Vietnamese Culture Vs American Culture Essay

I was raised in the family that centered around how to relate to other people. When I moved to another country that was different from where I had been raised, I wondered how I could survive this change. There are many differences in these two countries - Vietnam and America. Vietnamese culture is collective while the American culture is individualistic. There is also other differences is the holiday celebrations, for example, the Tết (or Lunar) New Year in Vietnam and the solar New Year in America. In addition, these two cultures are very different in what people throughout the year eat to survive. First of all, the different between the two cultures is that one is collective and the other is individualistic. Vietnamese people are very close

Vietnamese people eat three meals a day and each meal has a different kind of taste. For breakfast, for example, Vietnamese may have light pho soup which is a Vietnamese soup made with a broth, rice (or rice noodles), and some kind of meat (usually beef or chicken). The other two meals may be the same also, because Vietnamese people work all day for the living and are not wealthy. Since we eat almost the same meal every day, we would get use to eat same food and it would get boring to eat it. To prevent this, the food in each dish has many different kind of colors and simple changes are made, like mixing a little cilantro with the soup to increase the taste. (Cilantro is a kind of herb.) Sometime the vegetables we eat grow in the backyard. All kind of dishes in Vietnam have a variety of tastes. For example, we make fish sauce to eat with Bún Thịt Nướng (grilled pork with noodles) and have noodles and meat to eat with a salad. This meal also contains pepper, lemon, garlic sugar, and water. The different vegetables mix together to make up the special taste that many people like to eat. While American food also has a variety of herbs in it, the taste, for me, is kind of unique and different. For example, Macaroni and Cheese has cheese and noodles. For me that not enough, so I put some other ingredients in it to make is better when people eat