From Street Gangs to School Clubs: the Vietnamese American Youth Since 1975 ______

FROM STREET GANGS TO SCHOOL CLUBS: THE VIETNAMESE AMERICAN YOUTH SINCE 1975 ______

A Thesis

Presented to the

Faculty of

California State University, Fullerton ______

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

History ______

Silvia Hsu Cheng

Thesis Committee Approval:

Allison Varzally, Department of History, Chair Lisa Tran, Department of History Susie Woo, Department of American Studies

Spring, 2018

ABSTRACT

Since the influx of Vietnamese immigrants to the United States at the formal end of the Vietnam War in 1975, dominant narratives have portrayed Vietnamese Americans as the benefactors of a war fought at the cost of American lives. This thesis argues that throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, 1.5 and second-generation Vietnamese

American youth contested this narrative by challenging racial stereotypes, forming social groups, engaging in political activism, and creating films and literature to interject their own voices. The youth rejected inherently racist expectations of being “model minorities” by joining gangs or sometimes straddling both the gang life in secret and the ideal student image in public. Sociopolitical groups like the Vietnamese Student Associations attested to the fact the younger generations wanted to maintain traditions and values of their parents. Their literature and films focused on the realities and challenges of life in

America, complexities of growing up in between two cultures, and the true impact of

United States intervention in Vietnam. Through their writing and filmmaking, the youth revealed issues with racism and challenged the notion that life in the United States was great and beautiful because of American benevolence after the Vietnam War.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iv

Chapter 1. THE VIETNAMESE IN AMERICA...... 1

Introduction ...... 1 Background ...... 3 Historiography and Methodology ...... 12

2. REJECTION OF THE ‘MODEL MINORITY’ ...... 16

3. COLLECTIVISM AND POLITICAL ACTIVISM IN SOCIAL GROUPS ...... 48

4. NEW VOICES IN FILM AND LITERATURE ...... 61

5. CONCLUSIONS ...... 70

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 73

iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to begin by thanking my entire committee for their support and recommendations throughout this process. I am especially grateful to my committee chair, Dr. Allison Varzally for her guidance, positivity, and endless patience for my slow progress. I always left our meetings reassured that I was on the right track. I would like to extend a special thanks to my good friend, Arturo De Leon Tell, who has pushed and supported me throughout this entire process. I could not have finished this feat without his knowledge and experience in the pains of thesis writing. I am also thankful for my supportive colleagues and optimistic students at Rosemead High School who encouraged me to continue writing at all costs. Finally, I must thank my family, friends, and loved ones, who dealt with me over the course of the past year. I am especially appreciative of my mom, Kuei Cheng, who chose to show her support by cooking meals for me on many occasions.

iv 1

CHAPTER 1

THE VIETNAMESE IN AMERICA

Introduction

The formal end of the Vietnam War in 1975 brought over 1,322,000 Indochinese refugees to the United States over the course of more than two decades.1 Between 1975 and 1995, 424,590 Vietnamese resettled in the U.S.2 Despite the government’s attempt to disperse refugees to different cities throughout the U.S., Vietnamese immigrants did not remain in those locations; they partook in secondary migrations to cities with larger, already existing Asian populations. By 1990, California was home to nearly 40 percent of the refugees from Southeast Asia.3 Nearly half of the nation’s Vietnamese population resided in the state’s county of Orange, primarily in Garden Grove, Santa Ana, and

Westminster. Large populations also resided in the San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles

1 This figure combines the 822,977 refugees who fled their homelands and resettled in the United States between 1975 and 1985 and more than 500,000 persons who were resettled through the Orderly Departure Program from 1979 to 1999. Established in 1979, the ODP helped immigrants (who were family members of refugees already resettled in the U.S. and Amerasian children of U.S. soldiers) leave Vietnam and directly arrive in the United States. “Flight from Indochina” in State of the World's Refugees, 2000, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees http://www.unhcr.org/3ebf9bad0.html.

2 This number does not include those who arrived through the Orderly Departure Program—only refugees who were resettled in the U.S. after fleeing to a “first asylum” country on their own.

3 Jeremy Hein, States and International Migrants: The Incorporation of Indochinese Refugees in the United States and France (San Francisco: Westview Press, 1993), 73.

County and San Jose of Santa Clara County.4 Since the late 1970s, Little Saigon, an ethnic enclave in Orange County, emerged as the largest Vietnamese community in the country. 5 Today, the community serves as a cultural center, commercial hub, and historic reminder of the old Vietnam.

The influx of immigrants not only changed the demographics of America, but also the discourse on the Vietnamese as an ethnic group and their citizenship in this country.

Before the mass arrival of immigrants, American perspectives dominated the narrative on the war, refugees, and their resettlement. Gradually, scholars and filmmakers incorporated more voices of Vietnamese themselves. Yet, in many ways, immigrant voices served to reinforce the narrative of the U.S. as its savior. Since the country’s involvement in Vietnam’s war, discourse in favor of overseas intervention relied on an anti-communist foreign policy. When the last of troops pulled out of Saigon, America was able to reclaim itself as the hero of desperate refugees fleeing the evils of communism brought by the relentless North Vietnamese troops. Utilizing the myth of the

“good refugee,” Americans attempted to justify a lost war into a good and necessary war.6 Although 2,000 refugees requested to be repatriated and challenged the idea that they needed to be saved, their voices were suppressed as the U.S. government quietly

4 Min Zhou and Carl L. Bankston III, Growing Up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the United States (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1998), 46.

5 Cities in the San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles County saw an influx of more ethnic Chinese Vietnamese while cities in Orange County experienced an increase in ethnic Vietnamese. Oftentimes, the ethnic Chinese from Vietnam will identify only as Chinese.

6 Yen Le Espiritu, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014).

3 sent them back to Vietnam and continued to frame themselves as liberators of the

Vietnamese from the Communists.7

Early voices of Vietnamese Americans appeared in publications such as James M.

Freeman’s Hearts of Sorrow: Vietnamese American Lives and Sucheng Chan’s collection of student essays in The Vietnamese American 1.5 Generation, which echoed and reinforced the savior narrative.8 Focus on educational and economic successes of the

“model minority” served as proof of America’s accomplishments against communism and dismissed the reality of war-related poverty and struggles of immigrants. Gradually, the conversation shifted as the 1.5 generation and second-generation Vietnamese

Americans entered into adulthood. By the late 1980s, Vietnamese American youth had different stories to tell, which oftentimes filled the voids or clashed with voices of the first-generation. Thus, this thesis argues that the 1.5 and second-generation Vietnamese youth contested the prevailing narrative about them in a few ways, which included rejecting the “model minority” stereotype, establishing and participating in political and social groups, and claiming a space in the discourse to “take back their history” through literature and the arts.

Background

Vietnamese Americans are defined as persons of Vietnamese ancestry, or those who left Vietnam after 1975. This includes ethnic Vietnamese who left other Southeast

7 Heather Marie Stur, “‘Hiding Behind the Humanitarian Label’: Refugees, Repatriates, and the Rebuilding of America’s Benevolent Image After the Vietnam War,” Diplomatic History 39, issue 2, (2015): 223-244.

8 James M. Freeman, Hearts of Sorrow: Vietnamese American Lives (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989). Sucheng Chan, ed., The Vietnamese American 1.5 Generation: Stories of War, Revolution, Flight, and New Beginnings (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).

Asian countries as part of a larger diaspora, as well as other ethnicities, such as the

Hmong and Chinese living in Vietnam prior to leaving the country.9 First-generation

Vietnamese Americans are persons from Vietnam who reside in the United States. The second-generation refers to children of these immigrants and includes children who entered the United States before the age of five. The “1.5 generation” is defined as persons who arrived in the United States between the ages of 5 and 17. The “1.5 generation” holds a unique position as those who were old enough to remember their lives back in Vietnam, yet young enough to experience growing up in the United States.

Due to the decades-long diaspora of the Vietnamese, it is difficult to clearly demarcate generations based upon age of arrival. At any particular time after 1975, a first-generation Vietnamese American might be sixty years old or 18 years old when they arrived with their families under U.S. sponsorship. By the mid-1980s, the 1.5 generation was comprised of teenagers and young adults, if they had arrived in 1975, or children ages 5 to 17 if they had arrived in 1985. By the mid-1990s, the second-generation was comprised of young adults (born by the first-generation) as well as newborn babies (born by the 1.5 generation). Therefore, this study does not attempt to confine generations to any particular “wave” of the exodus or decade in the United States. Instead, this work seeks to find the emergent voices of those born in the United States of Vietnamese descent and those who immigrated to the United States as young children; voices that may have been overshadowed by the first-generation immigrant stories of wars, life before 1975, escape from Vietnam, refuge on islands, experiences at refugee camps, and

9 An estimated 70 percent of the refugees in the second wave were Chinese-Vietnamese persons. W. Courtland Robinson, Terms of Refuge: The Indochinese Exodus and the International Response (New York: Zed Books Ltd., 1998), 27-28.

5 struggles with adapting to life in the United States. Shifting narratives of this new generation of Vietnamese Americans reveal their experiences with growing up in the

United States as an ethnic minority.

The waves of refugees arrived in conjunction with a climate of economic recession, Reagan-era cuts to social welfare programs, and increasingly xenophobic rhetoric. Additionally, wounds of a divided America on the issue of involvement in

Vietnam remained fresh. Americans had to readjust their political values and moral obligations to a group of people whom they were fighting and helping at the same time.

Within two decades, Congress passed the Hart Cellar Act of 1965, Indochinese Refugee

Act of 1975, and Refugee Act of 1980, which opened U.S. borders to immigrants of

Asian nations. By the early 1980s, Americans were experiencing “compassion fatigue”— feelings of indifference or hostility towards Vietnamese due to their unexpectedly large numbers and long period of migration.10 Furthermore, the social climate of racial tensions was exacerbated by events such as Vincent Chin’s murder in 1982, the 1989 schoolyard shooting in Stockton, 1991 shooting of Latasha Harlins by a Korean American grocery store owner, and the Rodney King riots in 1992.

Despite sharing a common point of origin, the culture of Vietnamese Americans is far from monolithic and their experiences are just as diverse. The migration of

Vietnamese spanned over two decades and occurred under different conditions depending on the year of migration, socioeconomic status prior to migration, and ethnicity of the persons leaving Vietnam. Those who left in 1975 were part of the “first wave” of

10 Stanley L. Knee, “A Research Project to Determine the Law Enforcement Needs of the Southeast Asian Refugees in the Year 1995: To Develop Strategies to Meet Those Needs” (Garden Grove Police Department), 164-171.

6 refugees who were assisted by American forces and were of generally high or middle socioeconomic status due to their ties with the United States government.11 Refugees of the “second wave” escaped mainly by boat (thus the nickname “boat people”) and were economically and ethnically diverse—originating from different regions of Vietnam. 12

Many of these refugees were low-ranking soldiers of the former South Vietnamese army and ethnic Chinese living in Vietnam. By this time, a large number were released from re-education camps after serving time for opposing communism by serving the South

Vietnamese army or being wealthy business owners and merchants.13 The “third wave" in the late 1980s brought 120,000 refugees, of which over half were unaccompanied minors of low socioeconomic status, including “Amerasians” (children of mixed American and

Vietnamese ancestry, typically born out of wedlock when U.S. soldiers were stationed in

Vietnam).14

In addition to varied origins, the Vietnamese experienced diverse journeys prior to resettlement. Some were flown to U.S. military base camps and quickly resettled within months while others took refuge on small uninhabited islands of “first asylum countries”

11 This wave consisted of 130,000 Vietnamese who worked for the U.S. government, as well as their dependents. In addition, 65,000 refugees were able to escape on their own. Robinson, Terms of Refuge, 17-18.

12 The second wave began as a trickle, but by 1979, over 277,000 refugees escaped by boat. Robinson, Terms of Refuge, 50.

13 Under a unified Vietnam, many were required to complete re-education courses or were sentenced to re- education camps. One-fifth were detained for several years, while 40,000 were held without trial for over a decade. Those forced into re-education camps included low-ranking former South Vietnamese soldiers, educated elites, non-Communists, artists, and writers. Other interned Vietnamese included ethnic Chinese business owners and merchants of higher economic standing who were persecuted for their ethnicity and wealth.

14 Nghia M. Vo, The Vietnamese Boat People, 1954 and 1975-1992 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co. Publishers, 2006), 97.

(such as Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, and Hong Kong) for many years until they were accepted as refugees for admission into “second asylum countries” like the United States, France, Canada, Australia, and other countries of

Europe. The first wave of refugees assisted by the U.S. government were sent to four different military camps which were used as refugee resettlement centers: Camp

Pendleton in California, Fort Chaffee in Arkansas, Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania, and Elgin Air Force Base in Florida. Each camp consisted of Quonset huts and housed about 20,000 refugees. The camps served as a temporary location and by the end of 1975, all refugees had been resettled and the camps closed.15 Vietnamese Americans settled in cities and suburbs; some with small Asian populations and others with large Vietnamese

American communities. These communities would later impact the ways in which second-generation youth dealt with their ethnic identity. Those living in areas with a larger Asian American community are better able to cultivate Asian American identities which resisted assimilation into “whiteness.”16

Shifting demographics changed the ways in which Vietnamese Americans students were treated at schools. For some, increasing numbers of Vietnamese youth created racial tensions between groups. In other cases, a growing population meant more social and cultural support from other Asian Americans. For example, one person recalled, “...as I grew older maybe into the 6th and 7th grade, there [were] more Asians in my school, and so the making fun of Asians stopped. And it suddenly became cool to be

15 Stur, “‘Hiding Behind the Humanitarian Label’” 223-244.

16 Rosalind S. Chou, and Joe R. Feagin, The Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism. 2nd ed. (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2015), 24.

Asian.”17 Specifically, this student attended middle school during the mid-1990s in

Riverside County (southeast of Los Angeles), California. However, cities like Alhambra in Los Angeles County and Westminster in Orange County experienced heightened racial tensions in the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, respectively.18 Second-generation youth also faced racism and discomfort with their ethnic identity due to the history of the Vietnam

War. Amy Huyen Le, whose parents immigrated before she was born, recalls: “When I was younger, I was embarrassed to tell people I was Vietnamese. There were a lot of movies about Vietnam made in the 80s and I felt insecure [ . . . ] Back then, people had a lot of opinions about the Vietnam War and when you’re Vietnamese, you’re stuck in the middle of it.”19 For these families, economic success or struggle was, in part, shaped by their socioeconomic standing prior to leaving Vietnam, as well as availability of resources and funding from government and voluntary agencies. Despite attempts by the

United States to expand their resettlement programs, they were unable to keep up with the greater than anticipated size of exodus of Vietnamese. Consequently, later immigrants were more likely to depend on welfare and less likely to adapt to society.20 Although refugees received money from Refugee Cash Assistance, in 1982, the time period of

17 Tiffany Le interviewed by Roger Le, November 10, 2010, Westminster, California, VAHF#0006, transcript, Vietnamese American Heritage Foundation 500 Oral Histories Vietnamese American Oral History Project, University of California, Irvine.

