Born to Kill

by T. J. English

  At Cau Mau, on the southern peninsula of the delta, the banks of the Ganh Hao River were packed with refugees. In recent years, Cau Mau had become the favored embarkation point for ethnic Chinese, a minority whom the Vietnamese government had never trusted, fearing they might become a fifth column for Beijing. Many Viet-Ching had been expelled in the late 1970s as “boat people” and perished at sea. Now they paid gold to underworld figures to help them flee by arranging illegal shipments of human cargo.

  Tinh’s parents had made arrangements for him to travel with his oldest sister’s husband, whom Tinh knew as Kha Manh. Kha Manh had just spent eight years in a Vietnamese prison camp for the sole offense of having served as an interpreter for the American military during the war. He was thirty-eight years old, spoke good English, and it was believed he would be a wise, able-bodied protector for his young nephew.

  As Tinh and Kha Manh prepared to embark, the Ngo family was startled to hear that young Tinh, in fact, would be traveling separately from his brother-in-law. Apparently, the plans had been altered at the last minute. Now, two small vessels, each packed with some thirty people, were to follow a large mother ship through the delta and out to sea. Tinh would be on one vessel, Kha Manh on the other. Both ships were destined for Malaysia, where the castaways planned to throw themselves on the mercy of the refugee camps.

  As a surly navigator hollered instructions and rounded up the refugees, Tinh’s mother wept and embraced her son. “My child,” she explained, “I know you do not understand. But someday you will. And you will realize that what we have done is for the best.”

  Tinh cried uncontrollably and his nose dripped like a leaky faucet. Standing in the mud on the banks of the river, he waved good-bye to his parents, then disappeared into the crowd of refugees fighting their way onto the boats they hoped would carry them to some faraway world of peace and opportunity.

  It didn’t take long for Tinh’s boat to run into trouble. At the mouth of the Ganh Hao River, after a one-hour voyage through the eerie U Minh forest, both Tinh’s and his brother-in-law’s boats were stopped by a Vietnamese military patrol vessel. Soldiers stormed onto the boats with guns and began demanding gold and other valuables. When one of the refugees resisted, he was abruptly smacked across the face with the butt of a rifle.

  Refugees from both boats were loaded onto the military vessel, stripped naked, and searched. Soldiers turned the contents of the refugee boats upside down looking for precious commodities. By the time the soldiers allowed the refugees to dress and reboard their boats, the mother ship was nowhere in sight.

  “You will return to your point of origin,” a soldier ordered the navigators of both boats, “or you will perish at sea.” The soldiers then drained gasoline from the refugee boats, leaving just enough for the return to Cau Mau.

  After the military patrol vessel had safely disappeared, the refugees elected to push on. The two seventy-foot wooden cargo boats powered by truck engines chugged slowly toward the South China Sea, the passengers packed so tightly they were unable to lie down.

  Dressed only in shorts, sandals, and a T-shirt, Tinh couldn’t help but feel his young life might be nearing a premature end. What few belongings he had were on the other boat with Kha Manh. Feeling destitute and frightened, he cursed his parents once again for throwing him to the sharks.

  That night, the sun set on the western horizon and an ominous darkness engulfed both vessels. Navigation had been reduced to a simple maxim: At night, follow the North star; during the day, follow the sun. Unfortunately, this method did not make allowances for the swirling currents at sea, and by dawn the two refugee boats had been separated. Tinh would not see his brother-in-law’s face again for many years.

  After two days and nights, Tinh’s boat was stopped again, this time by a Thai pirate ship. The robbers were dressed like fishermen, and they carried an assortment of weapons, including knives, guns, and a hammer.

  “Give us your gold!” shouted one of the pirates in English. A passenger on the boat who spoke English translated to the others what the robbers were demanding. When no one moved, the robbers began angrily ransacking the boat, looking for secret compartments where valuables might be stashed. One of the robbers grabbed a young female passenger and ripped her clothing. She screamed out for help. A Vietnamese male tried to intervene, but he was struck with a hammer and fell to the deck.

  Then, in front of everyone, the female passenger was raped. Tinh squeezed his eyes shut, but he could still hear the woman crying, “No, please, I beg you!”

