As I stood in line at the security checkpoint at Houston’s Intercontinental Airport, I wasn’t sure my plan would work. I prepared for the possibility that security might confiscate my precious cargo. I had stowed the item in question in a nondescript plastic container, sealed it in a plastic bag and tucked it in my shoulder bag.

I needn’t have worried, though. We made it through — me and my chile con queso.

I don’t remember now which restaurant the queso came from, but it was excellent queso left over from my prior night’s dinner. I wasn’t about to throw out all this melty, cheesy goodness. How could I bring it back to California? My solution: freeze it in hopes that in this temporary solid state it would bypass security without scrutiny.

This is what you do when you’re a Tex-Mex-loving Texan living 1,600 miles from home.

Whenever I return to Texas, the food I most look forward to eating is Tex-Mex. It’s not my mother’s cooking. (Sorry, mom.) This might surprise some people who look at my East Asian face and assume I hunger for the foods of my Chinese heritage. The truth is that where my family ended up shaped me as much as where they came from. (The other truth is that I’m from a family that can’t really cook, so there’s not much there to miss.)

Of course there are times when I seek comfort in the Cantonese foods that my family mostly ate. Some days I just want a simple meal of steamed whole fish with scallions in soy sauce, eaten with a side of greens and a small bowl of rice. I dreaded this dish as a child but have come to appreciate it as an adult. There’s a sense of ritual in eating it with others, picking one side of the fish clean and then flipping it over to reveal the other side, untouched.

But while I can find decent Cantonese food in California, it’s harder to find good Tex-Mex. And Tex-Mex — with its efficient breakfast tacos delivering scrambled eggs in neatly folded hand-held packages, its enchiladas drenched in sauce and cheese, and its combo plates of plenty — is what I want to eat in times of celebration.

People trash Tex-Mex in the same way they put down Chinese American food. It’s not “authentic,” they say. Excuse me. These foods are authentic to me, a Chinese American raised in Texas. Authentic eats from my childhood include the egg foo young sandwiches my mother packed in my school lunches — a mini omelet with a Kraft single between two slices of bread. They include quesadillas, which my mother charmingly called “chile tortillas,” made with store-bought flour tortillas, home-made shredded chicken, jarred salsa, green onions and cheddar cheese.

What does authentic mean, anyway, when cuisines migrate and adapt with people? Culture is not static, but a living, changing thing.

Tex-Mex isn’t some kind of fake Mexican food. It’s a regional cuisine rooted in Tejano culture, going back to when Texas was part of Mexico. Yes, sometimes cuisines adapt to prevailing tastes. Americanized Chinese food was made sweeter and boneless by Chinese restaurateurs serving non-Chinese clientele. But sometimes cuisines morph because of the ingredients at hand. This is how processed cheese became integral to Tex-Mex and how broccoli beef came to be in Chinese American food. (Early Chinese immigrants didn’t have access to the vegetable they’d normally use, gai lan.)

So, my love of Tex-Mex isn’t just about how much I love cheese, though it is true that I love cheese so very much. My love of Tex-Mex is the story of my family’s journey and the hardships they faced, what they lost and what they gained. It is a story that begins in a riverside village in rural Guangdong province in southern China, long before I am born.

My grandfather grows up barefoot in this riverside village, one of eight children. When his education is interrupted in his childhood by the Second Sino-Japanese War, he works farming rice and harvesting fruit trees with his father. Like everyone in the village, they are poor. So in 1950, when he gets a chance to leave for America, he takes it. This is one year after the Communists have come to power, and just weeks after the birth of his first child, my mother.

To immigrate to America from a poor country means to have a chance at changing the trajectory of your family. But this comes at a cost, a life lived apart from loved ones. My grandfather does not know it when he leaves, but seven years will pass before he’s reunited with his wife, nearly 20 before he sees my mother again. He will never see his father again.