18 Thanh Tam Tran interviewed by Charlie Van Le, November 10, 2010, Westminster, California, VAHF#0004, transcript, Vietnamese American Heritage Foundation 500 Oral Histories Vietnamese American Oral History Project, University of California, Irvine.

19 Amy Huyen Le interviewed by Vee Kim Banh, March 15, 2012 and March 18, 2012, Irvine, California, VAOHP#0027, transcript, Vietnamese American Experience Winter 2012, Vietnamese American Oral History Project, University of California, Irvine.

20 James Diego Vigil, A Rainbow of Gangs: Street Cultures in the Mega-City (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 103.

9 providing aid was cut in half, reducing the thirty-six months of aid to eighteen months after the arrival of the refugee.21 Surveys from San Diego in 1984 reveal that 22.4 percent of Vietnamese refugees were unemployed and 61.3 percent worked below the line of poverty. In contrast, immigrants who arrived in 1975 were more educated, literate in

English, and familiar with U.S. bureaucracies than later waves. By 1988, the Office of

Refugee Resettlement reported that immigrants of the first wave had reached average household income levels in the United States.22 The transmission of economic stability

(or instability) to the next generation affected the futures of 1.5 and second-generation

Vietnamese Americans. Statistics reveal that a disproportionate number of Southeast

Asian teenagers were wards of the California Youth Authority (known today as the

California Division of Juvenile Justice) and successful “model minorities” in the social and academic realm. In 1990, Southeast Asians made up 1.5 percent of the Californian population, but 4.5 percent of the youth in the juvenile justice system.23 Furthermore, compared to other Asian groups, “Vietnamese Americans had the highest rate of institutionalization in the 1990s.”24 On the other hand, “8.5% of the 1991 incoming freshman class at the University of California, Davis, were Southeast Asians.”25

Migration significantly altered the structures of most families. Some refugees lost family members during their escape from Vietnam or were permanently separated from

21 Nazli Kibria, Family Tightrope: The Changing Lives of Vietnamese Americans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 83-84.

22 Kibria, Family Tightrope, 14.

23 Tony Waters, Crime and Immigrant Youth, (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1999), ix.

24 Vigil, A Rainbow of Gangs, 115.

25 Waters, Crime and Immigrant Youth, ix.

10 their families after resettlement. Unaccompanied minors arrived alone in the United

States and lived with friends, while others lived under one roof with large extended families in order to survive economically. First-generation immigrants faced shifting gender roles, experienced downward socioeconomic mobility, dealt with generational tensions, and suffered from painful memories of war, escape, and loss of their previous lives.

Although they lived in the same household, experiences of the 1.5 and second- generations differed greatly from their parents. American-born Vietnamese endured racism in a different way than their parents had, due to the fact that many felt culturally

‘American’ and sometimes spoke very little (or no) Vietnamese or Chinese. Thus, the first-generation, understanding that they would always be perceived as Vietnamese, faced a losing battle against maintaining a Vietnamese identity and teaching their children the

Vietnamese language.26 Their family’s (or their own) socioeconomic success did not protect them from blatant or systemic racism. Incidents of overt racism generally remained unreported and undiscussed. The young Vietnamese Americans internalized their feelings of sadness, anger, and marginalization due to lack of communication and rigid traditional relationships between the generations. Many youth were unable to discuss racism, psychological stress, depression, and suicide with their parents, which led to emotional shut-down and suppressed memories of racist attacks—strategies which negatively affected their self-esteem and stress levels. In addition to avoiding confrontation, lack of Vietnamese American collective action against racism stemmed

26 Hoang Diem Hau, “An Unwilling Refugee” in Struggle for Ethnic Identity: Narratives by Asian American Professionals edited by Pyong Gap Min and Rose Kim (Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press, 1999), 207.

11 from the “white-established ‘model minority’ myth” which had been maintained by

Asian Americans themselves.27 They dealt with extreme pressures for academic success from their parents as well as societal expectations to fit into this stereotype. Pressures from unrealistic examples of “model minorities” featured in the media and promoted in school settings contributed to the psychological stress these students endured—a fact not lost on research revealing high rates of depression and suicides among the Asian

American communities.28 The 1.5 and second-generation Vietnamese Americans were caught between two or more cultures. Assimilating into “white American” culture could cause conflicts if their parents disliked the “Americanization” of their children and hoped to preserve the Vietnamese language and traditions. Even when the second-generation socially assimilated into American culture, they could never physically blend in and be recognized as “real Americans” by their parents and other non-Asians.29

Familial relations were strained, and generational tensions exacerbated by unstable family conditions due to separated family members and unaddressed psychological issues--circumstances caused by war brutalities, memories of imprisonment, and traumatic experiences during their escape, which included frequent drownings, constant hunger, and the pillaging and raping of refugees by Thai pirates.

These topics remained undiscussed and adults turned to drugs, alcohol, and abuse as coping mechanisms. In addition to coming from lower socioeconomic classes, second and third wave refugees faced higher rates of poverty and more protests against their

27 Chou and Feagin, The Myth of the Model Minority, 106-107.

28 Chou and Feagin, The Myth of the Model Minority, 23.

29 Chou and Feagin, The Myth of the Model Minority, 133.

12 resettlement in the United States.30 These conditions increased risks of delinquency and gang membership among young Vietnamese Americans. In time, the rise of youth gangs and increase in gang membership in Southern California became a major concern for law enforcement and many communities.

As children of the largest wave of immigrants in recent U.S. history, second- generation Vietnamese Americans have changed the demographics of the United States.

By 1990, 24 percent of Vietnamese who entered the U.S. were under the age of nineteen and 27 percent were women of child-bearing ages.31 The vast majority (79 percent) of

Vietnamese children in the United States were second-generation Americans and only 21 percent were 1.5 generation.32 In the following decade the exodus of Vietnamese had slowed to a trickle. As such, over the course of a few decades, the second-generation made up the majority of all Vietnamese Americans. Voices of the two generations of youth contributed to the missing collective memory and sparse history of Vietnamese in the United States. Thus, it is important to understand this group from a scholarly perspective.

Historiography and Methodology

Since the Vietnamese diaspora, many scholars sought to understand the causes of emigration and plight of refugees as a whole. Paul J. Strand and Woodrow Jones Jr. were

30 In 1982, second wave refugees who arrived within the last three years, had a poverty rate of 90 percent. Vigil, A Rainbow of Gangs, 103.

31 By 1990, 148,110 women between the ages of twenty and forty-four entered the United States. U.S. Department of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration, Bureau of the Census, “1990 Census of Population: The Foreign-Born Population in the United States” July 1, 1993. https://www.census.gov/prod/cen1990/cp3/cp-3-1.pdf.

32 Zhou and Bankston III, Growing Up American, 4.

13 among the first scholars to address issues refugees faced during the resettlement process.

In their book, Indochinese Refugees in America: Problems of Adaptation and

Assimilation (1985), Strand and Jones analyzed the impacts of resettlement policies on social adaptation. As pioneers on the subject of resettlement, the authors focused on the difficulties in adjusting to the United States as involuntary immigrants.33 Nazli Kibria’s

Family Tightrope: The Changing Lives of Vietnamese Americans (1993) provided a more holistic understanding of Vietnamese Americans family and the power shifts they experienced after migration. Kibria’s book covered topics from traditional practices and assimilation, to economic survival, gender role tensions, and generational gaps.34 Nhi T.

Lieu’s The American Dream in Vietnamese (2007), shifted from theories of assimilation to address leisure and entertainment in Vietnamese American culture and identity formation.35 Lieu argued that the immigrants created a distinctive popular culture through mass media and shaped their own ethnic identities in the process.

Increasing fears of Vietnamese American youth gangs in the 1980s and 1990s prompted scholars to explain the phenomenon which defied the “model minority” trajectory. Min Zhou and Carl L. Bankston III focused on delinquency among children and teenagers of Vietnamese immigrant parents in their book, Growing up American:

How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the United States (1998).36 Using statistical

33 Paul J. Strand and Woodrow Jones, Jr., Indochinese Refugees in America: Problems of Adaptation and Assimilation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1985).

34 Nazli Kibria, Family Tightrope: The Changing Lives of Vietnamese Americans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

35 Nhi T. Lieu, The American Dream in Vietnamese (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

36 Min Zhou and Carl L. Bankston III, Growing Up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the United States (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1998).

14 data, Zhou and Bankston explained socio-cultural aspects of Vietnamese American children, who were born from refugees, or came as infants and young children. The authors’ analysis placed youth at the center of the discourse, rather than the margins of society.

Scholarship in the 21st century leans toward a postcolonial approach and attempts to connect the Vietnamese experience as collateral damage of war and colonialism to the broader context of U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia. In Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es), Yen Le Espiritu asserted that Vietnamese refugees continue(d) to suffer even after the Vietnam War ended. 37 Furthermore, their affliction results from U.S. militarism and attempts to justify a lost war into a good and necessary war. Utilizing the myth of the “good refugee,” America was able to reclaim itself as the savior of desperate refugees fleeing the evils of communism, despite having played a multifaceted role in causing mass displacements and the diaspora. Espiritu emphasized the ability of war memories to transmit through generations of survivors via

“postmemory,”38 resulting in identity crises, emotional confusion, family tensions, violence, and unstable ‘peace’ in the household. Drawing much of his theory from

Espiritu, Kevin D. Lam analyzed the development of Vietnamese youth gangs as an extension of colonialism by broadly tracing the political and economic imperialism of the

United States from the foreign war in Vietnam to the domestic policies of resettlement and racialization. Lam’s book, Youth Gangs, Racism, and Schooling: Vietnamese

37 Yen Le Espiritu, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014).

38 Coined by Marianne Hirsch to explain “the experience of being separated in time and space from the war being remembered, yet of living with the eyewitness memory.” Quoted in Body Counts from Hirsch’s 1996 article, “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile” in Poetics Today 17 (4): 659-86.

American Youth in a Postcolonial Context, was the first work entirely dedicated to

Vietnamese gangs in California. 39

This thesis seeks to fill the gap of sociological and historical investigations of 1.5 and second-generation Vietnamese Americans and their participation in collective activities and organizations. Although scholars have written on the negative impacts of

“model minority” stereotypes on Asian Americans, none have specifically addressed young Vietnamese Americans. Scholarship on the younger generations focused on explaining their academic excellence or delinquency, rather than youth norms and beliefs.

Additionally, scholars examined a broader Vietnamese culture, but overlooked the distinctive culture of Vietnamese American youth. Utilizing Vietnamese American oral history archives from the University of California, Irvine and California State University,

Fullerton, the research draws upon recollections of the youth in social and political organizations during their formative years of high school and college. This paper incorporates literature written by the teenagers and young adults in order to expand the pool of narratives. These include essays, poems, and articles in student publications as well as full-length memoirs. I argue that the youth used literature and other arts to assert their place in history as neither exclusively model minorities nor delinquents.

39 Kevin D. Lam, Youth Gangs, Racism, and Schooling: Vietnamese American Youth in a Postcolonial Context (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

CHAPTER 2

REJECTION OF THE ‘MODEL MINORITY’

Although generally assumed to be passive and compliant, second-generation

Vietnamese American youth were openly defiant and vocal in many ways, which ranged from socially acceptable to criminal activities. At times, activities perceived as socially favorable among teens were deemed delinquent to parents and law enforcement.

Many students and young adults recognized the existence of a “white-imposed racial frame” on Asian Americans, which they themselves had reinforced. 40 The white narrative of the “model minority” included stereotypes such as high academic performance and careers in the medical field, engineering, and law. Some rejected stereotypical and restrictive occupational paths by choosing to study the arts and humanities in college. For example, Tony Bui, who was brought to the United States at two years old, studied film at Loyola Marymount University and American-born filmmaker Kathy Uyen studied film at the University of California, Irvine.41 Similarly,

Simon Levan left his pharmaceutical studies and opted to pursue a profession in music,

40 Chou and Feagin, The Myth of the Model Minority, 190.

41 Tony Bui, alongside his older brother Timothy Linh Bui, wrote and produced the award-winning film Green Dragon (2001), featuring the refugee experience at Camp Pendleton in southern California. Kathy Uyen Nguyen became an actress, producer, and writer. She and Timothy Linh Bui produced the film How to Fight in Six Inch Heels (2013), which was directed by Ham Tran, known for his film on the reeducation camps and boat people refugees, Journey from the Fall (2006).

17 despite his father’s desire to have him become a pharmacist.42 Others assumed an active role in identifying and criticizing white racism, which oftentimes resulted in negative backlash from Caucasians and Asian American alike. In the attempt to build a “counter- framing” narrative, Asian Americans were often accused of “rocking the boat.”43

Younger students also felt social and parental pressures for academic success.

Some deliberately refused to do well in school as a direct retaliation against expectations.

Charlotte was one such student. She recalled, “I tried my hardest to flunk out of school.

That’s my rebellion, to try not to be Asian [ . . . ] that’s how I kept the pressure off of me with the grades.”44 This strategy was not simply an act of adolescent rebellion. Charlotte understood that demand for success not only came from her parents, but from peer and societal pressures. Her statement of not wanting to be Asian signifies her understanding of the academic burdens which were attached to her race. For some young Vietnamese

Americans, joining youth gangs served as a clear rejection of the burdens of being an idealized version of an ethnic minority. Although they may not have been politically motivated to counter the “white racial frame” or deliberately attempting to change the

‘American hero’ narrative, their delinquency and participation in criminal activities made it difficult for the United States to maintain the “good refugee” narrative. As numbers of gangs appeared to increase in the 1980s and 1990s, it became evident that not all

42 Levan escaped Vietnam in 1979 by boat with his famly, but was “too young to remember” the journey. Simon Levan interviewed by Trangdai Tranguyen, January 9, 2000, Westminster, California, Oral History #2832, transcript, Vietnamese American Project, Center for Oral and Public History, California State University, Fullerton.

43 Chou and Feagin, The Myth of the Model Minority, 194.

44 Charlotte, quoted in The Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism by Rosalind S. Chou and Joe R. Feagin. 2nd ed. (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2015), 119.

Vietnamese immigrant families were economically successful, bringing into question the achievability of the American Dream for ethnic minorities.45

Officials and Vietnamese families were shocked to find involvement of girls in youth gangs. Females played a significant role in the male-dominated Vietnamese gangs.

