Chapter 4 Search for Meaning

By the time I was a senior in high school, I could feel the mounting pressures of my future looming. Other kids in high school already had acceptance letters to other colleges and knew where they wanted to go. I applied to a couple of colleges but knew I did not want to attend any of them.

My father wanted me to attend West Point, and even after his death I hoped to both honor him and redeem myself in some way. The previous summer, I had failed my SAT exams and knew there was no way I would be going to the academy. Yet, I did not share it with my mom. Instead, I filled out an application to the Reserve Officer Training Corps. Something about joining the military was much more attractive than going to college for me. One day, the recruiting officer called my house, and my mom picked up the phone.

“No, we are not interested. My son is not doing that. Don’t call here anymore.” She hung up the phone, then turned and looked at me. “Why are these recruiters calling our house for? Don’t they know you are going to West Point?” Without waiting for an answer, she went back to bustling around in the kitchen.

I said nothing and acted like I did not hear her.

At the time, I was working at Subway, the sandwich shop. One evening, my brother and a couple of my friends came into my work. He looked upset and had a scowl on his face.

“Gumby and his friends just called our house and threatened our family.” He sat down with my friends, and I came from around the counter. “They called the house, and said they were going to come in and kill Mom and everyone. I wish we had beat his ass worse last time at the beach.”

Gumby was a self-proclaimed skinhead who attended a nearby continuation school. He had been arrested with stolen property and let the police know he got it from my brother. We ran into him at a beach party one night with what looked like a dozen other skinheads. I was with my brother and two of our friends, Ant and Red. My brother wanted to beat him up for snitching. As we approached Gumby, I stayed quiet. We were outnumbered, and fights made me nervous, unlike my brother. He thrived on the adrenaline of it and called Gumby out to fight. That night, Red had a .22 caliber handgun. He pulled it out and announced if anyone jumped in he would use it. I felt a new sense of courage as my brother dropped Gumby with an uppercut, and the skinheads stood back in fear. My friends roared victoriously as they jumped in, swarming on Gumby with their fists and feet. I joined my comrades in the fray, sucked in by the violence. Gumby ended up with broken ribs.

I felt fearful before the fight, but with the sense of power from our gun and the adrenaline of my brother fighting, I found myself looking forward to the next time we could hurt someone as a group.

Two nights after we jumped Gumby, a man and woman walked into my work right before closing time. They were wearing leather motorcycle jackets and I could make out tattoos on the man’s wrists. He wore sunglasses and had a grim look. I suddenly felt nervous.

The woman began to speak. “I am Gumby’s mom. We are here to make sure there are no other issues with my son.” I kept my eye on the man and could tell he was trying to see if there was anyone else working in the store with me.

I took a step back from behind the counter, terrified inside. “Gumby told on my friends. There are no other issues as long as he does not say anything else.” 

“Gumby will not be talking to the police anymore. Just make sure you and your friends leave him alone. If something else happens to my son, we will be back.” They walked out, and the word later in the streets was they had come in with a gun to shoot me. I am not sure why they thought I was the ringleader, but I found I liked being recognized like that.

This night at the Subway shop, Red was with my brother and had his .22 caliber gun with him. “Do you know where Gumby lives?” he asked. I didn’t, but my coworker knew Gumby, and I convinced her to draw me a map of where he lived. I handed it to my brother and friends.

“OK, we’ll be back to pick you up tonight after work, and we will go and shoot up his house,” they said.

They never came to pick me up. Instead, they found someone else at a nearby arcade and he brought them to Gumby’s house. Red ended up shooting three people inside. We were arrested within a couple of weeks, and they charged me with conspiracy to commit murder. Even though I was not at the scene of the crime, I was arrested because my coworker had drawn the map and given it to me. It did not matter if my friends used it or not.

Juvenile hall was terrifying. A large Samoan staff member told me to remove all my clothes, and I stood there completely naked. He then had me bend over and spread open my butt cheeks so he could look inside my rectum. It was humiliating. I stepped on a cold scale and weighed in at 106 pounds.

Juvenile hall reinforced to me, though, that as long as I victimized others, I would not be victimized. After one of the earliest visits with our mother, another kid, named Maples, kept staring at me and my brother. His face was scrunched up like someone had farted. He looked at us and said, “Are you guys Korean?”

“No, we’re Vietnamese,” I said.

He said, “I don’t like Koreans, Vietnamese, Chinese, or whatever you guys are.” Another Asian kid nearby heard and spit on Maples’s face.

Maples did not even blink or flinch. A big loogie was making its way down his face. He stood up and slowly walked up to one of the juvenile hall staff. “Do you see this right here?” He pointed at his face. “Do you see this?”

