Who will walk the runway during New York Fashion Week and win $20,000? You decide.
Lan Thanh Nguyen
About Lan Thanh Nguyen
I spent my whole life trying to earn my worth by being good. Now I write. This August I publish my first memoir, What the Mud Made Me. I no longer think of the girl I was as someone to apologize for. She is the reason I am here.
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What makes you the Next Runway Star?
I spent my whole life learning to disappear. Be quiet. Be good. Take up less room. When I was twelve and a family friend molested me, I froze and stayed silent, and I carried that silence into every year after. Being seen still scares me. Showing up on camera still scares me. That is exactly why I belong on this runway. Walking it is the opposite of everything I was trained to do. It is standing in a body that escaped a war, survived cancer, and was taught to stay small, and letting it be looked at anyway. Head up, chosen, not sorry. If I can walk, so can the woman watching who was also told to stay quiet. That is what makes me the next runway star. Not because I am fearless, but that I show up afraid and do it anyway.
What would this once in a lifetime experience mean to you and why?
I have spent my life being useful. Seen only when I was performing, earning my place, giving something away. This would be the first time I am simply seen, and it would cost me nothing to be there. That alone would mean everything. Joy instead of survival. It would also be for the people who got me here. My father was taken to re-education camp when I was three months old. My parents gave up everything and escaped by boat so I could have a life worth writing about. To stand on that runway alive, free, and unafraid, in the country they risked everything to reach, would be proof their sacrifice became something beautiful. And it would come right as my memoir does. I spent a year putting my story on the page, alone. This would be that story standing up and walking, in front of people, in a place that turns shame into pride. After a lifetime of shrinking myself, I would finally get to celebrate the woman I became instead of apologizing for the girl I was.
What are you most proud of about yourself or what have you overcome and why?
What I am most proud of is not what I survived. It is who I stayed while surviving it. I have been displaced, betrayed, and sick enough to be told my life could end at any moment. Any of it could have turned me hard. It did not. I am still soft. Still generous. Still someone who looks for beauty and keeps finding it. What I had to overcome was quieter and harder than any of that. I had learned that love was something I earned by giving myself away, so I gave and gave, and stayed in places long after they stopped loving me back. I survived cancer and still could not stop abandoning myself. Breaking that pattern took me longer than beating the disease did. I am proud that I finally learned to give to myself the way I had always given to everyone else, and that I did not have to go cold to do it. I am still the warm one. I am just no longer the disappearing one. That is the thing I fought hardest for, and the thing no one can take back from me now.
What would you do with the $20,000 cash prize?
I would use it to open the doors of Sentuary NYC, the healing space I founded, to the women who could never afford to walk through them. It is a room for circles, workshops, and gatherings, a place to come back to yourself, and it already exists. What this prize would do is make it free for survivors. Running it is not free. There is a space to keep and skilled facilitators who deserve to be paid for their work, and the money would cover exactly that, so every gathering is free to the women who walk in. I know what it is to need that room and believe it belonged only to women with money and time I did not have. This is how I open the door for the ones who cannot open it themselves. Not by selling them anything, but by making sure the cost is already covered before they arrive. This prize was raised in the name of survivors. I would spend it giving survivors a place to be held, led by people who know how to hold it, and make sure not one of them is ever charged for the healing.
Content from Lan Thanh Nguyen
Rise is a 501 (c) (3) non-profit that helps sexual assault survivors across the country and around the world. They’ve created the most successful legislative reform movement in U.S. history: 120 laws passed, 1 UN Resolution and 112 million people’s lives impacted by their efforts.
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