  The pirates tied the refugee boat to their own. Another woman was taken at gunpoint onto the pirate boat, where she too was raped and finally released. After two hours, Tinh’s boat was cut loose and the pirates sailed away.

  The refugees had been told their entire trip to Malaysia was supposed to take three days. They were now in their fifth day at sea, with no land in sight. Without food or water, some passengers became sick and began vomiting blood. Others drank sea water and urine for sustenance.

  On the sixth day, the refugees were stopped by another shipload of Thai pirates. More gold was demanded and passengers beaten. Another woman was taken on board and raped.

  After that, it was mostly a blur to Tinh. For six more days the boat drifted aimlessly, the fuel tank now bone dry. Many of the older passengers had mercifully passed out. On day twelve, Tinh squinted in the brutal midday sun and watched the buzzards circle overhead. Then, in the distance, he spotted what he first thought must be a mirage: a huge oil tanker with a Panamanian flag on the side. “Look!” young Tinh squealed, pointing toward the tanker.

  The other passengers mustered what energy they had left and cried out, “Over here! Help us! Please, help us!”

  The Panamanians towed the refugees to a nearby oil derrick, where they were given food and water. For thirty days the oil derrick served as their home, until a boat came and took them to a refugee camp, not in Malaysia, as they had planned, but in southern Thailand.

  For the next twenty-two months Tinh lived the life of a camp dweller, first at Songkhla, a camp of mostly Vietnamese, and then at Sikhiu, a larger camp in central Thailand. In the spring of 1985 a U.S. representative interviewed Tinh. He was asked where in the States he would like to be resettled. Tinh knew that his father had an acquaintance in New York, so he suggested the place, knowing almost nothing about it. The only thing Tinh really remembered being told about New York was that the Statue of Liberty was there.

  Six months later, Tinh boarded a plane in Bangkok, destined first for a processing center in France, then JFK Airport in New York City. Just thirteen years old, he had survived a perilous, traumatizing voyage out of Vietnam. Now he was heading to the heart of an even larger unknown: life as a Viet Kieu, a Vietnamese expatriate in the land of golden landscapes.

  On the night of September 30, 1985, a seasonably cool, clear evening, Tinh’s plane approached Kennedy Airport. From his seat near the window, Tinh could see the Manhattan skyline, a magnificent display of tall buildings and colored lights that would impress anyone seeing it for the first time, much less someone coming from a flat, squalid refugee camp. Tinh’s eyes opened wide and his skin tingled, as if he had passed through some alien force field into a strange, exotic universe.

  On the ground, Tinh waded slowly through immigration. In an airport receiving room, he stood anxiously for two hours until a female social worker arrived and asked, “Are you Tinh Ngo?”

  Tinh had been taught some English in school and picked up a bit more in the camps, but his command of the language was not great. He was able to discern that the social worker had been sent by the foster agency overseeing his resettlement in the United States.

  “Let me introduce you to your new parents,” the woman declared. “This is Mr. and Mrs. Simmons.”

  Tinh was shocked to see an elderly African American couple standing in front of him. Growing up in Vietnam and living in the camps, he had never seen a black person in his life. On top of that, Mrs. Simmon
s was blind!

  Tinh was overcome by a dizzying mixture of awe, fear, and confusion. Wow! he thought to himself. This is going to be one strange country.

  Tinh moved in with the Simmons family in a compact two-story house in Roosevelt, Long Island, a town of fourteen thousand just a few miles from the New York City line. Mr. and Mrs. Simmons had five foster kids, none of whom were Asian. The first thing Mrs. Simmons told Tinh was to stay away from the other children in the family. “They’re bad,” she warned. “They sell drugs in the street.”

  Around the house, Tinh found it difficult to communicate. About the only thing he could enunciate clearly in English were the words “I don’t know.” Most of his day was spent sitting in his bedroom in the basement staring out the window. Mr. and Mrs. Simmons seemed anxious to help Tinh fit in, but they could never hope to understand his deep feelings of dislocation and abandonment. They fed him heavy American meals, which gave him diarrhea. On Sundays they took him to a Baptist church where parishioners swayed to gospel music and bellowed “Amen!” and “Hallelujah!” in a loud, most un-Vietnamese-like manner.