The staff looked up and did a double take. “Looks like someone spit on your face, young man. Who did it?”

Maples turned and, with a smirk, pointed out the person who spit on him. “That gentleman right over there.” He then took the bottom of his shirt and wiped off the spit and gave everyone a smile.

From that day forth, Maples was targeted. He had broken the code, and we all knew “snitches got stitches.” Maples was separated from the rest of us, but that only made it easier to victimize him. During mealtimes, he had his own table, but we were the ones serving it. The other boys would spit in his food and put pubic hairs and dust balls in it. We would punch or slap him in the back of the head when we walked by as he was eating. Each day during showers, we were given a linen roll with an issue of towel, T-shirt, and briefs with our name taped across it. One of the linen boys decided to wipe his butt with a towel after defecating and rolled up Maples’s linen with it. After that, it became amusing for everyone to use old linen to wipe themselves and reserve it for Maples’s linen roll. Maples did not say anything else ever again, but it was too late for him.

At court, I was charged as an adult and transferred to the county jail. I was to be housed in the juvenile section until I turned eighteen. One day on the rec yard, I was watching a guy shooting hoops on the basketball court. Suddenly, I felt someone’s arms cinch tightly around my neck. I looked down and saw a large spider web tattoo on the crook of the elbow. It was one of the Hispanic juveniles, nicknamed Spider. He was much bigger than me. I could not breathe and tried to pull down his arm, but he flexed even tighter and lifted me several inches off the ground. I blacked out and woke up on the ground, gasping for air, and saw stars everywhere. Spider and a group of Hispanics were laughing at me. They walked off as one of the deputies made his rounds.

One of the other Vietnamese kids saw me on the ground and helped me up. “Stay away from the Mexicans,” he said. “If they try that again, we will have to fight all of them.” I felt scared but knew I could not let him pick on me again because I could not be a victim. The juvenile section was filled with a bunch of kids who were all facing life sentences. Many of us still had not developed any sense of identity and distortedly thought that violence was the way to gain recognition. I wholeheartedly believed in it and felt ashamed that I had allowed Spider to choke me out.

A few weeks later, I was in a new dorm with two other Vietnamese and three Hispanics, including Spider. The Hispanics had been sniffing some drugs and were doing push-ups. They spoke in Spanish, and somewhere I realized their tones changed. I knew something was going to happen. One of them walked up to where we were playing cards and wanted to fight one of the Vietnamese. I looked down in hopes that nobody would call me out to fight, too. The cards trembled in my hands as they started fighting, and my heart was racing. But as the Vietnamese began to get the best of his assailant, it gave me courage. I saw Spider from the corner of my eye and walked up to him.

“I wanna fight, Spider.”

I knew after they were done, someone would want to fight me anyway—at least if I did it this way, I would be recognized for calling Spider out to fight first. Spider took one look at me, threw his head back, and began laughing. I took that opportunity and punched him square in the mouth. He reeled back, and I saw his lip was split. It threw him into a rage, and he threw me up against the bars of the cell and attacked me like a rabid dog. I protected myself as much as I could by covering up. He pounded on me, and the back of my head kept hitting against the bars as each of his blows hit my head and forearms.

Spider was roaring while swinging erratically, and he missed on one of the punches. I heard the sickening crunch of his hand breaking as it struck the bar. He screamed in pain, picked me up over his head, and body-slammed me onto the concrete floor. I landed on my lower back, and I heard a pop. The adrenaline was pumping through me, and even though I knew I was hurt, I pulled myself up on the bars. Spider’s hands were a broken mess and he was gasping for air. Luckily, he did not attack me further.

The sound of keys jangling and boots stomping signaled that the deputies were coming. They cuffed all of us up for fighting. My back was throbbing, and they took us to the nurses to check for injuries. I said nothing about my intense back pain and denied I had been in a fight. I believed I could not say anything, or it would be considered snitching. The officers ended up separating us from the Hispanics, and for the next six weeks my dorm mates helped me get in and out of bed. Later, during my life sentence, I found out I had developed a degenerative disc from that injury.

On my eighteenth birthday, two deputies came down and started singing “Happy Birthday” to me. One of them sneered at me and said, “Are you ready to join the real men upstairs, juvie? Today is the day you get to go with the big boys.”

I grabbed the few belongings I had: a book of stamps and some envelopes and paper to write letters. I fought back tears because the familiarity of my life these past several months had at least seemed a little comforting. Now I was going into somewhere new. I would be thrown into the mainline, where everyone who was arrested and fighting a court case was housed. I was unsure what to expect.