They worked as accomplices to home invasions, extortion, and other crimes, extending beyond traditional roles of a girlfriend. They established female gangs as auxiliaries to their male counterparts and adopted matching gang names such as “NIP Family Ladies”

(Nip 14) and “Lady Rascal Gangsters” (Tiny Rascal Gangsters). In some instances, they formed independent female gangs, such as the “Dirty Punks,” and “Innocent Bitch

Killers.” 46 Females also joined co-ed gangs like the “Masters of Destruction.”47

Newspapers portrayed Asian-American girls as armed, dangerous, and independent from male-dominated gangs. Growing concerns among family members, schools, and law enforcers about females in gangs prompted intervention strategies aimed at the youth, such as promoting conferences like “Sister to Sister: Celebrating Asian Women of

Tomorrow” and hosting programs for parents at local high schools like Westminster

45 James Diego Vigil, Steve C. Yun, and Jesse Cheng, “A Shortcut to the American Dream?: Vietnamese Youth Gangs in Little Saigon” in Asian American Youth: Culture, Identity, and Ethnicity edited by Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou (New York: Routledge, 2004), 208.

46 Other gangs in Southern California include the “South Side Scissors,” “Midnight Flowers,” “Pomona Girls,” and “Junior Wally Girls.” In Northern California, female gangs like the “Sacramento Bad Girls,” “Pretty in Yellow,” and “Best Side Posse” gained notoriety in the Sacramento Bee. Sonni Efron, “Vietnamese Girl Gangs Become Armed, Violent” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 10, 1989, http://articles.latimes.com/1989-12-10/news/mn-532_1_girl-gang. Vigil, A Rainbow of Gangs, 117.

47 Stephen Magagnini, “Asian-American Girl Gangs on Rise: Teenage ‘Gangsterettes’ Accused of Violence, Thefts in Capital,” Sacramento Bee, Apr. 25, 1993. (UC Irvine Southeast Asian Archives).

High.48 In a rare interview, former gang member (and author of Treacherous Subjects)

Lan Phuong Duong described her troubled upbringing and explained the reasoning behind her delinquent actions during her youth. She came from a family that was broken in many ways. Due to an abusive relationship, her mother opted to stay in Vietnam while her father brought seven children to the U.S. She witnessed the abuse of her sisters by her father, attributing it to a cycle of abuse and loss of status after the war. Her life was also plagued with economic struggles and racism. She explained her early understanding of inequality: “[W]e knew that the world was rigged [ . . . ] against us and so how we rebelled against that was: stayed out late, made out with guys, got into fights, and tried to just out-pace or outgrow the refugee identities that we had.”49 The process of defiance served as a channel for empowerment. By defying expectations about how refugees acted, Duong deliberately crafted a different and more complex identity. Duong also emphasized the role of gendered stereotypes and the sexualization of young women in the formation of the gang as well as her personal identity. She recalled her early experiences with harassment and explained that “[i]t was because I was a girl [ . . . ] I was Southeast

Asian of a certain class.” 50 In response to this discrimination, Duong participated in illegal activities like stealing and other delinquent behaviors. She distinguished her actions from middle-class teenagers by noting that her rebellion arose from a lack of

48 “Early Action Needed to Pull Girls From Gangs,” Orange County Register editorial, Dec. 17, 1989. (UC Irvine Southeast Asian Archives). Carolyn Jung, “Redirecting Girl Gangsters,” The Mercury News, May 5, 1997. (UC Irvine Southeast Asian Archives).

49 Lan Phuong Duong interviewed by Tram Le, December 15, 2014, Silver Lake, California, VAOHP#0215, transcript, Tram Le Oral Histories, Vietnamese American Oral History Project, University of California, Irvine.

50 Lan Phuong Duong interviewed by Tram Le, VAOHP#0215, Vietnamese American Oral History Project.

20 economic resources and support for female refugees, not her status as an adolescent.

Duong further explained how labeling Vietnamese youth reinforced gender stereotypes.

During the 1980s, media narratives focused on gangsters and model minorities, but only assigned gangster labels to males. She pointed out: “I felt like we didn’t fit in either one category. So we just wanted to form our own identity. We thought we were really tough.”51 Although she did not explicitly claim membership in any particular gang, her interview reveals activities that authorities associated with gang members. As an Asian

American female, law enforcement likely overlooked Duong’s ties to gangs or overemphasized the danger women in gangs posed and violence they inflicted upon others. This identity formation allowed Duong and her friends to reject stereotypical labels and assert themselves in their own ways. The Vietnamese American gang girl was subjected to external forces which shaped her decision to participate in illegal activities.

On the other hand, girls in gangs asserted their agency by choosing this path on their own, as Duong emphasized.

Gangs served as channels for the youth to access new forms of power. In many cases, the influx of Vietnamese into ethnic minority communities upset the balance of race relations. Young Vietnamese persons formed gangs because they sought to protect themselves from other gangs, bullies at school, and racial discrimination. For example,

“Nip 14” formed in response to the racial slur “Nipponese” and the fact that Chicano gangs identified with the number 13. Chicano gangs frequently claimed “13” in reference to the 13th letter of the alphabet. The letter “M” stood for the Mexican Mafia or La Eme, to which many Chicano youth gangs claimed allegiance to. Xenophobes, mostly whites

51 Lan Phuong Duong interviewed by Tram Le, VAOHP#0215, Vietnamese American Oral History Project.

21 and Chicanos who feared a growing Asian population would diminish their power, used

“Nipponese,” (a derogatory term for Japanese Americans), to degrade Vietnamese people. Although the word “Nipponese” simply meant Japanese, it had acquired a negative connotation during the post-World War II era. The use of the word to generalize all Asians diminished the value of a separate Vietnamese people to an unfavorable racial group. To counter this, Vietnamese youth reclaimed the insult, wielding it as a signifier of power and unity in a gang. They selected the number “14” as a direct challenge to the prevailing power of Chicano gangs in the neighborhoods. In cities with large existing

Chicano populations, the Vietnamese clashed with the Hispanics. Areas containing large populations of other Asians prompted the Vietnamese to become rivals with other Asian or Southeast Asian gangs. For example, in communities with large populations of

Chinese Americans, the Viet Ching youth gang emerged as a response to the well- established Wah Ching gang, which was comprised of ethnic Chinese and Taiwanese youth. Needless to say, conflicts between Chicanos and Asians were not primarily about race, but about power and economic struggles. Furthermore, the white-imposed ideas of who was the “model minority” impacted the ways that these two groups saw each other.

Historically, during the World War II era, Mexican Americans were considered the ideal example of an ethnic minority. Second-generation Mexican Americans were perceived as

“basically white” and could easily assimilate into white American culture by participating in the war effort and joining social clubs.52 In the following decades, race again, was used to divide ethnic minorities. During the height of the Civil Rights Movement, the

52 Elizabeth R. Escobedo, From Coveralls to Zoot Suits: The Lives of Mexican American Women on the World War II Home front (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013),

22 narratives pushed a new “model minority” group as “proof” that no racial nor socioeconomic injustices existed in the United States.

Racial slurs oftentimes led to physical altercations, further justifying the necessities of joining gangs for protection According to Huc, an immigrant who left

Vietnam in 1979 at the age of six, racial prejudice led to an argument with a Chicano student. This culminated into a fight between Huc and twelve Chicano “homeboys.” Huc admits: “I got my ass whopped [ . . . ] You couldn’t hang by yourself.”53 This incident prompted Huc to begin carrying a knife to school and ally closely with other Vietnamese students. Eventually, these racial tensions would result in another argument where Huc pulled out a gun and started shooting a Chicano student in the school’s cafeteria.

Acquiring knives and guns as a means of protection led the young boys closer to gang subculture and their classification as criminals. Ricky Phan, a “boat person” at the age of ten who resettled in the United States in 1985, shares his experience with racism: “After a while, after I start going to school . . . some of the kid there start to give me shit. Call me

‘fucking nip’ and ‘gook’ and stuff.”54 As a result, Phan associated himself with other

Vietnamese in the community, who belonged to gangs. These young men came from different places throughout Vietnam; some from large cities and others from small towns, some with their entire families and others on their own. Despite this, Phan felt a deep connection to them as he “became a member of a whole new family.”55 In the late 1980s

53 Huc, interviewed by Vigil in A Rainbow of Gangs: Street Cultures in the Mega-City (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 121.

54 Ricky Phan, testimony in Bui Doi: Life Like Dust filmed by Ahrin Mishan and Nick Rothenberg, 1994 documentary.

55 Ricky Phan, testimony in Bui Doi: Life Like Dust.

23 and early 1990s, increasing gang membership correlated with increasing numbers of youth who arrived in the United States unaccompanied and without any other family members. These “third wave” refugees oftentimes came from poverty and were chosen by their families (who could only afford passage for one child) to establish a beachhead to help the rest of the family escape. Others were Amerasians who did not know their

American fathers and oftentimes did not have mothers in their lives either. One such example is Vinh, an orphaned teenager of mixed descent who came to the United States in 1986 under the Amerasian Homing Act. Upon arrival, he had difficulty adapting to school and society. After living in a group home and multiple foster homes, Vinh ran away to live with his gang.56 For these refugees, their gang was their family.

Additionally, many of the 1.5 generation refugees witnessed the violence of war, brutalities of the communist regime, and traumas of escaping a war-torn country— experiences that shaped their adaptation to U.S. society and the appeal of rebellious behavior. According to Vigil’s research, a quarter of surveyed refugees in Orange County were forced to serve time in Communist Vietnam’s prisons, where they were frequently tortured by police. Economic hardship in postwar Vietnam resulted in “children becoming prostitutes, robbers, and cigarette vendors in order to survive.”57 Traumatized by war and unable to assimilate socially or economically, many children became

“streetboys” and “streetgirls”—a label given to Vietnamese who spent their time on the streets, rather than at home with their families. These activities and behaviors in Vietnam

56 Keiko Tsuno, The Story of Vinh, Center for Asian American Media, 1990, documentary online, http://on.aol.com/video/the-story-of-vinh-film-517357839.

57 Vigil, A Rainbow of Gangs, 102.

24 later migrated with the refugees who hoped for a different life in America. Members of youth gangs were oftentimes close witnesses of war violence and death. At the age of five, Huc (a 1.5 generation) witnessed the shooting of a man at the hands of communists.58 Frequent experiences with death and mistrust of law enforcement in

Communist Vietnam conditioned Vietnamese to accept violence and disregard the law.

When Huc and his family left Vietnam in 1979, he lost all of his siblings and his pregnant mother. In high school, he began stealing cars, oftentimes pretending not to speak English in order to avoid law enforcement. His criminal activities culminated in his arrest and trial for shooting at an individual and leading police on a car chase. Another gang member, Ricky Phan, encountered death at a young age as well. He struggled to sell bread for survival in Vietnam and one day, decided to wander off in frustration. He saw a dead body in the water and thought that the lifeless man looked peaceful, “just floating.”59 He repeatedly saw this image in his head when he went home, but never told anyone. As a teen and young adult, Phan participated in criminal activities, resulting in his arrest and 11-year sentence for armed robbery in 1994.60 Surviving a past filled with loss, these teens found power in violence, crime, and vice.

Although second-generation Vietnamese Americans in youth gangs may not have directly witnessed the brutalities of war, conditions of their upbringing rendered them susceptible to gang life. They dealt with difficult socioeconomic conditions and continued racism which made gang life appealing. Some were influenced by their

58 Vigil, A Rainbow of Gangs, 119.

59 Ahrin Mishan and Nick Rothenberg, Bui Doi: Life Like Dust, Center of Asian American Media, 1994, documentary DVD, 28 min.

60 Mishan and Rothenberg, Bui Doi.

25 family’s membership in gangs. Because his father was a gang member, P-Dog, (who came to the United States at the age of three), grew up with the familiarity of the gang lifestyle. He explained that he was “born and raised [a gangster] . . . I wake up and see a gang of jewelry on the table . . . [from] robbing jewelry store . . . Robbing, you know. I was born and raised in this game, basically.”61

As more refugees arrived in the United States, the Vietnamese living in America faced increasing opposition to their resettlement. Racial tensions and anti-Asian sentiment increased in the late 1970s, early 1980s, and early 1990s due to the influx of new immigrants and economic recessions.62 Outside of their homes, Vietnamese

American youth faced racial violence, which drove them to band together for protection.

Hostility towards Southeast Asian immigrants existed since the arrival of refugees in

1975. In the subsequent decade, reported incidents involving animosity toward Southeast

Asians became increasingly violent and aggressive. Between 1975 and 1978, the majority of incidents were protests against the arrival of refugees. Only 17 percent of the incidents involved harassment and altercation. In contrast, from 1983 to 1990, assaults made up 45 percent, and harassment and altercations made up 22 percent of these incidents.63 As more refugees entered the United States, Americans became more openly hostile towards them.

Racial violence escalated in high schools, where students visibly noticed increasing numbers of refugee students. In 1985, racial tensions between Vietnamese

61 P-Dog, interviewed by Kevin D. Lam in Youth Gangs, Racism, and Schooling: Vietnamese American Youth in a Postcolonial Context (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 88.

62 Knee, “A Research Project to Determine the Law Enforcement Needs,” 164-171.

63 Strand and Jones, Indochinese Refugees in America, 73.

26 students and Latino and Anglo athletes at Alhambra High resulted in a school fight and the stabbing of a student. According to Jesse Heredia, a student who witnessed the fight, fifteen to twenty students were involved in the altercation. He recalls, “[a]ll I heard was

Chinos, Chinos [ . . . ] and before you knew it there was blood all over.”64 The use of

“Chinos,” the Spanish word for “Chinese,” as a derogatory term for Asian Americans exemplifies racial tensions between Asian and Hispanic students in schools.65 The word acquired negative connotations through its use as a label for all Asians disliked by

Latinos.66 The conflict resulted in the suspension of 10 students (from both sides) and arrest of four Vietnamese students for carrying weapons on campus. Concerned about a possible retaliatory attack by the Viet Ching (Vietnamese youth gang of ethnic Chinese origins), law enforcement and school officials necessitated police presence at the school for the next week. Racial violence was not limited to ethnic minorities and also erupted at

Fountain Valley High School in Orange County between Vietnamese and white students in 1993, resulting in the expulsion of twenty-two students. The brawl called attention to

64 Mark Arax, “Police Move to Cool Alhambra High Racial Tension,” Los Angeles Times, Mar. 14, 1985. http://articles.latimes.com/1985-03-14/news/ga-26831_1_alhambra-high-school.

