Meditations on Identity:

By combining food with Vietnamese folk tales I heard as a child, I present one way in which cultural identity continues to be created and cultivated across immigrant communities. I recreate Vietnamese folk tales and implicate certain foods to portray the intersection of cultures. The intention is to show how immigrant identity is constructed by an in-betweeness amid two places—not completely set in one culture or the other, but in a vast abstract space filled with displacements, linkages and fluctuations. In exploring the themes of personal and cultural identity, immigration and social movements across time and space, I present a specific culture to discuss the universal theme of food’s importance and Vietnamese folk tales’ relevance in my American experience.