A community in pictures: South Philadelphia

“According to U.S. Census numbers, thirty-nine percent of Philadelphia’s foreign born come from Asia, making Asians the largest share of Philadelphia’s immigrants.”
- Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvanians

Photos by Debbie Nguyen and Calvin Ho

Walking through South Philadelphia with my fellow SMP member, Calvin Ho, we were struck by the ethnic diversity of the area. Cambodian markets are next to Lao video stores, Vietnamese restaurants, Chinese supermarkets, and Indonesian churches. Storefront signs are not usually written in a single language – on some storefronts there were Cambodian, Chinese, English, Vietnamese, and Lao. These ethnic groups are not just neighbors in South Philadelphia; their ancestors were also neighbors on the Asian continent. The original plan was to take pictures of the Cambodian community in South Philadelphia. The moment we arrived into the area, we realized the impossibility of this task. There appears to be no separate Cambodian community in South Philadelphia; instead, as Calvin said, the area is a “microcosm of Southeast Asia.”