New Home, New Story: How Immigration Shapes Identity

In 1979, a family named the Nguyens climbed into a 35-foot wooden boat with 38 other people and left Vietnam with almost nothing. They spent six days at sea before a cargo ship rescued them. Today their grandchildren run a shrimp boat out of New Orleans, Louisiana — and every Tet (Lunar New Year), they still hang red paper lanterns just like their great-grandparents did back home. Moving to a new country doesn't erase who you are. It adds a new chapter.

Why people leave their home countries, and why anthropologists study it. The difference between an immigrant, an emigrant, and a refugee. How families keep pieces of their culture alive in a new country. Why your identity can be more than one thing at the same time.

Anthropologists sort reasons for moving into two groups. Push factors force people out — like the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1852, when a crop disease destroyed Ireland's food supply and pushed over a million people to emigrate to the United States. Pull factors draw people in — like a job offer, a relative already living somewhere safe, or better schools. Some moves mix both: since Syria's civil war began in 2011, more than 6 million Syrians have become refugees, pushed out by violence and pulled toward countries offering safety.

When people move, they often settle near others from home, creating neighborhoods like San Francisco's Chinatown, founded in 1848 during the Gold Rush and still home to a Lunar New Year parade every year. Food carries memory too — Vietnamese pho, once unknown in most of the U.S., is now served in restaurants nationwide because refugee families kept cooking it. Language matters as well: many kids in immigrant families grow up speaking one language at home and another at school, switching between them without even thinking about it.

A kid who speaks Spanish at home and English at school, and celebrates both the Fourth of July and Dia de los Muertos, isn't 'half' one thing and 'half' another. Anthropologists call this biculturalism — belonging fully to more than one culture at once. Hyphenated identities like Mexican-American or Chinese-American describe this: not a split identity, but a combined one.

Between 1975 and 1995, roughly 800,000 Vietnamese people fled by boat after the Vietnam War, becoming known as 'boat people.' Many spent months in refugee camps in Malaysia or Thailand before being resettled. Families with fishing skills, like the Nguyens, were often placed along the U.S. Gulf Coast, where the shrimping industry needed workers. Today, Vietnamese-American shrimpers make up a large share of the fleet in towns like New Orleans East — a direct result of one hard journey, generations ago.