  Simple household appliances were beyond Tinh’s comprehension. One day, Mrs. Simmons was excited to put Tinh on the phone to speak with a young Vietnamese boy who had been adopted by a friend of hers. Tinh was relieved to finally be able to speak his native language with someone. The two boys chatted amiably for a while, then the kid asked Tinh for his phone number.

  “Phone number?” replied Tinh. “What’s that?” The boy explained that there were a series of numbers written somewhere on the phone.

  “Oh,” answered Tinh. “Okay.” He began reciting the numbers on the dial. “One, two, three, four, five …” Even the Vietnamese kid laughed at Tinh’s ignorance.

  In school, Tinh not only suffered the shame of speaking strange, fractured English, but he had no familiarity with football, baseball, or other American forms of recreation. There were no Vietnamese at Roosevelt Junior High. Mostly, Tinh felt terrorized by African American kids who called him “slant eyes” or “gook” and dumped milk on him in the lunchroom and urinated on him in the rest room.

  After six months, Tinh begged his social worker to transfer him somewhere else. He was suffering from bouts of acute depression and loneliness, and his near-sleepless nights were filled with discomforting images from his past.

  In April of 1986, Tinh was transferred to a low-income household in Uniondale, another mid-sized Long Island town. His new home was not much of an improvement. His latest mother, a divorced African American woman in her fifties, worked the night shift at a local hospital. While she slept during the day, one of her five foster kids sold crack out of the house. Tinh had never seen crack or powder cocaine before, except on American TV. One day, Tinh watched as his foster brother was beaten to a pulp by a rival drug dealer. Again, Tinh pleaded with his social worker for a transfer.

  After eighteen months in Uniondale, Tinh was relocated once again, this time north of New York City to New Rochelle. This situation was a vast improvement. Mr. and Mrs. Rocco were an Italian American couple with two adopted Vietnamese teenagers, one boy and one girl. Tinh could hardly believe that he was now living under the same roof with people his own age born in Vietnam.

  Tinh’s first agreeable living environment in America didn’t last long. Mr. and Mrs. Rocco were an elderly couple approaching retirement. In early 1989 they decided to sell their house and move to Florida. Once again, Tinh would have to find a new place to live. Of all his relocations, this one embittered Tinh the most. He had grown close to the Roccos and made progress in his attempts to assimilate. Now, much like his real parents in Hau Giang, they had abruptly abandoned him.

  The social workers informed Tinh that the only family they could currently place him with lived in a poverty-stricken area in Brooklyn. Even they were concerned for his welfare in such a difficult environment. But Tinh didn’t care. He had lived in so many different houses with so many different parents he figured it didn’t really matter where he lived. It was becoming painfully obvious to Tinh that, in the United States, the parents who harbored foster kids did so more for the money they received than out of any true commitment to provide love or support.

  In Brooklyn, Tinh wound up in a run-down tenement at 1641 Nostrand Avenue in Flatbush, a tough ghetto neighborhood. His new foster parents were Hawaiian and Filipino; they had adopted three children to go along with the two they already had. Tinh had never seen kids like this. They cursed and threatened the foster parents, smoked crack in the apartment, and came and went as they pleased.

  Tinh’s new home surpassed even the refugee camps in its level of filthiness. While he lay in bed at night cockroaches and rats crawled brazenly across his body. Outside on Nostrand Avenue, drugs and violence were rampant. And there were no Vietnamese. Mostly, the neighborhood was a teeming hodgepodge of African Americans and West Indian immigrants from Jamaica, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.

  During the day, Tinh attended Sheepshead Bay High School, where he was enrolled in the eleventh grade. After his classes he headed to Waldbaum’s supermarket to work in the produce department. At night, he couldn’t wait to get to the local billiard hall, where he was amazed to find dozens of Vietnamese gathered regularly.

  It was here that he first met Kenny Vu, Tommy Vu, and others just like himself. They were outcasts, the byproducts of a country traumatized by a war most of them were too young to remember. They had braved refugee boats and survived camps in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Many strayed from failed foster homes and some had moved into barren apartments together. As Viet Kieu, they shared a common bond: they were dat khach que nguoi, lost and lonely in a strange and hostile land.