The mainline jail system was more organized with rules of how to conduct ourselves than juvenile hall. In each dorm of seventy men, there was one prisoner who was known as the House Mouse. The House Mouse was the intermediary between the prisoners and the deputies. Our House Mouse was a Samoan in his forties, with graying hair, known as Uso. He was heavyset and was always happy and smiling, although he was fighting a murder case. One day, Uso came back and called the heads of each race together. His bunk was next to mine, and I got to hear everything.

“OK, everyone, we got a fuckin’ rapist in our dorm,” Uso began. “I just saw the bed card from the deputy that is on right now. He says we have the green light to get him after shift change tonight. He doesn’t want to be here to do the paperwork when it goes down. We need a representative from each race to volunteer for the mission.”

Each prisoner who came in had a bed card with their mug shot and arrest charges on it. In our pecking order, anyone who committed any type of sex offense is considered the lowest of the low. Gang murders are at the top of this spectrum, while everything else fell in between. Even deputies despised sex offenders, but I was still surprised to hear of one setting a rapist up.

I was new and felt out of place and only wanted to fit in with these guys. “I will volunteer and represent for the mission,” I chimed in. I would end up regretting that decision.

Uso had a proud look on his face and looked at the heads of the whites, blacks, and Hispanics. “We got a representative for the Asians. If each of you get your representative, we will get this chester tonight after shift change.” Chester was our slang for a sex offender.

After everyone walked off, Uso looked at me. “Listen, youngster, the cops will do body checks. Make sure you kick him instead of punching him.” Body checks were where the deputies would look at our knuckles for red marks, scrapes, and swelling for evidence of a fight. Uso was giving me a tip to get away with the attack. I nodded and thanked him.

That night, at shift change, the cop on duty announced over the PA system that he was leaving and for us to have a good night. That was the signal for us to attack the rapist. The victim had already been pointed out to me, and my bunk was near where we were to attack him. The plan was for someone else to lure him to the dayroom, where people played cards and watched TV, and I saw him approaching. When he walked by my bunk area, I swung myself off and kicked him in the head. He dropped facedown, and four of us began to kick and stomp on him. He started screaming, but the more he screamed, the harder we kicked his head and body. He grew quiet. There was a pool of blood that began to come out from around his head, and he was not moving. One of the other attackers climbed up on a nearby bunk and jumped off, landing with both feet on the back of the victim’s head. I heard a popping, squishing noise, and his head bounced off the concrete floor. We all stood in shocked silence. The attacker climbed up on the bunk and once again jumped with both feet onto the back of the man’s head. This time, though, his feet slipped from all the blood everywhere, and he fell onto his butt. He had blood on his palms and the back of his jumpsuit from sitting in the blood. There was so much blood everywhere. I was breathing like I had run a thousand-yard sprint. I looked down at my shoes and pants and there were spots of blood on them.

I went into survival mode and began to wipe and clean my shoes. There were a lot more blood splatters on me than I had expected. The jail-issued shoes were the plastic gummy kind, and I was able to wipe off the blood quickly. I took off my clothes, threw them in a plastic bag, filled it up with soap and water, and tied the bag off. I let it sit in the corner of the dorm with other laundry that was being hand washed. I jumped in the shower and took a quick rinse. I was still breathing heavily, and my heart was still pounding. I looked down and noticed red welts on my legs from being accidentally kicked by the other men when we attacked the rapist. One of the other Vietnamese handed me some lotion and told me it would get rid of the red marks. I rubbed it in, and they began to fade. 

Two of the other assailants were standing around, nonchalantly talking to the other men in the dorm and reliving the fight. I noticed they had changed their clothes, but I saw spots of blood still on their shoes. A lot of the people in the dorm had pitched in to help mop up the blood with towels, yet the victim still lay on the ground, unmoving. He began to groan from somewhere deep in his throat, and I could tell he was beginning to choke from lying facedown in his own blood.

Someone decided to roll him over onto his back. My bunk was nearby, and I had a clear view of what we had done to another human being. His whole body looked swollen, most of all his face, which had turned a deep purplish black. His eyes were bulging from their sockets, and he looked like a human fly. Blood and spittle were still bubbling up from the area where his nose and mouth used to be. I saw a purple crease that ran diagonally across his forehead, where his skull had caved in.

The sight silenced the whole dorm.

The deputies were finally alerted that there was a man down. The first deputy who walked in took one look and ran back out, screaming into his walkie-talkie. Our dorm soon had what

looked like the whole force of deputies inside, and true to protocol, they began to do body checks.

“Everyone, strip down!” one of the deputies screamed.

