Wrong. Because a character who has been raised in a Chinese family, and eats Chinese cuisine almost daily will not look at burgers that way. For her they are a white food, an American food, a food that's a part of an ethnicity that is not her own.
So I feel a little weird commenting on this as Random White Girl, and I wonder if I'm inappropriately appropriating the stories of several PoC in my life (and you [or anyone else] are free to tell me off if you think I've lost my pants), but. . .
When I was in high school, one of my best friends was first-generation Chinese-American. I used to love to go over to her family's house for dinner because her mom was a great cook. Being gently teased for my ineptitude with chopsticks was a small price to pay for extremely tasty Chinese food.
It took about two years, I think, before I became aware that this menu was being selected in part for -me-. When they were alone as a family, they more frequently ate "American" food--steaks, pasta with meatballs, bagels with cream cheese, all of that. Because to her parents, that was the sign that they'd Made It--that they could eat these exotic things every day if they wanted. (Actually, from what I saw and heard, this was mostly her father's opinion, and I think her mother was secretly happy at any excuse to cook the recipes she'd grown up with.)
My father described a very similar dynamic in his (white, eastern European, immigrant) family: his mother wanted to cook traditional Jewish food, but his father was determined to prove they'd made it in American by having steak every night for a year. In his case, this definitely didn't mean my father ended up thinking of steak as a comfort food--my grandmother had a very limited idea of how to cook steak and an aggressive lack of interest in learning. In the case of my Chinese-American friend? Her idea of comfort food is mixed, but in my observation leans towards the American end of things--because that's what she grew up eating.
(Conversely, I had a Korean-American friend who had been adopted by a white family as a very young child. She has no memories of her home country, of eating anything other than American food growing up. But she found Korean restaurants comforting because they made her feel connected to her heritage.)
Which is not, not to critique your read on how your character would react. (Among other things, I'm babbling about immigrants, and I gather from what you said that your character was born and lived her life in China, which is of course a very different thing.) Only that the connections between food and ethnicity are complicated, and they don't always intersect in obvious ways.
eating from your culture
So I feel a little weird commenting on this as Random White Girl, and I wonder if I'm inappropriately appropriating the stories of several PoC in my life (and you [or anyone else] are free to tell me off if you think I've lost my pants), but. . .
When I was in high school, one of my best friends was first-generation Chinese-American. I used to love to go over to her family's house for dinner because her mom was a great cook. Being gently teased for my ineptitude with chopsticks was a small price to pay for extremely tasty Chinese food.
It took about two years, I think, before I became aware that this menu was being selected in part for -me-. When they were alone as a family, they more frequently ate "American" food--steaks, pasta with meatballs, bagels with cream cheese, all of that. Because to her parents, that was the sign that they'd Made It--that they could eat these exotic things every day if they wanted. (Actually, from what I saw and heard, this was mostly her father's opinion, and I think her mother was secretly happy at any excuse to cook the recipes she'd grown up with.)
My father described a very similar dynamic in his (white, eastern European, immigrant) family: his mother wanted to cook traditional Jewish food, but his father was determined to prove they'd made it in American by having steak every night for a year. In his case, this definitely didn't mean my father ended up thinking of steak as a comfort food--my grandmother had a very limited idea of how to cook steak and an aggressive lack of interest in learning. In the case of my Chinese-American friend? Her idea of comfort food is mixed, but in my observation leans towards the American end of things--because that's what she grew up eating.
(Conversely, I had a Korean-American friend who had been adopted by a white family as a very young child. She has no memories of her home country, of eating anything other than American food growing up. But she found Korean restaurants comforting because they made her feel connected to her heritage.)
Which is not, not to critique your read on how your character would react. (Among other things, I'm babbling about immigrants, and I gather from what you said that your character was born and lived her life in China, which is of course a very different thing.) Only that the connections between food and ethnicity are complicated, and they don't always intersect in obvious ways.