65 Chicano hostility towards Vietnamese originated as a result of population shifts and concerns by Hispanics about power loss. In Alhambra, the 1960s saw an increase in the Latino population, giving Chicanos more power in numbers. Between 1975 and 1985, Alhambra school district experienced a tripling of its Asian population from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. In 1985, the Asian population made up 42% of the schools in the district. Additionally, “white flight” occurred in cities where Latino populations grew during the post-World War II era, leaving large ethnic enclaves dominated by Chicanos. When the Asian population exploded in the 1980s, the Latinos had fewer opportunities to leave the cities and instead of “flight,” the gangs dug in their heels to face the growing numbers of Asian gangs. It is important to note the socioeconomic differences between Asians who were moving into predominantly Hispanic cities and those who could afford to move to wealthier white suburbs.

66 In Alhambra, the Asian population consisted of persons from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and ethnic Chinese from Vietnam, making the groups more prone to being generalized as Chinese.

27 issues of racial tension at multiple high schools throughout Orange County in the early

1990s.67 Vietnamese American students were frequently targeted with racial slurs, such as: “Chinos” (Chinese), “Nips” (from anti-Japanese sentiment), and “gook,” among other things. One youth explains: “It’s just that I was thinkin’ I’m Vietnamese, so I should be hanging with other Vietnamese [ . . . ] I knew that white people were prejudiced [ . . .

]They hated me and I hated them.”68 Vietnamese Americans frequently associated with other Asian Americans in response to the racial climate, further exacerbating racial tensions between groups. Even without a heavy presence of ethnic gangs, children like

Tiffany Le, a second-generation Vietnamese American, gravitated towards other Asians, as her two best friends were Filipino-American and Chinese-Mexican American. She explained she was bullied for her race by other students and that she and her best friends were the only Asians at the school.69 Racial violence was not limited to altercations between Asians and Chicanos or Asians and blacks. Some of the most violent crimes were committed between gangs of different Asian ethnicities. This includes the 1993 shooting in El Monte, which started as a rivalry between an ethnic Chinese and

Taiwanese gang (Wah Ching) and a Southeast Asian gang (Asian Boyz). P-Dog, a member of the Asian Boyz in the early 1990s, explains the complexities of ethnic relations between gangs:

Yeah, that’s how we got problems with the Chinese gangs here [San Gabriel Valley]. They didn’t like us . . . the Asian gangs. We’re not like the Asian gangs

67 Ann Pepper and Denice A. Rios, “School Ousts 22 Students After Brawl” Orange County Register, Mar. 13, 1993. Vertical Files, Southeast Asian Archives at University of California, Irvine.

68 Unknown, interviewed by James Diego Vigil in A Rainbow of Gangs: Street Cultures in the Mega-City (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 109.

69 Tiffany Le interviewed by Roger Le, VAHF#0006, transcript, Vietnamese American Oral History Project.

because they say we’re disgracing them because we’re not the way Asian gangs should be . . . We’re the only one dressing like Mexicans still, talking like blacks . . . 70

The “Asian gangs” P-dog referred to included the older gangs comprised of east

Asian ethnicities (Chinese and Taiwanese) as well as gangs formed by newer immigrants from Southeast Asia. P-dog belonged to the generation of gangs who distinguished themselves from “FOBs,” or “Fresh off the Boat,” a disparaging term for newly arrived immigrants. By adopting fashions from Chicano gangs and linguistic styles from black gangs, they assembled a separate identity. As a result, they clashed with other Asian gangs. Well-established gangs like the Wah Ching prompted the formation of new gangs, such as Viet Ching. The Viet Ching was comprised of ethnic-Chinese Vietnamese youth who were not allowed to join the predominantly Chinese and Taiwanese Wah Ching, who looked down on the ethnic Chinese from Vietnam and considered them to be Vietnamese.

It became clear to most young Vietnamese that they needed to find protection from racial and ethnic violence.

Although females did join gangs for the same reasons as males, their motives varied from being “victims of male oppression” (abuse as children or adults) to attaining power.71 Studies of non-Asian female gang members have garnered conclusions that are wide-ranging and sometimes contradictory. Some scholars noted that girls have been a part of gangs (usually as auxiliary units) since the nineteenth century and others have argued that the numbers of girls in gangs have grown significantly since the feminist

70 P-Dog, interviewed by Kevin D. Lam in Youth Gangs, Racism, and Schooling, 89.

71 Jody Miller, One of the Guys: Girls, Gangs, and Gender (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 9.

29 movements of the 1970s. The “liberation theory” and shifting gender roles are often employed to explain women who challenge gender roles in search of equality. The

“liberation theory” postulates that the liberation of women during suffrage movements in the 1910s and feminist movements in the 1970s resulted in more delinquency among girls and more crimes committed by females. The growing sense of independence and reluctance to comply with gender norms caused females to be “led astray” towards criminal activities. In contrast to this theory, other scholars focused on the large numbers of female offenders being, or having been, victims of abuse as children or adults.72

According to researcher Jody Miller, the violent and aggressive actions of young women reflected their responses to oppression in abusive relationships as adults and/or being abused as children. In that sense, they were products of their victimized past and engaged in a cycle of abuse within the gangs. In contrasting portrayals of females, they are oftentimes characterized as sex objects with low self-esteem or aggressive “street feminists.”73 Scholars argued that abused women lacked agency and thus, served as auxiliaries to men in gangs, further worsening their situations. On the other hand, feminist scholars argued that women found empowerment in gangs in the same ways that disenfranchised young men did. Females in gangs were seen as combative feminists seeking to assert their power in society.74

72 Miller, One of the Guys.

73 Anne Campbell, The Girls in the Gang: A Report from New York City (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1984). Her comparative study follows the trends of New Left historians, focusing on class, race, and gender. Additionally, the narrative approach incorporates the perspective of these women in the gangs, giving them a voice beyond that of a “sex object” or “tomboy.” Her work provides an understanding of the socioeconomic challenges and different cultural burdens particularly unique to females.

74 Miller, One of the Guys.

Explanations of why Vietnamese American girls participated in gangs are even more complex. Like Vietnamese males in gangs, females faced racism and economic hardships. In addition to socioeconomic hardships, Vietnamese girls were subject to gendered double standards from society, their parents, and their peers. A mother explained: “My daughter must be a good girl. That means she must do good in school and she must not go out alone at night with boys.”75 Divergent expectations for girls from boys required strict control of daughters. The mother also noted: “Sometimes my son is bad, but not very bad. He can always do better. But if a girl is bad, people will always see her as bad, so it is very important to be careful with daughters.”76 The lax attitude towards her son’s “bad” behavior reveals biases in rearing boys versus girls. She excused the actions of her son by asserting that boys grow out of deviance and defiance; girls were not socially permitted to test authority. Vietnamese parents, who hoped for their daughters’ eventual marriage, considered these traditional Vietnamese values important.

Both parents emphasized and enforced these values with extra supervision and pressure on Vietnamese American girls. These double standards did not go unnoticed as one girl recalled: “I would have a curfew, you know, I'd have to be home at 10pm at night.

Whereas, my brother could stay out as late as he wanted even though he's six years younger than me.”77 Not only did females experience bias in household rules, they

75 Unknown narrator quoted in “Family Pressure and the Educational Experience of the Daughters of Vietnamese Refugees” by Min Zhou and Carl L. Bankston III in International Migration 4, vol. 39 (2001): 141. UC Irvine Southeast Asian Archive vertical file collection.

76 Ibid.

77 Tu-Uyen Nguyen interviewed by Kassandra Tong, April 30, 2012, Fullerton, California, VAOHP#0066, transcript, Natalie Newton Class Oral Histories, 2012, Vietnamese American Oral History Project, University of California, Irvine.

31 understood the differing societal standards between boys and girls. In conjunction with having stricter expectations for females, parents judged their daughters’ behaviors by different standards. One father noted: “Of course a boy can get away with more than a girl. A boy can do more before he gets a bad name. A boy can get a bad name and still become good later.”78 Resonating the previous quote of a mother, this father confidently states the existence of two distinct sets of rules for boys and girls.

The extreme pressures to perform well academically and behave well socially did not sit well with all young women, yet the vast majority did not break away from traditions and expected gender roles. Researchers found that second-generation

Vietnamese American young women in a low-income community of New Orleans academically outperformed their male peers. According to scholars Zhou and Bankston, this was not due to a shift away from traditional gender roles, but rather a move towards securing a higher status in order to secure a good husband. Parents viewed education as a bargaining tool to increase their daughters’ marriage prospects to men of higher socioeconomic status. It could also serve as a bargaining tool to protect their daughters from being cheated on by their husbands.79 Pressures on the girls came from their adolescent male counterparts as well. As teenage girls, concerns about peer relations contributed to feelings of frustration because Vietnamese American girls were expected by the boys to be smart, but not too smart, Americanized, but also Vietnamese. One

78 Unknown narrator quoted in “Family Pressure and the Educational Experience of the Daughters of Vietnamese Refugees” by Min Zhou and Carl L. Bankston III in International Migration 4, vol. 39 (2001): 138. UC Irvine Southeast Asian Archive vertical file collection.

79 Min Zhou and Carl L. Bankston III, “Family Pressure and the Educational Experience of the Daughters of Vietnamese Refugees” in International Migration 4, vol. 39 (2001): 133-151. UC Irvine Southeast Asian Archive vertical file collection.

32 adolescent male explained, “I guess I want a girlfriend who is very American but a wife who is very Vietnamese. I think girls can be both of these things, though. They can wear okay clothes and listen to okay music and still be Vietnamese inside.”80 These contradictory characterizations reveal the complexities of identities expected of young

Vietnamese American women. On one hand, young men desired “westernized” girlfriends who were Americanized in clothing styles and music choice. At the same time, young men hoped for wives with very traditional Vietnamese values.

In part, Vietnamese parents raised their daughters differently from their sons in order to maintain their social status among others in the Vietnamese American community. On the other hand, parents faced real concerns about the literal and physical protection of their daughters. In an interview, first-generation immigrant, Ann Phong expressed her worries for the next generation: “The prom night is a dangerous night. A lot of little girls get raped.”81 Even as an artist with relatively liberal ideas, Phong was concerned about girls during prom night—an American tradition maintained by high schools. Like other concerned parents in American society, Phong understood that the school dances could include underage drinking and sexual activity between teens while they were away from the watchful eyes of parents. Many others expressed similar concerns about American liberalism and the impact on Vietnamese culture and traditions.

Phong’s worries stemmed from the fact that she had an eleven-year-old daughter at the time of the interview and her personal trauma from witnessing brutalities against women

80 Unknown narrator quoted in “Family Pressure” by Min Zhou and Carl L. Bankston III, 142.

81 Phong was born in 1957 and after multiple attempts, escaped Vietnam as a young adult in 1981. Ann Phong interviewed by Trangdai Tranguyen, May 7, 2000, Cerritos, California, Oral History #2860, transcript, Vietnamese American Project, Center for Oral and Public History, California State University, Fullerton.

33 in refugee camps. She recalled Thai pirates that “captured women [ . . . ] raped them day and night. [ . . . ] After that, they sold those women to the prostitutions in Thailand!”82

Other testimonies reveal that refugees frequently witnessed similar tragedies. These were not isolated nor atypical events, but continuous problems that refugees faced. Even more traumatizing, Phong’s former students at the refugee camp reported that these tragedies happened to them as well. Phong recollected, “[T]hey’re only twelve years old, they’re only eleven years old. And they came to me and said, ‘Co giao, em bi ham.’ [Teacher, I was raped].”83 Phong’s experience in refugee camps was not uncommon. Women in these spaces of detention were typically outnumbered and suffered of sexual harassment, rape, and unwanted pregnancies. They were also blamed or considered partially at fault for being raped and/or pregnant and thus, endured the psychological impacts.84 These experiences likely shaped the ways in which second-generation girls were raised—under the strict protection and watchful eyes of their parents who witnessed many unfortunate tragedies against females. Although these traumas shaped the protective ways in which girls were raised, they were not topics typically discussed by families. In general, younger Vietnamese Americans noted that parents did not communicate their feelings, much less their horrifying experiences of escape. An interview with Suzie Xuyen Dong

Matsuda reveals the difficulty in recounting these incidents. Matsuda left Vietnam in

1983 by herself at the age of seventeen. She recalls:

So I come to the refugee camp and of course . . . as a younger woman without family is subject to, you know, sexual harassment, sexual abuse and things like

82 Ann Phong interviewed by Trangdai Tranguyen, Oral History #2860, Center for Oral and Public History.

83 Ibid.

84 Espiritu, Body Counts.

that. I uh . . . There’s several incidents but I am not going to share here . . . it really did take a toll on me.85

At the end of the interview, when asked if she had anything left to say, she mentioned again, “I didn’t tell you . . . in details about the traumatic experience that I went through. I am not in the mood to talk about it.”86 Although it seemed like Matsuda wanted to emphasize the pertinence of this issue to the female refugee experience, she was hesitant to recount details of her personal incidents. The difficulty with which she spoke about these events reflects the struggles of so many Vietnamese parents.

In line with traditional ideology, girls were simply less valuable than boys. While explaining one of her paintings in an interview, Ann Phong mentioned a common traditional idea: “if you have one son, he is worth more than ten women, ten girls.”87

While many Vietnamese American teens experienced violence within their families, the female experience with violence, as with their upbringing, differed from that of males. In their research, Zhou and Bankston found that corporal punishment was used against almost all of the girls, but only one of the boys interviewed. In some households, violence was an outcome of the clashing of cultures between generations. The “Americanized” teens did not accept abuse because they knew about child abuse laws in the United States, while parents resorted to corporal punishment for discipline as it was an acceptable form of control in Vietnam. Some children and teenagers were beat for earning anything less

85 Suzie Xuyen Dong Matsuda interviewed by Lena Nguyen, November 26, 2012, Santa Ana, California, VAOHP#0096, transcript, Vietnamese American Experience Course Fall 2012, Vietnamese American Oral History Project, University of California, Irvine.

86 Suzie Xuyen Dong Matsuda interviewed by Lena Nguyen, VAOHP#0096, Vietnamese American Oral History Project.

87 Ann Phong interviewed by Trangdai Tranguyen, Oral History #2860, Center for Oral and Public History

35 than an A in school. Others experienced domestic violence from their fathers or temporary caretakers. Mai Hoang experienced physical, verbal, and sexual abuse from her foster parents. At nine years old, she was sent unaccompanied to a Malaysian refugee camp by her parents. After arriving in the United States, she was placed with an abusive foster family. Initially, Hoang struggled in school and associated herself with the “wrong crowd.” After her placement in a different foster home, she improved her grades and separated her academic and social life. Even so, she maintained her relationship with the same crowd of friends--many of whom were in gangs or living on their own. She reasoned: “They treat me like a little sister. That way I can have protection when people try to mess with me . . . They’re my homies.”88 As a victim of abuse, Hoang did not possess any power in the household. Thus, through her gang, she acquired the ability to feel empowered and protected. Academic achievement did not indicate recovery from violence. Although Hoang improved her grades, her self-esteem and self-perception had already been negatively impacted by the abuse she suffered at the hands of her foster parents.

