"From East to West" - With Nam Dang through his Offenbach

After a warm welcome from the Vietnamese cultural association, the group were given a brief insight into the lessons and discovered that Vietnamese is written in Latin script, a remnant from the French colonial era. To illustrate this sonorous language, in which the correct intonation of the letters is very important, schoolgirls had written a few sentences on the blackboard, including "I like to eat dog meat", which the young lady dismissed with great giggles. The group also received some explanations about Tai Chi, as a course open to all interested parties is held at the school alongside the language and culture lessons.

The title of the tour "From East to West" also has to do with Tung Nam Dang's family history. His mother comes from North Vietnam, his father from the South, and they met at university in Moscow. After German reunification, the couple moved to Dresden, where Tung Nam Dang was born in a home for asylum seekers in 1993. He then came to Offenbach with his family at the age of eight.

The group also headed west, taking the bus to the city center. The Citytower was the first thing the little boy saw of Offenbach. For a few more days in his new home, he thought he was in Frankfurt because of the skyscrapers, as his father had initially announced. The Vietnamese community has its own peculiarities when it comes to names: Nam is the call name, and the parents had taken special care to ensure that it was easy for European tongues to pronounce. It is now common for many families to give their children European and Vietnamese first names, both of which appear in their passports.

We continued on to Herrnstraße to the SPD party office. Tung Nam Dang is involved in both the Young Socialists and the local inner city association. He has been a member of the SPD since leaving school, and his political role model at the time was his politics teacher Felix Schwenke. The group met another role model further west in the Catholic church of St. Paul, the former parish priest Sohns. Around seven percent of the Vietnamese population is Catholic, like Tung Nam Dang and his father. His mother is more spiritually oriented, but traditional ancestor worship still plays a major role in the family.

St. Paul's is the oldest Catholic church in the city, although it had to be rebuilt after the Second World War. The parish is proud of its restored organ and the regular organ concerts with church musician Olaf Joksch. The tour ended in St. Paul's Allerweltscafé with Vietnamese fruit and crab chips and lychee juice.