When I worked for the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in New York City as a college intern in 1981, I had the job of interviewing refugees when they first came over to the U.S. from the Bangkok refugee camps where they had lived for years. Some of them were large families. Many of them were not even related but said they were families anyway so they could come to the U.S. more quickly.

I remember one particular Vietnamese family. The IRC had found an apartment in the Bronx for this family of eight. With my ten-year-old interpreter that my employer gave me, it was my job to take this family to the Bronx on the subway, make sure that the boxes of dishes and blankets we had sent earlier had arrived, and give the family the keys to their new home in the U.S.

When I opened the heavy door to the old Bronx apartment, several large boxes sat in the living room, so I breathed a sigh of relief. I hurriedly put the dishes away in the kitchen cupboards, unpacked the bed linens, made the beds and explained how to get to the nearest grocery store. After I showed the family how to use both locks of the door, I handed them the keys. Then I left with the promise to visit them soon.

I visited the family a week later. All the blankets had been taken off the beds and were neatly rolled up in a corner of the living room floor. The cupboards in the kitchen no longer had doors. The upper shelves where I had put the glasses and dishes were bare. The family had put all the dishes on the lowest shelves of the cupboards.

Through the young interpreter, I learned that the Vietnamese family liked to squat and it was easier for them to use the dishes if they were stored on the lowest shelves. They ate on the floor anyway, and didn’t like the kitchen table for eating.

After the mother showed me that the doors to the cupboards were safely stored in the closet of the bedroom instead of the dumpster, I felt better. They were now comfortable in their new home, they told me, but of course, had to make a couple of changes to meet the family’s needs.

This Vietnamese family example illustrates a growing trend. Immigrants today do not leave their cultural customs behind as quickly as immigrants used to do a century ago, and we may ask ourselves why not?

Unlike a hundred years ago, newly-arrived immigrants can usually find ethnic neighborhoods in major cities where they can speak their own language in local stores, send packages to their countries, shop at grocery stores where they can buy their seasonings and even listen to a church service in their own language.

With all these international resources available today in U.S. cities, the need for immigrants to adopt the customs of their new country is less urgent, which may explain why they are slower to exchange their customs for new American ones.