It is unclear to what extent Vietnamese youth gangs in the 1980s and 1990s were actually growing in numbers or merely perceived as an intensifying problem. On one hand, law enforcement officials reported that gangs and gang membership in Los Angeles

County doubled to 800 gangs and 90,000 members from 1985 to 1991.89 In contrast, activist and scholar Daniel Tsang argued that negative perceptions of Vietnamese youth

88 Mai Hoang, interviewed by Soya Jung in “Vietnamese Youth Facing Life, Tough Times Head On,” International Examiner 20, no. 9 (1993): 3, http://search.proquest.com/docview/368012272?accountid=9840.

89 Louis Sahagun, “Sheriff’s Officials, Community Leaders Shift Gang Strategy,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 16, 1991, http://articles.latimes.com/1991-01-16/local/me-106_1_enforcement-officials.

36 generated a “moral panic,” which prompted the police to “conduct ‘gang sweeps’ that garner much publicity but no suspects.” 90 Furthermore, the perceived rise in gang activity was attributed to subjective media reporting during periods lacking in sensational news material.91 The 1991 hostage situation in Sacramento may have also played a role in bringing Vietnamese gangs to the forefront of the nation’s attention. 92 The nation watched the televised and live events unfold as four purported members of the Oriental

Boys gang held forty-one workers and customers hostage at a “Good Guys” electronic store. The resulting death of three hostages and three of the perpetrators reinforced growing fears of Vietnamese youth gangs.93 For those who lived in cities with large

Vietnamese populations, this event served as evidence of the imminent danger of

Vietnamese gangs.

In many cases, youth of Vietnamese descent were mistakenly labeled as gang members while socializing in public spaces. The biased judgements on the part of law enforcement led to the increase of gang membership on many occasions. Many did not consider themselves gang members when they hung out with their friends. On one occasion, the police approached Huc and his friends, started taking pictures of them, and inquired about gang affiliation. Huc explained:

90 Daniel Tsang, “Moral Panic Over Asian Gangs,” The Rice Paper 4, no.1 (1992): 18-21, UC Irvine Southeast Asian Archive vertical file collection, accessed through the Online Archive of California. http://oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/hb4r29n9gf/?order=2&brand=oac4.

91 Campbell, The Girls in the Gang, 6.

92 “McGinness Remembers Good Guys Hostages,” YouTube video of a KCRA News Report, 1:45, posted on April 4, 2011 by KCRA News, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m21bsDrCKx4.

93 Jane Gross, “6 Are Killed as 8-Hour Siege By Gang Ends in California” New York Times, Apr. 6, 1991, http://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/06/us/6-are-killed-as-8-hour-siege-by-gang-ends-in- california.html.

We’re not doing anything. We just wanted to kick back . . . We don’t gangbang, we don’t have a name . . . But [the police] want us to have a name. Well, we just said, ‘Alpine, Alpine Kids.’ Yeah, that sounds good.94

Perceived danger of youth gangs contradicts the members’ perception of their own groups. Huc explained that members were part of “a happy family . . . We don’t consider ourselves a street gang. That is really disrespectful.”95 To Huc, street gangs meant involvement in serious crimes, whereas he and his group were merely socializing.

In the same manner, Ricky Phan found the comfort of family in his gang. He explains,

“We eat together, play game together, comfort each other. We family from the heart. Not blood you know, just . . . just heart.”96 Another interviewed youth stated: “White people say we are a gang, but we are not a gang—we family.”97 In that regard, labeling non-gang members as gangsters directly worked against law enforcement goals of curbing gang membership. At the time, criminology scholars and law enforcement officers like Wilbur

Rykert, warned against wrongly labeling the youth: “ . . . all you’re doing is forcing them into a gang, because the gangs are treating them better than the police.”98 In fact, many young individuals, whether or not they were involved with gangs, recalled being mistreated by police based on their appearance, resulting in their negative perceptions of law enforcement.

94 Huc, interviewed by Vigil in A Rainbow of Gangs, 125.

95 Huc, interviewed by Vigil in A Rainbow of Gangs, 125.

96 Ricky Phan, testimony in Bui Doi: Life Like Dust.

97 Unknown, interviewed by Vigil in A Rainbow of Gangs, 114.

98 De Tran and Iris Yokoi, “Asians Say Police Photos Are Harassment: Dispute,” Los Angeles Times, November 15, 1992. http://articles.latimes.com/1992-11-15/news/mn-1093_1_fountain-valley- police-department.

Oftentimes, young persons were led toward youth gangs simply because their friends became involved in gang activities. Linh, an American-born second-generation female, began her involvement with gangs through her dance crew friends. As her friends began entering the gang life, she “went along with the ride” to maintain her friendship ties.99 She and other females began as girlfriends of the gang members, but eventually created their own clique within that gang. For Vietnamese girls, this path to becoming a gangster was similar to that of other young women who joined gangs. Feelings of belonging and the desire for social ties were more important than the activities in which the girls partook.

Categorizing young women as “good” or “bad” daughters relied on gendered expectations. Parents envisioned girls as filial, quiet, and obedient daughters, while boys were allowed to rebel because they would have opportunities later in life to correct any problems in their youth. Tiffany Le’s later years of high school included ditching school, partying, sneaking out of the house by climbing out of the window, and being disrespectful towards her mother, who was a single parent. She reflects: “I didn’t even think I was delinquent. I didn’t think I was that bad, but I was pretty bad . . . I almost dropped out of high school.”100 At a critical point in her life, Le believed her mother had given up on her and would kick her out of the house, prompting her to join the United

States Marine Corps. More likely than not, her mother and other community members assumed Le was associated with gangs because she did not fit their standards of a filial

Vietnamese daughter. If her brother had engaged in these activities, her mother, like other

99 Lam, Youth Gangs, Racism, and Schooling, 105-106. 100Tiffany Le interviewed by Roger Le, VAHF#0006, transcript, Vietnamese American Oral History Project.

Vietnamese parents, might have excused these behaviors. Even after Le returned from military boot camp, her relatives criticized her decision to join the Marines. They assumed, like in Vietnam, that girls in the military drank alcohol and cursed excessively.

These double standards for girls existed in all realms of life.

Rebelling against the expectations of being a “model minority,” some Asian

American youth created a unique culture revolving around cars imported from foreign countries. Asian Americans of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Filipino descent created and dominated the import car culture. In the late 1980s and 1990s, this subculture flourished in Southern California and further caused issues with law enforcement. The lifestyle included influences of other ethnic minorities, such as listening to rap music and wearing clothing trends of hip-hop. Young Asian American women were interested in racing as well, and founded the Go Gyrl Racing group to cultivate their endeavors in racing their own cars. Teenagers and young adults from middle and upper-class backgrounds purchased cars from foreign companies like Honda,

Nissan, and Toyota. They modified their vehicles for aesthetic purposes or to improve racing performance. While parents of the youth may have purchased the cars for them, modifications were costly and many took on part-time jobs throughout high school and college to finance this hobby. Oftentimes, the styles of import car culture resembled those of Asian youth gangs, like shaved heads, baggy pants, and flashy jewelry, which prompted law enforcement to target them more frequently. Additionally, a few instances of “gang-banging, fist fights, civil disturbance, illegal races and even deaths . . . have led some local law enforcement officials to regard import car racers as dangerous trouble-

40 makers.”101 Kevin D. Lam attested to the issue of racial profiling and assumptions of gang affiliation in his book, Youth Gangs, Racism, and Schooling: Vietnamese American

Youth in a Postcolonial Context (2015):

As an Asian American youth in Southern California in the 1990s, I (the author) was pulled over by the police a handful of times because I drove a Honda Civic with dark tinted windows (both front and back), wore baggy clothes (what young people wore), and had a crew cut. [ . . . ] More oftentimes than not, when I asked why I was pulled over, the standard response from the officer was that they were looking for a suspect driving my car make and model—virtually half the city. I was not a gang member but certainly racialized in a manner and context that evoked fear and perceived threat.102

Lam emphasized prevalent fads among young members of society to make the point that he was targeted by police based on his race and characteristics of import car culture. In an era of heightened policing and targeting of youth gangs, many 1.5 and second-generation

Vietnamese Americans like Lam were subjected to racial profiling. Although law enforcement officers were quick to assume that the Vietnamese were connected to gangs, in reality, the majority of teenagers and young adults were creating and associating with a unique culture which allowed them to feel empowered in contrast to stereotypical images of the emasculated Asian man and the oversexualized subservient Asian woman. Racing their cars and flaunting their wealth through “fixed up” cars allowed young men to gain status among their peers and feel manly. For Asian American women, racing their own cars enabled them to reject the stereotypical role of scantily-clad sex objects in car culture.

101 Jennifer Lee and Minh Zhou, eds., Asian American Youth: Culture, Identity, and Ethnicity (New York: Routledge, 2004), 172.

102 Lam, Youth Gangs, Racism, and Schooling, 81.

Some students straddled both the “model minority” and the new “Vietnamese gangster” stereotypes, complicating the polarized characterizations of this group. As

Chou and Feagin explained, “High educational expectations or performances . . . create such great anxiety that some Asian Americans have mental breakdowns, which may in turn lead to destructive actions against themselves, their families, or strangers.” 103 The dual lives of A-students by day and youth gang members by night exemplifies this idea.

A 1995 Los Angeles Times article quoted thirteen-year-old Phuoc Nguyen of Orange

County saying, “I have two lives . . . I want to do good in school, but I like to hang out and go places with [my gang friends].” These students not only maintained high grade point averages, but also earned their “teachers’ admiration,” according to the article.

Nguyen was not alone in sustaining two completely identities. The article reported that

“police, school officials and gang experts say they have begun to notice a contingent of students—almost all of them Asian—who maintain both gang ties and top grade-point averages.”104 Linh, who was drawn to gang life through her dance crew friends, also had similar desires to remain filial to her parents while fitting in with her peers. Explaining her double life, she stated, “I was really really hard-core into the gang . . . and beat up people . . . girls, guys, whatever the case is and assisted them in whatever they needed.

But I’ll be that student in the front seat of class.”105 These oscillating students attended top universities in California as well. A former biology student at UC Irvine, Dan Trung

Hoang, landed himself behind bars in 1995 after being convicted for “attempted murder,

103 Chou and Feagin, The Myth of the Model Minority, 111.

104 Diane Seo, “Top Students Lead Dual Lives in Asian Gangs,” Los Angeles Times, July 5, 1995. Vertical Files, Southeast Asian Archives at University of California, Irvine.

105 Linh, interviewed by Lam in Youth Gangs, Racism, and Schooling, 106.

42 assault with a deadly weapon and committing crimes for the benefit of a street gang.” At

20 years old, Hoang had planned to attend medical school and was an honor student at

Katella High School in Irvine.106 Some of the crimes committed reached the federal level.

In December of 1996, UC Irvine sophomore, Trung “Alex” Minh Dao, was arrested for operating a major weapons-trafficking ring. As a member of the National Honors Society and an honor student at Loara High School, the public found it difficult to imagine Dao’s participation in criminal activities at such a high and organized level.107

Through the lens of the youth with “double lives,” we clearly see a struggle between two cultures. Parents expected their children to be obedient, succeed academically, and contribute time, earnings, or loyalty to the family. John Pham describes strict traditional customs of mealtimes with his family: “[M]y dad . . . told us how we act, how we sit during the meals. Once we have meals, we cannot talk. That’s how he’s been taught before.”108 On the contrary, teenagers were praised for individualism and independent thinking at their schools. Thus, they hoped to assimilate into American culture by adopting western ideals and especially youth trends in fashion, music, and activities.

Gang members (and former gang members) claimed that they joined because “it was the way to make friends.” Friendships in high school not only provided social

106 Seo, “Top Students Lead Dual Lives in Asian Gangs.”

107 Ivan Sciupac, “UCI Student Accused of Running a Weapons-trafficking Ring Surrenders,” New University News University of California, Irvine, January 6, 1997, Vertical Files, Southeast Asian Archives at University of California, Irvine.

108 John Pham interviewed by Tiffany Huang, May 17, 2015, Montclair, California, VAOHP#0254, transcript, Vietnamese American Experience Course Spring 2015, Vietnamese American Oral History Project, University of California, Irvine

43 groups, but more importantly, protection from outside threats--verbal, physical, or racial.

Adolescents viewed social hierarchy among peers as a crucial aspect. Additionally, gangs provided support systems to those contending with weak family structures, lack of support, and intergenerational tensions. One former gang member explained: “I couldn’t turn to my own family for help, and the gang seemed like they would be there for me.”109

Lack of communication in these households made it difficult for young Vietnamese

Americans to express themselves and deal with their issues, forcing them to turn to their

‘other family,’ the gang.

Although most Vietnamese youth did not consider themselves to be part of gangs, this reality did not stop law enforcement from targeting them, (and treating them), as gang members. Whether real or perceived, the growing Vietnamese gang problem in the

1980s and 1990s was fueled by racialized stereotypes and expectations, further bifurcating narratives of the “model minority A-student” and the “delinquent youth gang member.” For officers patrolling the community, young persons were considered either one or the other. If they were not at home studying, they were suspected gang members.

Additionally, officials assumed that these youth gangs served as a direct path to organized crime. John Mckenna of the San Francisco Police Department best expressed this idea when he wrote: “Their ages should never be considered in the investigation.

Agencies should always be aware that today’s juvenile gang member is tomorrow’s adult gang leader.”110 A 1986 research report for the Garden Grove Police Department revealed

109 Seo, “Top Students Lead Dual Lives in Asian Gangs.”

110 F.B.I Report, “Oriental Organized Crime,” Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington, D.C., January, 1985, Chapter IV. From Attachment E in “A Research Project to Determine the Law Enforcement Needs of the Southeast Asian Refugees in the Year 1995: To Develop Strategies to Meet Those Needs” by Stanley L. Knee, (Garden Grove Police Department), 52.

44 that most officers anticipated an increase in gang size and power within the next decade.111 Additionally, 76 percent of officers believed that “Southeast Asian youth gangs operating today will mature into a Mafia-like organization.”112 The report included suggested strategies to be implemented in anticipation of the proliferation of Southeast

Asian gangs. Local police officers were to “monitor activity at coffee houses and billiard businesses” and be trained “to look for the re-emergence of organized gangs identifiable by name, dress, or tattoos.”113 In the subsequent decade, these plans resulted in heightened tensions between law enforcement and young people, militarization of the streets, and violation of civil rights.

