Southeast Asia - Southeast Louisiana fusion

In recent discussions about immigration and assimilation, the salad bowl and the melting pot are often set out as opposing metaphors. (Try Googling "melting pot, salad bowl". I got over 250,000 results.) In the case of New Orleans I believe that a third metaphor is more apt: gumbo.


With gumbo, you've got the base, the roux. Gotta have a good roux! Then you can add your vegetables: bell pepper, celery, and onions are standard. And okra of course. (I've heard that gumbo is actually some kind of African word for okra.) You can even put tomatoes if you want, though a lot of locals might take you for a Yankee poser. Don't forget the Tony Chachere's. And the filé powder, which can be added as part of the cooking process or set out on the table as a condiment. Then you add the chicken and sausage, or seafood, or some combination thereof. The possibilities are almost limitless. My mother-in-law, whose Cajun credentials no one should dare question, likes to boil eggs, peel them, then let them stew in the gumbo where they take on the roux's rich brown hue as they soak up the flavor.


In the case of  the city of New Orleans, the roux would be French-Creole culture. Each successive wave of immigrants -- German, English, West African, Croatian, Sicilian, Honduran, and others -- has enriched the stew without compromising its essential character. The Vietnamese community is a particularly interesting example. They came over in the 1970s. They have managed to maintain their identity while integrating so thoroughly into the city's institutions that it would be hard to imagine New Orleans without them. If you go to Cafe du Monde, which will soon celebrate its 150th anniversary, the person serving your beignets and cafe au lait will almost certainly be Vietnamese.


If you really think about it, it isn't all that strange that the Vietnamese have acclimated so well to warm, wet New Orleans. After all, Southeast Asia and Southeast Louisiana both bear the legacy of French colonial history. Many Vietnamese immigrants were Roman Catholic. Many were also fishermen by trade, so New Orleans' seafood industry must have offered a familiar element. Then there's rice as a dietary staple. (I'm open to correction, but I can't think of any other American city where rice is so central to the cuisine.)


I worked my first wedding as a pedicabbie last week. The bride was a New Yorker, of European stock as far as I know. The groom, however, was a New Orleans native of Vietnamese ancestry. The wedding was held at the Saint Louis Cathedral, America's oldest cathedral and the French Quarter's most iconic landmark. After the vows, the newlyweds and guests poured out of the church and formed a second line, twirling colorful parasols as they danced and paraded through the streets of the French Quarter behind a brass band. My fellow pedicabbies and I -- there were five of us I believe -- brought up the rear, bearing the groom's elderly relatives. I felt a touch of amusement, a bit of pride, and plenty of pure pleasure to be a part of this. 


The next day I was working the Saints game, and I stopped to ask a couple of traffic cops for permission to make a left turn at a place where the street was blocked. One of the policemen turned out to be Vietnamese-American, and we struck up a brief conversation.


"I'm so glad to see this here!" he said referring to the pedicab. "It reminds me of home. We have these in Vietnam, you know? We call them rickshaw."


The fact that they have rickshaws in Vietnam was not news to me, but somehow I had failed to make the connection. Had my previous day's passengers ridden rickshaws in their childhood days? Was it possible that I had taken them on their first rickshaw ride in 40 years or more? Was the sweet irony of the situation lost on them?  (Not so long ago many Americans would have viewed the rickshaw as a symbol of Asia's poverty and backwardness; these days pedicabs are commonplace on the streets of almost all of our major cities.) I don't know what my passengers were feeling, but I like to think that they felt more or less the same mixture of pride, amusement and pleasure at seeing us embrace their tradition as I felt at seeing them embrace ours. 


It is only now in retrospect that the beauty of that whole scene is beginning to really register. Elderly Vietnamese-New Orleanians riding in rickshaws at the tail end of a second line parade. Something old something new indeed! How strange! How apt!

---------------------------------------------

Bonus trivia question: Which Rolling Stones song (more recently covered by Old Crow Medicine Show) pays tribute to New Orleans' second line tradition?


Answer: Down Home Girl, which contains the following lyric:
I'm gonna take you back to New Orleans 
Down in Dixieland
I'm gonna watch you do the second line 
With an umbrella in your hand