Footprint Journeys, "Start Here": Thoai Nguyen
by City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program and The Historical Society of Pennsylvania
Dancer and choreographer Amanda Miller and video artist Tony Rothlein incorporated oral history, video and movement with Start Here, a work — part of Journeys South — that drew on first-person stories of individual or familial journeys to South Philadelphia. At the heart of their exploration was the question: "Where do the paths of immigration intersect?"
Footprint Journeys, "Start Here": Thoai Nguyen
Thoai Nguyen fled Vietnam with his family as a child. He is the executive director for SEAMAAC, a nonprofit agency serving Southeast Asians immigrants based here in South Philly.
“I’m a Vietnamese refugee. I grew up, from the age of 9 to now, in South Philly. I came with my family in 1975.”
“I wavered back and forth between “Is this my home or Vietnam my home?” until I went back to Vietnam in 1996. That was the first time I came back. You came, you understood things a little better, and so I think it’s only recently that I consider South Philadelphia my home. Prior to that, I had hoped that it was out there somewhere else.”
“The longer you live in an area, in a place, you have institutional memory. You understand that it’s cyclical and that you’re no better or no worse than everyone who’s been in that cycle. So it’s certainly a place I’d want to fight for now. I can be very defensive. I can joke and I can criticize it to some extent, but I really don’t like it when other people criticize it who don’t really understand what South Philly is about.”
Click here to read the full interview with Thoai Nguyen!
This project has been funded by The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage through the Heritage Philadelphia Program.