Approaches taken by law enforcement officials and implementation of new policies led to the violation of Vietnamese youths’ civil rights. Due to the mobility and geographic spread of Vietnamese gangs, the Garden Grove Police Department research emphasized a need for centralization of information on Southeast Asian criminals, as well as a network of local, state, and federal systems in order to exchange information. In response, law enforcement in Los Angeles County developed a database to track suspected and known gang members. Also known as Cal-Gang, the Gang Reporting,

Evaluation, and Tracking System (GREAT) collected personal information for analysis.

Local jurisdiction allowed law enforcement to acquire data in any ways they felt necessary. For Garden Grove, Knee called for “lawfully gathered intelligence on criminal

111 Knee, “A Research Project to Determine the Law Enforcement Needs,” 109.

112 Knee, “A Research Project to Determine the Law Enforcement Needs,” 111.

113 Knee, “A Research Project to Determine the Law Enforcement Needs,” 112.

45 gangs.”114 However, multiple testimonies reveal violations of civil rights, particularly in the quest to acquire photographs for this database. Vietnamese youth were detained and had their pictures taken involuntarily. “Back then when we were 14, 15 [years old], they took all kinds of pictures of us . . . pictures of our tattoos . . . Pretty much, they would manipulate our rights without us knowing.”115 This was particularly damaging for people who were not involved with any gangs at all. In one case, Ted Nguyen, unable to pay

$500,000 in bail, served three months in jail after his photo was selected by a victim of a home robbery. The jury acquitted him at the trial after the accuser admitted she was unsure whether he was the right person. The San Jose Police had previously taken

Nguyen’s photograph at his friend’s house, despite the fact that he had no criminal record.116 Under police chief Stanley Knee, the Garden Grove Police Department disproportionately stopped and questioned Asians. Of 719 individuals in the database, 72 percent were Asians. However, Asians only made up 23 percent of the population, while whites made up 69 percent of the population.117 Garden Grove was not the only city where this occurred. In 1985, ten Vietnamese youth in San Diego were locked inside a café and photographed. Thirteen-year-old Phuoc Hang told reporters: “We ask them why they are taking our pictures and they tell us to shut up or they’ll arrest us.”118 In their

114 Knee, “A Research Project to Determine the Law Enforcement Needs,” 125.

115 Melo, interviewed by Lam in Youth Gangs, Racism, and Schooling, 130.

116 Tran and Yokoi, “Asians Say Police Photos Are Harassment.”

117 Elisa Lee, “Local Police in Southern California Sued for Asian American Youth Mugbook” Asian Week, San Francisco, CA. July 1, 1994. Proquest. http://search.proquest.com/docview/367539913?accountid=9840.

118 H. G. Reza, “San Diego Police Photo File Upsets Asian Community,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 1, 1985, Proquest http://search.proquest.com/docview/154474457?accountid=9840.

46 quest to find and keep records of all gang members in the community, police disregarded the civil rights of many young people and wrongfully accused them of gang affiliation.

The Vietnamese American community, as well as the broader Asian American community, fought back against these injustices with their voices and in the courts. The

San Diego community was among the first to speak out against the practice of photographing youth after the ten adolescents were photographed without probable cause in 1985. 119 In 1993, 14-year-olds Minh Tran and Annie Lee, and 15-year-old Quyen

Pham (with help from the American Civil Liberties Union and Alliance Working for

Asian Rights and Empowerment) filed a lawsuit against the Garden Grove Police

Department for racially stereotyping them and categorizing them as suspected gang members. Based on their clothing and for “loitering in a ‘gang-infested’ area,” police officers interrogated, searched, and photographed the girls without consent.120 ACLU attorney Robin Toma asserted that Garden Grove’s police department relied on “racial stereotypes” as a “part of the hysteria of Asian gangs.” She adds, “[t]he reality is that police are in the process of creating a huge file of Asian youth.”121 The three girls won a settlement due to the violation of their civil rights. In Fountain Valley, protesters argued against the police department’s practice of maintaining a “mug book” on Asian

Americans who had never been arrested nor convicted of gang activity. The misidentification and wrongful arrest of Ted Nguyen prompted an end to San Jose Police

119 Reza, “San Diego Police Photo File Upsets Asian Community.”.

120 Lee, “Local Police in Southern California Sued for Asian American Youth Mugbook.”

121 Lee, “Local Police in Southern California Sued for Asian American Youth Mugbook.”

Department’s use of their photograph database.122 Despite the settlement of lawsuits and procedural changes that required consent, the practice continued to raise concerns through the 1990s.123

Although the media focused on the dichotomies of the “model minority” and

Vietnamese delinquent, this chapter revealed a more complex narrative. Young men and women rejected the stereotypes imposed upon them by opting to study fields outside of their parents’ wishes, participating in deviant activities with their peers, and committing crimes as gang members. By justifying the youths’ membership in gangs, we find that many were not actually gang members, a few had dual identities as dedicated students and gang members, and most were simply young Vietnamese Americans who created their own identity and culture.

122 Daniel C. Tsang, “Is Innocent Until Proven Guilty a Lost Principle? Taking Photos of Teens and Linking Them to Gangs Because of What They’re Wearing Reveals Lack of Sensitivity by Police,” UC Irvine webfiles. https://webfiles.uci.edu/dtsang/public/lostprin.htm. The article first appeared in the Los Angeles Times on August 30, 1993.

123 Davan Maharaj and Rene Lynch, “Orange’s ‘Gang Book’ Flunks a Legal Test,” Los Angeles Times, December 3, 1993, http://articles.latimes.com/1993-12-03/local/me-63540_1_suspected-gang- members. Lorenza Munoz, “Gang Database Raises Civil Rights Concerns,” Los Angeles Times, July 14, 1997, http://articles.latimes.com/1997/jul/14/local/me-12650.

CHAPTER 3

COLLECTIVISM AND POLITICAL ACTIVISM IN SOCIAL GROUPS

Since the 1980s, Vietnamese Americans changed the discourse on Vietnamese in the United States by creating a new and separate youth culture and through political activism. Deviation from the “model minority” stereotype and formation of Vietnamese youth culture forced the American public to reassess their understanding of the

Vietnamese as “good refugees.” At the same time, social groups that were deemed acceptable by legal standards provided channels for Vietnamese youth to assert their own voices to the narrative. To begin addressing the collective and political activities of 1.5 and second-generation Vietnamese Americans, one must begin by tracing social groups of the previous generation.

With the admission and resettlement of over 200,000 Vietnamese immigrants into the United States before 1980124 and secondary migrations after initial placement, new refugees in Americas clustered in ethnic enclaves. These “Little Saigons,” named after the former capital of Vietnam, emerged in cities across the United States, including

Houston, Texas, and Orlando, Florida. In California alone, “Little Saigons” were instituted in cities like Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego, and most notably, the Orange County city of Westminster.125 These ethnic enclaves allowed the

124 Bureau of the Census, “1990 Census of Population: The Foreign-Born Population in the United States.”

125 In 1988, Governor George Deukmejian designated the “Little Saigon” area of Westminster and Garden Grove in Orange County by unveiling a new freeway sign Richard Paddock, “Governor Courts

Vietnamese to maintain close ties, network with other Vietnamese Americans, and attend social events. Utilizing their previously established relationships (prior to their escape or during their time at refugee camps), first-generation immigrants sought to quickly restructure their lives in the United States by opening businesses, starting organizations, and creating media outlets.

Social organizations of the 1.5 and second-generation youth reflect the activities of their immigrant parents. Their predecessors likely influenced the successive generations--many of whom recalled their parents’ political and social activities and often attended these events with their parents. In many cases, members of the younger generations continued the legacies and community participation of their parents; sometimes branching into different political and cultural ideologies.

Although many immigrant parents wanted their children to be doctors and engineers, oftentimes the next generation followed their parents’ footsteps into business and community leadership. For example, despite having already earned an M.D., Tam

Thanh Nguyen, a second-generation Vietnamese American who left Vietnam as a one- and-a-half-year-old baby in 1975, pursued a master’s degree in business administration to run the Advanced Beauty College, a company his parents built.126 The first-generation established tight knit communities to maintain cultural ties to Vietnam in America.

Despite assumptions that second-generation youth rejected ethnic ties and desired to completely assimilate into American culture, many remained closely tied to their

‘Little Saigon’ Votes,” Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1988, http://articles.latimes.com/1988-06- 18/local/me-4522_1_saigon-governor-courts

126 Tam Thanh Nguyen interviewed by Sadegh Iranmanesh, VAOHP#0066, Vietnamese American Oral History Project.

50 heritage, while others came back to it at a later age—typically after they graduated high school and entered college. People of the first-generation like Yen Dang established a sense of community. Dang, who opened the Tu Quynh Bookstore in Little Saigon in

1979, created a space for new immigrants to find Vietnamese literature and music. She also helped support the Vietnamese by sending books to refugee camps. Others engaged in protests against the repatriation of Vietnamese refugees and in 1999, against symbolism favoring Communism in their community.127 Vietnamese living in America raised money for unmarked graves at refugee camps and the erection of memorials in the community as well as around the world.128 Whereas the communal activities of the first- generation of immigrants served as support groups, sites of remembrance, and methods of healing, the 1.5 and second-generation participated in social groups for a variety of different reasons, including identity formation, discovery of cultural ties, and preservation of historic roots.

Social groups of the youth were much more diverse than that of their parents.

Some children were raised by parents who wanted to maintain Vietnamese culture, language, and traditions at all costs. Others wanted their children to assimilate into

American culture and thus, adopted western traditions and the English language at home.

127 The 1999 Hi-Tek protests began in opposition to the display of two images in a video store: a photo of Ho Chi Minh and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam flag. Anti-communist community members were upset that the owner would publicly display imagery celebrating communism and engaged in a demonstration lasting more than seven weeks. Requiring police force intervention, an estimated 15,000 people participated in sit-ins, peaceful vigils, symbolic reenactments of imprisonment, and the attachment of South Vietnamese flags to cover the entirety of the storefront. Thuy Vo Dang, Linda Trinh Vo, and Tram Le, Images of America: Vietnamese in Orange County (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2015). (UC Irvine Southeast Asian Archives, MS-SEA010, Ly Kien Truc Files)

128 Thuy Vo Dang, Linda Trinh Vo, and Tram Le, Images of America: Vietnamese in Orange County (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2015).

Some youth spent their childhood years in communities with very few other Vietnamese and grew up more assimilated to “white American” culture than those raised in communities with large Vietnamese populations. For those who worked towards “white

American” acculturation in order to fit in with their peers, Asian American courses at universities as well as access to a larger Vietnamese American community allowed the youth to rediscover their roots with their peers. From their parents, later generations adopted the concept and significance of ties to other members of their community. Since their resettlement, the first-generation continued their efforts to host frequent reunions for a multitude of groups in order to reconnect former classmates in Vietnam and other

Vietnamese immigrants with shared experiences. Tu-Uyen Nguyen, a member of the 1.5 generation recalled: “ . . . it was always really fascinating to me how my parents, coming here as refugees [ . . . ] would reconnect with friends who they knew from elementary school in Vietnam . . . That sense of community and being able to stay connected. It was really, always really interesting to me, and very powerful.” 129 As a young college student, Nguyen, like many other Vietnamese Americans, engaged in a variety of social groups to maintain ties to their ethnicity. These social groups included the Vietnamese

Student Association (VSA) and United Vietnamese Student Association (UVSA)—an umbrella group across different college campuses. VSAs existed across the nation, from

California state schools to seminaries, like the Divine Word College in Iowa.130 The youth also formed specialized support groups like the Gay Vietnamese Alliance (GVA),

129 Tu-Uyen Nguyen interviewed by Kassandra Tong, VAOHP#0066Vietnamese American Oral History Project.

130 Long Hoang interviewed by Vincent Ngo, May 24, 2015, Irvine, California, VAOHP#0255, transcript, Vietnamese American Experience Course Spring 2015, Vietnamese American Oral History Project, University of California, Irvine.

Vietnamese American Pharmacy Student Association, Vietnamese American Armed

Forces Association,131 and Vietnamese Language and Culture (VNLC), established in

1994 at University of California, Los Angeles, to promote the Vietnamese language and culture by teaching classes and mentoring younger generations. Students also continued the legacy of their parents in groups established by the first-generation, like Vietnamese

American Arts and Letters Association (VAALA). College students also established politically motivated groups like the Vietnamese American Coalition (VAC) and Project

Ngoc.

Vietnamese Student Associations provided opportunities for diverse Vietnamese

Americans to connect with their heritage and allowed a safe space for those who were in search of their ethnic identity. For some students like Mai-Phuong T. Nguyen, who grew up assimilated into “white American” culture, the experience helped her get in touch with

Vietnamese culture, even though she could not speak the language. She described her experience in an oral history interview: “I was so enamored because when we get together, the guitarist is playing music and I wanted to fit in right? So I get into the choir barely reading Vietnamese and I sing songs that I do not understand and most VSAs put on an annual, big fat concert for the Tet or the Lunar New Year and it was fun.”132 This

131 The Vietnamese American Armed Forces Association began as a networking organization, but later sponsored toy drives and scholarships. The association awards thirteen Vietnamese American students with thirteen thousand dollars to honor the thirteen Vietnamese American soldiers who have died in the line of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Christopher Phan interviewed by Andrew Lu, May 14, 2012, Garden Grove, California, VAOHP#0039, transcript, Linda Vo Class Oral Histories, 2012, Vietnamese American Oral History Project, University of California, Irvine.

132 Mai-Phuong T. Nguyen interviewed by Lotusa Chan, March 2, 2012, Irvine, California, VAOHP#0020, transcript, Vietnamese American Experience Winter 2012, Vietnamese American Oral History Project, University of California, Irvine.

53 led her to becoming secretary of the VSA at Orange Coast College and her later involvement in the VSA at UC Irvine where she finished her premedical studies.