  “Timmy, why you keep this stupid job?” Kenny Vu asked Tinh one night after he arrived at the pool hall still wearing his Waldbaum’s work shirt. Tinh said that he needed the money. His foster parents were poor and had little to spare.

  Kenny laughed. With hooded eyes, a sinewy physique, and an assortment of outrageous tattoos covering most of his upper body, nineteen-year-old Khang Thanh Vu was the epitome of a young Asian hoodlum. He had been raised in Cam Ranh, a seaside town not far from Vietnam’s demilitarized zone. To Tinh, Kenny’s cocky and aggressive manner was awe-inspiring. He didn’t seem to be afraid of anyone—a rare attribute for a Vietnamese immigrant surrounded by loud, intimidating Americans.

  Kenny told Tinh that in New York City there was no reason he had to live the life of the typical subservient refugee, working long hours for low pay, bowing to condescending white people. “You come with us,” he told Tinh, “you not worry about money anymore. We take care a you. We get you place to stay.”

  It didn’t take much prodding. Within weeks, Tinh had left his foster home on Nostrand Avenue, dropped out of high school, and moved into an apartment with Kenny, Tommy, and a half dozen other young Vietnamese males.

  Tinh knew that the Vu brothers were part of a group that committed crimes. From Kenny, he learned that in New York youth gangs were a way of life. Recently, Koreans and new immigrants from Fukien Province in China had formed upstart gangs to compete with the older, more established Chinese gangs. The Vietnamese, said Kenny, were the newcomers on the block and had only recently begun to organize, to ensure they received their slice of the pie in Chinatown.

  At first, Tinh could not have cared less about the money. It was the prospect of brotherhood that appealed to him. In their two-room apartment at 223 Neptune Avenue, in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn, he and the others ate Chinese food and watched videos. At night, they slept three and four to a bed. Among themselves, they spoke mostly Vietnamese. To pass the time they hung out at the pool hall or went to a roller-skating rink in Queens, where they flirted with teenage girls. On trips to Chinatown, Kenny showed Tinh how to mug people in subway stations.

  “Give us your money!” they would yell, sounding much like the pirates and rapists they had encountered on the refugee boats. Sometimes Tinh felt
guilty stealing tip money from Chinese waiters and garment workers on their way home. He recognized the sadness in their eyes as they relinquished their hard-earned profits, often as little as $20 or $30. But Tinh could not deny the feelings of empowerment he derived from these paltry muggings. And he was easily seduced by the camaraderie they engendered among himself and the others.

  In late May 1989, after Tinh had participated in more than a dozen subway muggings, he was introduced for the first time to Tuan Tran, otherwise known as Blackeyes. At a brightly lit billiard hall on Eighth Avenue in Brooklyn, Blackeyes sipped beer and looked sleek in his light cotton suit and black kung-fu slippers with no socks. He had a long, thin “turkey neck,” thick black eyebrows, and “Buddhist ears”—pronounced ears with long lobes that indicated a lengthy and fruitful life. Tinh had heard a lot about Blackeyes, an experienced, self-confident criminal whom many considered the dai low, or “big brother,” of all Vietnamese gangsters in Brooklyn.

  “I hearing good things about you,” Blackeyes said to Tinh; with Kenny Vu standing at his side. “Maybe you join us on a real robbery, huh? I know a massage place in Chinatown, on Chrystie Street. Very easy. You with us?”

  Tinh thought for a moment, then nodded a bit too casually, trying to give the impression he wasn’t the least bit scared.

  A few weeks after the robbery of the massage parlor on Chrystie Street, Tommy Vu told Tinh, “It’s time you officially join gang, Timmy. Come on and get your tattoo. I take you.”

  Any aspiring young Asian gangster knew the importance of a tattoo. With the Vietnamese, they were like a religion. Since the gang had no initiation rituals, no pricking of blood or burning of incense to symbolize entry into the gang, having a tattoo was the most powerful statement of all. Tinh had been thinking of getting one ever since he moved into the apartment at 223 Neptune Avenue, but he had not wanted to be presumptuous.