ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author begins her discussion of Vietnamese life in the United States with two portraits of resettlement. Both of them illustrate the dramatic class adjustments many immigrants have had to make. For Vietnamese families, averaging five persons, more than one wage earner per family became a necessity since full-time employment for one person in most cases put such a family at the poverty level and dependent on welfare. In the cases of the H. and K. families, sponsors assumed women would care for the children and put no pressure on the wives to enter the job market. Despite the presence of more than one wage earner per household, many Vietnamese families found themselves unable to be self-supporting. Vietnamese, regardless of their social and economic backgrounds, all coped with cultural changes—in family structure and cohesion, in language, in beliefs, and in identity—which were inevitable because they now lived in America, not in Vietnam.