Many students of UC Irvine also worked with Project Ngoc, a student-established and student-led advocacy group for Vietnamese refugees in camps throughout Southeast

Asia. Between 1987-1997, in addition to raising awareness through letter-writing campaigns and vigils, the students organized and funded summer trips to refugee camps in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, and Philippines to record camp conditions, teach English, and work with children.133 Project Ngoc also sent student representatives to two International Convention on Refugee Rights (one in Geneva,

Switzerland and the other in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), and arranged internships to

Washington DC to lobby for refugee rights. Their efforts were so crucial at the time, a

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) spokeswoman said that she was “anxious to read a copy” of the project’s 35-page report on refugees in Hong Kong and the impact of United States’ immigration policies.134 The majority of students in

Project Ngoc were 1.5 generation Vietnamese Americans. The first student chairman,

Van Tran, was ten years old when he and his family left Vietnam in 1975. In an opening event for an exhibit commemorating the work of Project Ngoc in 2012, Tran testified that the impact of Project Ngoc students at UC Irvine was far reaching because they only

133 According to the Project Ngoc records, these camps included: Morong Refugee Center and Palawan Refugee Camp, Philippines; Camp Panat Nikhom and Burmese Camp, Thailand; Chi Ma Wan Detention Center, Camp Collinson, and Whitehead Detention Center, Hong Kong. (UC Irvine Southeast Asian Archives, MS-SEA016, Project Ngoc Records)

134 David Reyes, “Viet Refugees: People World Forgot: UCI Students Making Efforts to Help Them,” Los Angeles Times, July 20, 1988, http://articles.latimes.com/1988-07-20/local/me-5843_1_hong- kong-refugee-official.

54 knew two things: “idealism and altruism.”135 Although not all students could directly relate to the plight of refugees who left by boat, many felt connected to the refugee issues as a member of the larger diaspora from Vietnam. Through this organization, students found their voice for activism and later used those voices to advocate for other social issues. For example, Mai-Phuong T. Nguyen, the third co-chair of the organization stated that “Project Ngoc was a defining moment in my life . . . as a Vietnamese American who grew up in white America in Virginia.”136 Through this group, she came to learn about her roots, the diversity of Vietnamese people in the United States, and the ties of all refugees from Vietnam to the cause of refugees who escaped at sea. She also mentioned that Project Ngoc helped her deal with her “survivor’s guilt” as a refugee lucky enough to leave with the 1975 wave. Like many others who were a part of this group, she continued to advocate for community issues, such as ethnic minority health rights. As a physician in

Orange County, Nguyen led the Ethnic Medical Organization Section of the California

Medical Association. Utilizing her ties to former Project Ngoc members, she sought the legislative help of Van Tran when he was elected to represent the 68th district in the

California State Assembly in 2004. Both Nguyen and Tran continued to advocate for medical and political rights of Vietnamese Americans in Orange County throughout the

2000s.

The younger generation used these organizations to engage in community activism and assert their rights to preserve Vietnamese culture. Events such as the “Little

135 “Hope of Freedom: Project Ngoc’s Decade of Dedication” Presentation for library exhibit opening, University of California, Irvine, April 24, 2012. https://www.lib.uci.edu/sites/all/video/SpringExhibit2012.mp4.

136 “Hope of Freedom: Project Ngoc’s Decade of Dedication” Presentation.

Saigon Clean-up” on November 16, 1996 and the annual Tet Parade called upon college and high school students alike. According to the bilingual newsletter published by the

Vietnamese American Culture Club of Westminster High School, the clean-up was organized by students of UC Irvine’s VSA and included members of VSAs at eight other high schools: Bolsa Grande, Fountain Valley, La Quinta, Loara, Los Amigos, Rancho

Alamitos, Santiago, and Tustin.137 Since 1982, the umbrella group, Union of Vietnamese

Students Association (UVSA) had organized an annual Tet Festival celebrating the

Vietnamese Lunar New Year in Westminster. The youth in student associations asserted their right to carry on Tet traditions, despite contentions between other organizations that wanted to coordinate it.138 By gaining authority above all others to organize the holiday, students staked their claim on continuing cultural practices and made clear that they favored traditional values despite assumptions by first-generation Vietnamese parents who thought their children would reject all traditions and become “too Americanized.”

Vietnamese Student Associations were prevalent in high schools across southern

California, such as Edison High School in Orange County and Alhambra High School in

San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles County. In addition to collaborating with VSAs at community colleges and universities, high school VSAs served a multitude of purposes for Vietnamese youth. Since the arrival of Alhambra High School’s first seven

Vietnamese students in 1976, the Vietnamese immigrant population continued to grow in the region, resulting in the establishment of a VSA in 1983. According to their student-

137 Westminster High School Vietnamese American Culture Club Newsletter, February 1997 vol.2 issue 1. (UC Irvine Southeast Asian Archives, MS-SEA020, Vertical Files).

138 Thien Si Pham interviewed by Jennnifer Duong, May 4, 2014, Santa Ana, California, VAOHP#0186, transcript, Vietnamese American Experience Spring 2012, Vietnamese American Oral History Project, University of California, Irvine.

56 published newspaper, The Moor, the purpose of the club was to grant scholarships and

“serve as a voice for Vietnamese students at AHS.”139 Similarly, a monthly newsletter from the Vietnamese Club at Westminster High School in 1992 revealed the club’s wide- reaching purposes. The newsletter listed upcoming events, showing the club as a crucial channel for students to become community members and social activists. For the month of September, the organization planned to hold a membership drive to increase the size of the group from its current fifty-six members. In the month of January, students held a drive to collect used materials for the anticipated influx of new immigrants, connecting charity work to their roots. They also planned to perform in February at the UVSA organized Tet Festival in Little Saigon and in May, for International Week, functions which aided in sustaining cultural pride140 In the following five years, the group appropriately changed its name to the Vietnamese American Culture Club. The newsletter called for submissions of poems and stories to keep the publication in existence. Student submissions included: traditional recipes like bitter melon soup, reflections on how to deal with parental issues, and “do’s and dont’s” during traditional celebrations.141 Published in Vietnamese and English on the same pages, the newsletter reached Vietnamese Americans who did not speak Vietnamese, new immigrants who struggled with the English language, and perhaps those who wanted to learn the

139“Seven Viet Nam Refugees Tell Trials of Traveling to Alhambra,” The Moor, January 6, 1976. (Alhambra High School newspaper archives). Armando Molina, “Club Grants Scholarship to Academic Vietnamese,” The Moor, March 28, 1984. (Alhambra High School newspaper archives).

140 Westminster High School Vietnamese Club Newsletter. (UC Irvine Southeast Asian Archives, MS- SEA020, Vertical Files).

141 Westminster High School Vietnamese American Culture Club Newsletter. (UC Irvine Southeast Asian Archives, MS-SEA020, Vertical Files).

Vietnamese language. It is evident that the Vietnamese Cultural Club sought to connect a diverse range of Americans with Vietnamese heritage--from students who grew up more assimilated to “white American culture” to ones who maintained strong traditional ties to their Vietnamese heritage.

For many second-generation Vietnamese Americans, schools provided a means to connect to their history and culture if their immigrant parents at home would not, (or could not), discuss the past, or wanted their children to assimilate into the mainstream culture. Through participation in VSAs, formation of political groups, and even taking courses on Asian American history, the youth found their voices and passions. Whether they were performing dances, plays, or comedy sketches, or engaging in the collection of

Vietnamese oral histories, the 1.5 and second-generations reinforced their parents’ heritage and preserved the history of their people.

Albeit carrying traditions forward into the future, youth involvement in the community gradually altered traditions as well as the discourse on Vietnamese

Americans. For instance, in 2013, the Viet Rainbow of Orange County formed in response to the barring of LGBT organizers from the Tet Parade in Westminster.142 On

February 10, activists and allies attended the event holding signs of love, respect, and unity, revealing a clash of old traditions and new ideas. Despite the existence of a Gay

Vietnamese Alliance (GVA) since 1994 and the O-moi organization for lesbian, bisexual, and transgender females, many first, 1.5, and second-generation alike clung to traditional values in regard to gender roles.143 As the next generation continued to age, traditions

142 Vo Dang, Vo, and Le, Images of America, 111.

143 Vo Dang, Vo, and Le, Images of America, 102.

58 were compelled to shift and alter to fit the views of the growing population of second and third generation Vietnamese Americans.

Young Vietnamese students also expressed their voices through performing arts.

In addition to frequent cultural performances with VSAs, 1.5 and second-generation

Vietnamese Americans performed with Club O’ Noodles, which began as a comedy troupe, but later addressed more serious topics in performances like “Laughter from the

Children of War.”144 In 1993, Hung Nguyen, Tram Le, and Thanh Nguyen co-founded the troupe by recruiting students from Cal State Northridge and other schools such as UC

Irvine and Golden West College. Members of the performance troupe were involved in other social and political groups, an indication that Club O’ Noodles represented more than simple entertainment.145 As the first Vietnamese American troupe, Club O’ Noodles tackled issues such as racial stereotypes, generational tensions, gender roles, cultural clashes, sex, and other topics considered “taboo” in Vietnamese culture. In an interview for the Los Angeles Times, Tram Le affirmed: “We want to be the voice of the young generation of Vietnamese Americans. It’s a bit of a rebellion on our part, because we didn’t all want to be doctors and lawyers.” 146 Using comedy and satire, the 1996 performance of “Laughter from the Children of War” addressed challenges of a

Vietnamese immigrant family in America. Drawing from their own personal experiences,

144 Club O’ Noodles performance “Laughter from the Children of War” Costa Mesa, California (UC Irvine Southeast Asian Archives, MS-SEA020, Vertical Files) Ephemera: program.

145 Contributing writer and member, Tu-Uyen Nguyen also participated in VSA, VAC (Vietnamese American Coalition), and Project Ngoc at UC Irvine. Tu-Uyen Nguyen interviewed by Kassandra Tong, VAOHP#0066Vietnamese American Oral History Project.

146 Vivian Letran, “Little Saigon’s TV With Teeth: Club O’ Noodles Hopes the Community Is Mature Enough for Biting Satire,” Los Angeles Times, December 29, 2000, http://articles.latimes.com/2000/dec/29/local/me-6019.

59 writer Hung Nguyen and other troupe members collectively discovered through processes of writing and acting, that their stories were not unique, but a part of a larger collective narrative. Their performances helped them, as well as audience members, form ethnic identities that balanced their American and Vietnamese cultures, and come to terms with conflicted views of their history as “American murderers” and beneficiaries of American benevolence. Their performances uncovered the oftentimes disregarded narrative of young Vietnamese Americans and forged new conversations on sensitive topics. For example, the troupe reemerged after the 1999 Hi-Tek protests in Little Saigon to interject their commentary on the socio-political issue.

Like performances and political activism, filmmaking served as a means for expression of passion, ethnic and cultural discovery, preservation of history, and construction of a new narrative. The Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Association

(VAALA) and VietNamese Language and Culture (VNLC) were key organizations that allowed the Vietnamese in America to assert their ideas through film. Established in 1991 and 1994, respectively, VAALA and VNLC helped the younger generation write their own narratives and change the discourse on the Vietnam War, Vietnamese refugees, and

Vietnamese Americans. Founded by community activists, artists, and journalists,

VAALA “brings the arts into the community for the much needed creative exchange and dialogue.” 147Additionally, VAALA fostered the learning of historical and contemporary issues related to the Vietnamese diaspora. Through the organization, Vietnamese artists

147 Booklet published by the VietNamese Language & Culture (VNLC) in collaboration with Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Association (VAALA), Cinema Symposium 2 “Passionate Dreams and Realistic Journeys,” November 7, 2004 at UCLA, 19. (Vertical Files, Southeast Asian Archives at University of California, Irvine).

60 were encouraged to communicate diverse perspectives to a broader audience. Similarly,

VNLC aimed to “preserve and promote Vietnamese culture . . . assist youths in the transition and acculturation into American society while promoting the preservation of

Vietnamese culture, language, and experiences in the Vietnamese community.”148 The organizations served as a testament to the growing community of 1.5 and second- generation Vietnamese Americans. Ysa Le, executive director of VAALA since 2008, began her involvement in 2000. She attributed her passion of organizing the arts to the influence of her father, who was also heavily involved in the organization.149 In 2003, Le also established the Vietnamese International Film Festival (VIFF) alongside Tram Le

(former member of Club O’ Noodles) and Huong Ninh. As an outgrowth of VAALA and

VNLC, the Vietnamese International Film Festival, (later known as Viet Film Fest), focused on featuring Vietnamese filmmakers and bringing the community together to support and share in the art of filmmaking.

148 Booklet published by the VietNamese Language & Culture (VNLC). 149 Ysa Le interviewed by Andy Le, November 10, 2012, Santa Ana, California, VAOHP#0102, transcript, Vietnamese American Experience Course, Fall 2012, Vietnamese American Oral History Project, University of California, Irvine.

CHAPTER 4

NEW VOICES IN FILM AND LITERATURE

Films produced by 1.5 and second-generation Vietnamese Americans and promoted through VAALA, VNLC, and VIFF generated new voices within the discourse on Vietnamese in the U.S. Many of the films were produced in the 1990s and early 2000s by university students or former students of filmmaking who were able to travel to

Vietnam after normalization of U.S.-Vietnam relations in 1991. These films reveal narratives that deviate from the dominating storyline of the heroic American who suffered at the hands of Vietnamese enemies, the Vietnamese as collateral damage of war, and the Vietnamese refugees as desperate souls awaiting rescue and reaping the benefits of American benevolence. Instead, screenwriters opted to tell stories about the

Vietnamese left behind, the reality of refugee camps, challenges in a not-so-ideal

America, and issues of culture and identity.

From the Rambo series to Oliver Stone’s trilogy on the Vietnam War, filmmakers portrayed Vietnamese through their own lens. Three Rambo films produced in the 1980s focused on the challenges and struggles of an American veteran of the Vietnam War, such as survivor’s guilt and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Two of Stone’s three films center on similar topics. Platoon (1986) tells the story of the American soldier in

Vietnam and their horrific experiences, while Born on the Fourth of July (1989) chronicles the struggles of returning soldiers. Although the main character of Heaven and

Earth (1993) is a Vietnamese woman, the premise of the film is that life in America surpasses a life in Vietnam. Featuring the story of a woman’s brutal life from Vietnam to acquiring success in San Diego, California, the underlying narrative requires her to be

“saved” by a U.S. soldier. These filtered perspectives of films did not change until

Vietnamese Americans began writing their own scripts.

Films such as Tiana Thi Thanh Nga’s documentary, From Hollywood to Hanoi

(1992), changed public perception of the aftermath of the Vietnam War.150 As opposed to focusing on trauma felt by U.S. veterans and their families, Nga brought to light the aftermath of the Vietnam War in the country where it was fought. In documenting the search for her roots, she found a political voice and “realized that we Americans have been sold a bill of goods that was nowhere near the reality . . . Americans think of

Vietnam as a war, not a country of seventy million people who are friendly towards the

West and who welcome American visitors.”151 Her film also addressed impacts of Agent

Orange on the Vietnamese communities and urged the global community to look at pervasive issues in Vietnam.

