Thank you J.K. Dineen for your words, beautifully capturing her story and immeasurable impact.
Thuy, cảm ơn chị. I love you.
Community, if you have the means, please consider donating to Thuy’s Go Fund Me.
Thuy Nguyen, an educator who shaped the lives of hundreds of San Francisco kids by transforming a small Western Addition retail space into a freewheeling urban classroom and neighborhood clubhouse, died Friday of cancer. She was 41.
Together with her husband, Shawn Connolly, “Miss Thuy,” as the kids called her, created the San Francisco Skate Club on Divisadero Street near Alamo Square. The name was somewhat misleading. If it was a club, it was the least exclusive club in San Francisco: Any kid who walked through the door was automatically a member.
Families paid what they could to join — many paid nothing. And while skateboarding was central theme of the club — the small, ground-floor space was full of skateboards and grip tape, trucks and wheels — it was also a knitting club, a filmmaking club, a homework club, a cooking club, an art club.
“Everything with S.F. Skate Club was a labor of love for Thuy and Shawn,” said Sunny Angulo, a legislative aide at City Hall who was Nguyen’s best friend for 23 years. “Everything.”
Thuy Anne-Marie Nguyen was born Aug. 8, 1979, in Newport Beach to Peter Thinh Nguyen and Tinh Thi Tran, refugees who immigrated from Laos to the United States in 1976. She was raised in a tight-knit Vietnamese community in Costa Mesa.
She knew from an early age that she that she wanted to teach and in 1997 was accepted to the University of San Francisco’s five-year masters of education program. While still in college she started working at the now-defunct nonprofit Friends of the Children, where she mentored a cohort of 12 girls.
She remained there until 2006. By then she had met Connolly, a professional skateboarder who tended bar at the Milk Club on Haight Street, and the couple started working on the concept for what would become the Skate Club.
The couple first took over an old Victorian at Eddy and Broderick that was owned by a woman Nguyen had met through Friends of the Children. She and Shawn lived in what was called the Thrive House rent free in exchange for operating it as a youth center where she tutored kids and ran afterschool art and cooking programs.
“We would do cooking classes for the kids in the big fancy kitchen, and throw them luaus that they would help plan for their graduations or other milestones,” Angulo said.
In 2007 Nguyen and Connolly leased the S.F. Skate Club space fixing it up themselves.
It was soon filled with kids in afterschool programs and summer camps. Nguyen and Connolly carted them to skate parks around the Bay Area in an old van, and the space became a place where kids, many of whom did not have adult supervision or computers at home, could do their homework and work on art projects. They brought groups of kids to publc hearings at City Hall to testify in support of skate parks.
“Thuy and Shawn would drive out to public housing in the Bayview to pick up a kid just to make sure that they got to be in the program,” Angulo said. “They would send them home with helmets for free and even food.”
The skate club attracted kids who felt like outcasts. Many were being raised by grandparents or by single mothers working long hours.
Talayah Hudson started going to S.F. Skate Club when she was in fifth grade and a student at Rosa Parks Elementary School. Thuy would cook with her and help her with homework. When Hudson’s grandmother became too sick to care for her, she went into foster care but spent her afternoons with Nguyen, who helped her get a scholarship to attend the exclusive Convent of the Sacred Heart.
“I would not have graduated high school without her,” Hudson said.
When Hudson left for college Thuy took her to Target for supplies and drove her to Sonoma State University.
“Everybody else was surrounded by their parents, there to move them in and support them,” Hudson said. “I didn’t have that, but I had Thuy. Thuy was there for me.”
Nico Hiraga, the professional skateboarder and actor who appeared in the film “Booksmart,” said he met Nguyen when he was “a little dude” of 9 or 10 years old.
“She was the backbone of the skater community,” he said. “Shawn would take us out skating and she would help us with our homework. She was that skater mom who helped raise us, kept us out of trouble.”
Lorraine Luna’s son, Jessie Luna-Abrams, was struggling in school and rebelling against his parents when he discovered the Skate Club.
“For him it felt like Skate Club was another branch of the family,” Luna said. “I always knew he would be fed and always have his skateboard fixed and he would have homework help, which was a big deal to me.”
In the months since Nguyen got sick, the Skate Club community has been fixing up the club house’s backyard to have an outdoor space in which to gather during the pandemic.
They pulled weeds, planted flowers, built benches, painted furniture, strung lights. The garden was nearing completion as Ngyuen passed away. In front of the clubhouse a memorial to “Miss Thuy” has sprung up.
Luna, a candlemaker, poured 67 candles in glasses she found on the street. She slapped a “We love Thuy” sticker on each candle. Some of the candles burned on the Divisadero Street sidewalk, but most of them were taken home by Skate Club kids.
“It’s like Thuy’s spirit is still flickering throughout the city, shining a little light on everyone,” Luna said.
In addition to her husband, Thuy is survived by her parents, Peter Thinh Nguyen and Tinh Thi Tran, brothers John and Tan Nguyen, and sister Jolynne Nguyen. There will be a private Catholic service for the family, and the S.F. Skate Club is planning a social distanced memorial at Ocean Beach, time and date to be determined.
-J.K. Dineen for the San Francisco Chronicle. All photos in this post by me.
If you were moved by her legacy and how she gave her fullest to help our youth and those most vulnerable, please consider donating to Thuy’s Go Fund Me. Thank you from the bottom of my healing heart.