My grandfather makes his way to Texas because this is where his relatives live. His grand-uncle had come to America to labor on the railroads. His son, my grandfather’s uncle, had spent some time in the U.S. Army, which took him to Fort Bliss in El Paso. He liked El Paso so much that he settled there, opening a grocery store. My grandfather goes to work for his uncle to pay off the debt he owes him for bringing him to America. This is how my family from a coastal village ends up in the dry desert heat of west Texas.

If you know nothing about El Paso, know that it is a border town where lives are lived in two countries, where it is normal to have breakfast on one side of the border and do your shopping on the other. After seven years apart, my grandmother joins her husband, leaving my mother in the care of others in Hong Kong. But lacking paperwork to prove their marriage, she migrates first to Mexico, where they marry again. For the next two years, my grandfather crosses the border daily, one year by foot, the next by car, because he works on the American side but lives with my grandmother on the Mexican side.

When my mother finally arrives in 1970, she is 19. By this time, my grandparents have three American-born daughters and have established their own small neighborhood grocery store. They speak three languages: Cantonese, Spanish, English. They send my mother to a Catholic school to learn English. The foods in El Paso are nothing like the foods my mother is used to eating in Hong Kong. Her parents warn that she won’t like Mexican food. So, in her high school cafeteria, where lunch trays are passed out indiscriminately to students, then traded, my mother dutifully trades away any Mexican meals.

But one day, no one will trade. She is stuck with a plate of flautas. “When you’re hungry, you’ll eat anything,” my mother recalls. “I ate them for survival. But when I ate them, I liked it.”

Flautas lead to tacos, which lead to tamales made by a neighbor. She eats avocados daily for a snack. She even likes cheese, which is so foreign to Chinese cuisines that there’s no real word for it. In Cantonese, we just add a suffix to the English word cheese. We call it “cheese-zee.”

In a few years, my mother moves to Austin for college, where she meets my father at a party for Chinese students who have gathered to cook the foods they miss. They marry in El Paso, throwing a Chinese banquet reception at one of the restaurants where my grandparents are lifelong customers, and they settle in Houston.

Every summer of my childhood, we visited El Paso, staying in the small house connected to the rear of the store where my grandparents lived and raised their family. We always made a pilgrimage to my mother’s favorite Mexican restaurant. With arched walls and a tiled fountain, the dining room resembled a courtyard.

I loved the restaurant’s menu, which seemed to anticipate my inability to make a decision by offering a generous combo plate with six items: an enchilada, hard-shell taco, tamale and chile relleno with rice and refried beans.

But the thing we most anticipated was the basket of sopapillas that arrived at the end of the meal. Pliable triangles of fried dough puffed with warm air, they were served nearly naked with a light dusting of sugar and a squeeze bottle of honey. As we ate our sopapillas, we’d place a second order to go, to bring back to our grandmother who was minding the store.

It has been more than 20 years since I’ve visited El Paso. Though it is not the city where I grew up, I consider it a home of sorts. It is a place that my family comes from among the various places that we come from. I have eaten other sopapillas in the years since, but none have come close to these golden sopapillas of my memory.

My parents recently moved from the house where I spent my adolescence to a Houston suburb an hour’s drive away. On my last visit home in October, I was afraid I’d have to get my Tex-Mex fix at a mediocre chain restaurant. Silly me. Google revealed a family-run restaurant five minutes from their new home.

My parents, who are not in the habit of using Google, were thrilled with this news. Though they don’t eat Tex-Mex often, they crave it, too, sometimes. My mother lamented that it had been too long since she’d eaten tamales. That evening, they studied the vast menu online, all the permutations of combo plates, the seafood section, the specialties. The next day, we went there together for lunch. We smiled as the waiter brought our meals out on a large tray — plates of comfort and abundance.

Melissa Hung is a freelance writer in San Francisco. Follow her on Twitter at @fluffysharp. Email: food@sfchronicle.com