creditwater sloshes at the sides of the road, creeping into
parking lots and backyards and beneath houses on
stilts. Wetlands and fishing docks splay out into the
Gulf of Mexico, narrowing the divide between solid
ground and the open sea. “Rural” here increasingly
means surrounded not by open land, but by water.
On one dock, Sandy Nguyen, an activist and a fish-
erman’s wife, stands among a small crowd, part of the
community of Vietnamese shrimpers who reside in
Plaquemines Parish, a county of about 23,000. It makes
up the southernmost part of New Orleans, and appears
on a map as a sprinkling of tiny islands reaching out
into the Gulf. Sandy paces the dock, alternating be-
tween jovial greetings and pointing out places where
the land she remembers from her childhood has dis-
appeared. “It was hard land, under your feet,” she says,
where kids played football and people built houses.
Folks here are used to change, though, and the lo-
cal Vietnamese population is f luent in it. A delta is,
by definition, an evolving landscape with complex
tributaries, and the Vietnamese have been navigat-
ing sea-level rise and environmental disasters for
decades. Duong “Sugar” Tran, the dock’s owner,
nods hello before hurriedly continuing preparations
for the Blessing of the Fleet, a ceremony performed
every May at the beginning of brown shrimp sea-son. The ritual begins quietly as Sugar and his wife,
Chan, anoint the altar table with a collection of ob-
jects, ranging from symbols of prosperity—a bowl of
eggs, a tower of fruit, folded paper boats—to items
that ref lect the fishermen’s daily lives—baguettes
from a Vietnamese bakery, bottles of Bud Light,
and some Pall Mall cigarettes. The stakes are high,
and Chan makes repeated adjustments to the ta-
ble’s careful symmetry.
Like many shrimpers in New Orleans, Chan and
Sugar immigrated from Vietnam and are part of a
community of about 14,000—one of the largest groups
outside their native country. After the fall of Saigon, in
1975, the U.S. government helped many Vietnamese
relocate to the United States, where Catholic clergy
in New Orleans helped families settle in Louisiana.
In the delta, they found a familiar near-tropical cli-
mate and a place where they could continue many of
the traditions they had practiced back home.
The Vietnamese have become synonymous with
shrimping in the Gulf, and have intertwined their for-
mer way of life with the land around them. “We grow
mint in any available patch,” Sandy says proudly as we
taste from platters of herbs grown by Chan and her
friends—purple shiso, pungent “fish mint,” and sour
lemon verbena. Between home gardens and shared
farms, they community grows at least 32 varieties of
edible plants, some carried all the way from Vietnam.
The Blessing of the Fleet is a Louisiana tradition
that continues in various forms in Plaquemines Par-
ish, despite a shrinking shrimping industry and the
eroding coastline. Sugar and Chan’s iteration incor-92 SAVEUR.COMFrom left:
Assembling a plate
of fresh herbs fol-
lowing the annual
Blessing of the Fleet;
the ritual feast in-
cludes whole roasted
pigs, sticky rice,
chicken, and eggs.AT THE
END OF
THE LAND IN
SOUT H E R N
LOUISIANA,