So, I was a bit behind on posts because of Mardi Gras. I had to create a costume with pinwheels, attend daily parades and, maybe the most important activity, eat king cake, like this one here. This cake comes from Dong Phuong in New Orleans East, where I went with my friend so that she could buy one.

Despite having lived here for more than two years, I’ve never gone to the East, where there’s a large Vietnamese population. What I found there was writing everywhere in Vietnamese, on advertisements, on the windows, on the stores, on the products in the stores. Vietnamese is a language of business in the East. The cashiers speak it by default as if one must understand it if one wants to do business there. It seems to me that Vietnamese is maybe more institutionalized there than French is elsewhere in Louisiana, but it’s difficult to say that for me, seeing as I haven’t traversed the state all that much.

I intend to find out if on can speak French there also, as part of the project to create a map of the francophone businesses in Louisiana. While I was working at AT&T, I met a Vietnamese woman who spoke French, better than English. She was somewhere older, so maybe that is still common among the old. I’ve heard that this would happen in Terrebonne-Lafourche, that francophones were able to speak with the Vietnamese better in French than English. It would be interesting if the Vietnamese became the newest francophones in Louisiana, helping to preserve the language. I doubt this would happen, but who knows.