Nguyen, Gennie Thi. Home is where rice is: maintaining and transforming cultural identity beyond the borders of Vietnam

Abstract

This paper discusses how persisting Vietnamese foodways are critical to sustaining cultural identity for Vietnamese refugees. For any immigrant group, traditional foods represent a connection to the past, function to maintain ethnic identity, and assist in reducing the effects of acculturation (Kilcik 1984). Vietnamese food is not only important for the maintenance of identity for refugees who fled Vietnam in search of asylum, but also for their descendents. Vietnamese food acts as a shared symbol that helps hold Vietnamese communities together. Persisting Vietnamese foodways is an important way for descendents of displaced Vietnamese to form their ethnic cultural identity, since they were not acculturated in Vietnam.