VNLC and VAALA were crucial in proliferating films in the Vietnamese community. In addition to organizing the Vietnamese International Film Festival (VIFF), members coordinated biennial events (beginning in 2002) called Cinema Symposium in order to bring film industry professionals together. Organizers sought to “celebrate

Vietnamese identity and culture . . . create a forum for filmmakers to share their

150 Born in 1956, Nga immigrated to the U.S. with her father in 1966. Although Nga was not part of the Vietnamese exodus, she is considered a 1.5 generation because she was ten years old at the time of migration.

151 Saul Anton, “A Search for Roots and Identity: An Interview with Tiana Thi Thanh Nga,” in Cineaste 20, no. 3 (1994): 46-47.

63 experiences . . . as well as [provide] an opportunity for younger Vietnamese Americans to learn more about filmmaking, challenges involved, and how to overcome those barriers . .

. [and] inspire future filmmakers to pursue their passion for filmmaking and tell their stories.”152 The symposiums featured 1.5 and second-generation Americans with

Vietnamese heritage like Timothy Linh Bui (producer of Green Dragon, 2001) and Ham

Tran, writer and producer of Journey from the Fall (2006), a film about re-education camps and boat people refugees. Other screenwriters addressed Vietnamese life in the

U.S., like Victor Vu, who produced Firecracker, a film about domestic abuse in a

Vietnamese American household and Exile, a family drama showcasing hardships of the

“boat people.” Le-Van Kiet, a boat refugee at the age of four in 1982, wrote Dust of Life.

The film chronicles the challenges of Johnny, who lost both parents during the boat people exodus, and his life in Orange County in the early 1990s. Similarly, Loc Do’s

Bastards highlights the Amerasian struggles in the U.S. by following the story of an

Amerasian searching for his father in America.

Ethnic stereotypes created an image of Vietnamese American youth as a monolithic “model minority,” too focused on academics to participate in leisure activities and enjoy broad social relationships. However, not only were they heavily involved in diverse social groups, they were also involved political movements, which in the case of

Project Ngoc, significantly impacted the lives of hundreds of thousands of refugees. The politically motivated organization reinvigorated the discourse on refugees as the

American public grew tired of their arrival. Additionally, establishment of organizations

152 Booklet published by the VietNamese Language & Culture (VNLC).

64 which promoted the arts resulted in the fostering of extensive literature and film production in the following decades.

Although many youth participated in the same political protests as their parents, voices from literature written in the 1990s reveal a broader understanding of the U.S. role in the Vietnamese diaspora. Whereas the first-generation, having experienced tragedies of being refugees and new immigrants, sided with narratives of America as their savior, the newer generations saw a more conflicted narrative, especially after taking Asian

American courses in college. Historically, discourse on Vietnamese refugees focused on the United States as the benign liberator providing refuge to those fleeing a communist regime, and remained silent on America’s role as the main perpetrators of the Vietnam

War and source of the resulting diaspora. The resettlement process emphasized humanitarian efforts of the United States, turning a “lost war” into a “heroic feat.”

Successful immigrant stories reinforced a myth of America as the “land of opportunity” based on economic, but not social, mobility. Although publications like The Vietnamese

American 1.5 Generation featured narratives of Vietnamese Americans themselves, the stories reinforced ideas of thankful immigrants who were able to flee a war-torn country and build a new life in the United States.153 Edited by Sucheng Chan, professor of Asian

American history, the second part of the book features chapters written by students of four University of California campuses (Berkeley, Santa Barbara, San Diego, and Santa

Cruz) between the years of 1980 and 1993. As evidenced by their enrollment at some of

California’s top universities, the authors’ backgrounds are mostly middle class and upper

153 Sucheng Chan, ed., The Vietnamese American 1.5 Generation: Stories of War, Revolution, Flight, and New Beginnings (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).

65 class. Although Chan notes the lack of voices from other groups of Vietnamese in

America (elderly and adults, freed political prisoners, second-generation American

Vietnamese, overseas Vietnamese, and unsuccessful youth), the sequence of stories clearly supports the “model minority” narrative. In explaining the missing voices of

“unsuccessful” Vietnamese Americans, Chan states that “some became low-paid working people, while others dropped out of school, joined gangs, and hoped to become rich through criminal activities.”154 Further reinforcing ideas of success in the United States,

Chan emphasizes that “the authors chronicle how they became strong and eloquent young adults not in spite of but rather because of their tragedy-filled childhoods. Thus their accounts should be inspiring, meaningful, and compelling to readers of other ethnic origins as well.”155 Although the narratives were written by 1.5 generation Vietnamese

Americans in college, the works selected by the editor served to strengthen the idea that this particular group of people were better off in the United States than Vietnam.

Gradually, the younger 1.5 and second-generation published short works, memoirs, and academic studies focusing on their experiences and perpetual challenges with racism, identity, and culture, rather than being successful minorities.

The earliest roots of Vietnamese American literature lie in periodicals and other publications of high school students. The Vietnamese clubs and student associations of

Bolsa Grande High, Edison High, Santiago High, and Tustin High produced periodicals as early as 1981. Some periodicals, like Hoc Tro: Xuan Nham Tuat (Student: Spring Year of the Dog) from Santiago High School’s Vietnamese Club, consist of poems and short

154 Chan, ed., The Vietnamese American 1.5 Generation, xiv.

155 Chan, ed., The Vietnamese American 1.5 Generation, xvi.

66 works only in Vietnamese. Others, like Edison High’s Thoi Tre Va Niem Tin (Youth and

News), include a few submissions in English. In the next decade, periodicals incorporated more poems and essays in English. Contents of these periodicals were typical of high school students: love, relationships, academic stress, and conflicts with parents. What was unique, however, was the distinctive collective voice of this group in written format.

The collections of writing reflect the higher socioeconomic statuses of the first wave of refugees, who were oftentimes well-educated back in Vietnam. Immigrants who left

Vietnam at a younger age typically acquired the English language more easily than those who arrived as teens, which attributed to the increase in number of passages submitted in

English as the decade progressed. For these students, writing served not only as a means of expression, but also as a way to preserve their culture and language. As explicitly stated in Bolsa Grande High’s periodical, Dac San Tre Xanh (Specialty Green Bamboo),

“ . . . the purpose of this magazine is to preserve the use of our language.”156 Desires to maintain use of Vietnamese was also evident in the constitution of Alhambra High

School’s VSA, which required that all meetings be held completely in the Vietnamese language and that members have at least some knowledge of the language.157

As their numbers swelled, Vietnamese American authors began flooding the literary scene with short works and poems. Some were published in journals such as

Amerasia and others in Asian American anthologies like Making More Waves: New

156 Dac San Tre Xanh Periodical. Bolsa Grande High School. No date. (UC Irvine Southeast Asian Archives, MS-SEA020, Vertical Files).

157 Armando Molina, “Club Grants Scholarship to Academic Vietnamese,” The Moor, March 28, 1984. (Alhambra High School newspaper archives).

Writing by Asian American Women.158 In 1998, members of the 1.5 and second- generations edited and published Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose, a collection which shifted away from war themes and expanded on truly Vietnamese

American cultural realms, including language, sexuality, family, and the fluidity of identity.159 Contributions to Watermark served as stepping stones for authors to publish their own collections of work and memoirs. For example, le thi diem thuy (who prefers her name in lowercase letters), went on to write The Gangster We Are All Looking For

(2004), a novel about a refugee girl and her father who left Vietnam in 1978 and their unstable lives in San Diego.160 Another contributor, Bich Minh Nguyen later published her memoir, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner: A Memoir.161 Nguyen used food, a unifying and common aspect, to create connections and tell the story of her coming of age (teenage years) as an immigrant in the United States. Throughout her memoir, Nguyen relayed her struggles in growing up with identity confusion—a common theme among many 1.5 and second-generation writers. Andrew Lam also published a collection of his essays in

Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora in 2005, revealing his search for identity as a Vietnamese American, immigrant, and son.162

158 Elaine H. Kim, Lilia V. Villanueva, and Asian Women United of California, ed., Making More Waves: New Writing by Asian American Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997).

159 Barbara Tran, Monique T. D. Truong, and Khoi Truong Luu, Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose (New York: Asian American Writers’ Workshop,1998).

160 le thi diem thuy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For (New York: Anchor Books, 2004).

161 Bich Minh Nguyen, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner: A Memoir (New York: Penguin, 2008).

162 Andrew Lam, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora (Berkeley: Heyday, 2005).

Over time, more second-generation Americans of Vietnamese origins emerged in the conversation. Most of these youth had little to no recollection of Vietnam—many of them born and raised in the United States. Some of their voices appeared in Vickie Nam’s

YELL-Oh Girls!: Emerging Voices Explore Culture, Identity, and Growing Up Asian

American (2001).163 The book compiled writings submitted by Asian American girls.

Submissions poured in from all over the country, reflective of the growing strength of this group. Writings from Vietnamese American girls revealed a variety of issues such as intergenerational challenges, burdens of the model minority stereotype, racism, and portrayal of Asians in media. Julie Lu, a 14-year-old who was born in 1985 in Oklahoma to immigrant parents from Vietnam, wrote about her relationship with her grandmother.

Over time, she spent less and less time with her grandmother, and regretted lost time after her grandmother passed away.164 The passage revealed a disconnect that second- generation Vietnamese Americans felt towards familial obligations. Whereas this likely would not have happened to a first-generation immigrant, the youth found it difficult to maintain ties to their families while immersed and assimilated to “white American” culture. Seventeen-year-old Belinda Wong also described challenges of being pulled in two different directions. As a child of ethnic Chinese refugees from Vietnam, Wong wrote about her struggles to maintain an image that her parents created for her and asserted: “I fight this battle between my internal and external selves because I know my

163 Vickie Nam, YELL-Oh Girls!: Emerging Voices Explore Culture, Identity, and Growing Up Asian American (New York: Harper, 2001).

164 Julie Lu, “The Answer” in YELL-Oh Girls!: Emerging Voices Explore Culture, Identity, and Growing Up Asian American edited by Vickie Nam (New York: Harper, 2001), 70-72.

69 flawless, idyllic image is tainted by my desire for freedom.”165 This perfect mold of the disciplined child created excessive burden and stress for many Vietnamese youth.

Although she maintained the image, her words reflected a rejection of it. Young

Vietnamese women also tackled issues on misrepresentations of Asians in media. Jean

Phan, born in 1980 after her parents fled Communist Vietnam, explained her reasoning for writing “Screening Asian Americans: More Asian than American?”:

I wrote . . . as a response to the exhausted stereotypes of Asian women depicted in the mass media. I seek to make a difference by screaming in the face of adversity and having my voice heard.166

In her essay, she criticized the portrayal of Asian Americans in media as people who have choppy accents, know martial arts, and are exotic sex objects. She pointed to the lack of actual representations of Asian Americans as a perpetual and cyclical problem of mass media. Vietnamese American youth continue to contribute their voices in anthologies such as I Am Vietnamese (2014), a publication of stories from Vietnamese around the world.167 Edited by Huy Pham, the collection features short works and poems on assimilation, identity, family, feminism, and intimacy. The hard copy of the book was funded through public donations via Kickstarter, rather than a publication company.

Open-source funding of this collection of Vietnamese voices reveals the growing number of people who value diverse narratives of the Vietnamese, by the Vietnamese.

165 Belinda Wong, “Tainted” in YELL-Oh Girls!: Emerging Voices Explore Culture, Identity, and Growing Up Asian American edited by Vickie Nam (New York: Harper, 2001), 57-58.

166 Jean Phan, “Screening Asian Americans: More Asian than American?” in YELL-Oh Girls!: Emerging Voices Explore Culture, Identity, and Growing Up Asian American edited by Vickie Nam (New York: Harper, 2001), 258-261.

167 Huy Pham, I Am Vietnamese: The Anthology (print edition and ebook, 2014).

CHAPTER 5

CONCLUSIONS

Throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, Vietnamese Americans constructed a narrative different from the one that had been imposed upon them. Youth of the 1.5 and second-generations challenged stereotypes, interjected themselves into politics and social groups, and offered their own opinions, and analyses of history. They shifted a narrative which focused on American heroism to that of Vietnamese agency.

Young adults and adolescents contested racial and gender stereotypes prescribed to them by subtly rebelling against expectations of the “model minority,” outright rejecting social norms by participating in criminal or delinquent activities, maintaining both model student and gang member identities, and fighting back against blatant and institutional racism. High school and college students participated in social groups to create cultural ties, reinforce ethnic identity, and participate in political action. New film and literature by the new generations exemplified these larger trends. Through the humanities, the youth left behind tangible evidence of their assertions and restored their history as

Vietnamese Americans.

As the 1.5 generation entered adulthood, whether they were “delinquents,”

“perfect children,” or both, they continued to advocate for the members of the

Vietnamese community through politics, public service, mentorship, and academia.

Scholars like Tu-Uyen Nguyen moved on to teach Asian American courses, allowing

71 those with Vietnamese backgrounds to teach their own history to future generations of scholars. Others published books, such as Lan Duong’s Treacherous Subjects: Gender,

Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism (2012),168 and Kevin D. Lam’s postcolonial analysis of the Vietnamese in Youth Gangs, Racism, and Schooling: Vietnamese

American Youth in a Postcolonial Context (2015).169 Duong’s book adds to the anti- colonial discourse by shifting the label of “collaboration” from a negative to positive meaning. While scholars previously used this term to point out Vietnamese participation in their own tragedies, Duong focuses on intellectual and artistic collaboration through film which was pivotal in establishing a new cultural narrative. Lam’s book criticizes colonialism by emphasizing the transnational impact of U.S. imperialism on Vietnamese youth in contemporary American society.

Narratives of the newer generations provided diverse views of the American role in displacing the Vietnamese. Although they did not argue against the U.S. actions as some scholars had, their experiences challenged the prevailing narrative. Through social groups, film, and literature, Vietnamese youth dealt with challenges of ethnicity, and addressed conflicting ideas of being appreciative of United States’ benevolence. Some wondered what life might have been like if their families had stayed in Vietnam and others assigned responsibility to Americans for inducing the diaspora from the beginning.

Young people of the 1.5 and second-generations sensed an urgency to preserve and tell their history. While their parents sometimes found it difficult to tell the stories of their

168 Lan P. Duong, Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012).

169 Lam, Youth Gangs, Racism, and Schooling.

72 flight from Vietnam and a fallen country, many did pass down these memories to their children. These stories, in combination with college courses in Asian American studies, social groups, and political organizations, impacted the next wave of Asian American scholars. As a result, youth of the new generations served as the voice for all generations of Vietnamese Americans.

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