Food and Fusion
AMDG
Food is such an excellent metaphor in the immigrant experience. There are the dishes from the old country that one clings to, and the dishes from the new country that eventually inspire some sort of fusion.
It's too bad that whoever wrote the script for "American Adobo" didn't quite get that. =S
My Fil-Am cousin in Santa Barbara recently married an American. My aunt wrote to the family in the Philippines to say that even though her grandchildren will likely eat hamburgers with their parents, they will eat only adobo, pancit, lumpia, etc. when they are with her. That is a great expression of the immigrant experience as the second generation develops a taste for local dishes and the first generation insists on the classics. That's something else the filmmakers failed to note, even though there was ample opportunity, there being two Fil-Am children in the story.
When I was living abroad, I often made adobo for my flatmates. After a few months, it already started changing. No surprise, since my flatmates were Indian and Korean. We influenced the way each other cooked just by sharing cupboard space for our ingredients. Since one of the characters in the film works as a maid for an American family, that is another very symbolic scenario that could have easily been written into the story.