MyLoan Dinh, a multidisciplinary artist living in Charlotte, talked to Bridge Builder Conversations host David "Dae-Lee" Arrington about experiencing cultural exclusion in the United States.
Dinh, who was born in Saigon, Vietnam, described what it felt like to come to the United States as refugee when she was young.
“I was ashamed of where I came from because economically … my parents worked all the time to barely make ends meet,” she said, adding that she was often made fun of in public.
“When you are constantly asked and assumed you don’t belong here, you’re not from here, eventually you start believing it.”
“I feel American, but to the outside, I don’t look American,” she said. “This is something that I address in my artwork, the idea of ‘othering:’ the idea that even though you might feel you belong … as an Asian American, and specifically as a Vietnamese woman, you’re always looked at as the perpetual outsider.”
View the full interview on YouTube: