"Being inauthentic is a fact of America"

In an article by an immigrant from Thailand with evolving views of Thai restaurants in America, I read this thought-provoking paragraph about the emotions created by differences between the food in those restaurants and the food from childhood in Thailand:

"It’s a hard reality to swallow, but I’ve learned to live with it, because being inauthentic is a fact of America. To become American means to have been, at some point, uprooted from an ancestral world and reinvented free-style. I sometimes find myself counting in Thai, but most of my thoughts now bubble out in English. I go back and forth between the Thai way of eating in tandem with fork and spoon and the American way of picking at foods with a lone fork. What love I have for fish sauce equally goes to butter. If I can feel neither wholly Thai nor wholly American, how can I ask the same of a bowl of duck green curry? Now, when I look at a Thai restaurant menu, I don’t fume and think in expletives as much. I just breathe in and out, and let the food be what it can be." -- Learning to Love Thai-American Food by Pitchaya Sudbanthad