My heart was pounding in my chest as they came and looked at my knuckles with their flashlights, but they moved on. The two assailants who had not cleaned their shoes also had red welts on their legs. They were handcuffed and taken out, and word later came down that they were charged with attempted murder, since the victim was in critical condition. I had nightmares about what happened for months after that. Many times, I dreamed someone was stomping on my head until it burst open and feared sooner or later it would happen to me.

After that day, the older guys treated me differently. Before, it felt like they ignored me. But after the incident, I felt accepted and liked. They called me to their bunk areas and began indoctrinating me into the politics of prison life. They told me about how each race was separated into different groups, or cars. There were certain phones, toilets, sinks, and tables for each car to use. I learned each car was also responsible for the trash in their own backyard. This meant that if someone from a certain race messed up in some way, his car was responsible for cleaning up the mess. Cleaning up the mess usually meant beating up the guy in your own car, a member of your own race, for all the other races to see. I hoped nothing like that would ever happen to me.

Not long after, I had to clean up the trash in my backyard. The jail moved people around all the time, and I was moved to another dorm of seventy men. There was only one other Vietnamese there, named Coon. We went to the chow hall for breakfast and, upon returning, saw that someone had stolen some of our commissary food. The thief also took some of our brand-new jail-issued T-shirts. Brand-new T-shirts were valuable and hard to come by.

Coon had marked the collar of his T-shirts and spotted one of them being worn by a paisano, the group of Hispanics who did not speak much English.

“That fuckin’ paisa over there has my shirt on.” He pointed. “Let’s fuck him up!” He began tightening up the laces on his shoes. 

“Wait, we can’t do that,” I cautioned. I knew the thief would be beaten by his own people. “We have to let the paisas and their car know.”

Coon was a few years older and did not want to listen to some punk eighteen-year-old. “If you’re too scared, just stay right here and I will take care of this myself!” Of course I was scared, but I could not admit it. I tightened up the laces on my shoes and walked with him to confront the thief.

I thought Coon was going to start attacking the guy, and I was ready for that. Instead, he started screaming at the top of his lungs. “You fuckin’ thief! Give me back my shirts!”

He continued to curse at the guy and then grabbed at a T-shirt that was on the paisano’s bed. The paisano grabbed for the other end, hopped off, and they began a tug-of-war with it. The other paisanos began to surround us, and my mind screamed that we were in imminent danger. I was reminded about my nightmares of the man we stomped on and feared that was going to happen to us. There was no talking to the paisanos now; they were going to attack us. I saw only one way forward.

Coon and the thief were still in the tug-of-war. I squared up my hips and punched the thief in the face. He screamed in surprise, let go, and fell down. From the corner of my eye I saw Coon slip backward, off balance. It was a blur what happened next, as I was punched and kicked from everywhere. My only thought was to not fall down, and I tried to fight back as much as I could. There were so many of them everywhere, and I could no longer breathe.

Fists were still pounding me when the familiar jangling of keys caused everyone to stop. Deputies ran in the dorm and pulled Coon and me out. My eyebrow was split open, and I felt battered everywhere, but my head was still intact. That was all that mattered to me. Coon was in worse shape because they had stomped on him when he fell down. He had a golf ball-size lump on his left temple, and the whole side of his face was an angry red. We were both breathing heavy.

One of the deputies opened up a black folder. Inside were the bed cards and mug shots of everyone in the dorm. “Who attacked you, son?” he asked me in concern. I knew better than to cooperate.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“How about you?” he said, turning to Coon. “Can you point out who did this to you guys?” To my horror and disgust, Coon began pointing out several of our assailants.

We got rehoused in another dorm that same afternoon. There were several other Vietnamese, one of whom I already knew. I told him about the fight and how Coon snitched on our assailants. In the jail system, word travels fast. Once someone is known as a snitch, they are not safe anywhere. The last thing I wanted to be known as was as a snitch. I definitely could not be associated with one either.

Sure enough, the paisanos in our new dorm got word from our previous dorm that we had snitched. I saw a group of them come over and whisper to the older Vietnamese guys, and I saw people looking my way. I felt anxious. The Vietnamese had to clean up the trash in their car, and at this moment, I was considered trash. Coon told, not me, but I knew nobody would believe it unless I took care of it. I walked up to the older guys and volunteered to be one of the people who was going to beat up Coon. I was so afraid of being labeled a snitch and would do whatever was necessary to clear my name.

Coon knew what was coming when we attacked him and didn’t put up a fight. He was so scared when we kicked and stomped him that he peed his pants. I had to get pulled off him because I kept kicking his head when he was already half-knocked out. I was frightened that anyone else might think I snitched, so I went above and beyond to show off and hurt him. I wanted to prove that I was not a snitch and believed the best way was to hurt another man excessively. A by-product of volunteering to inflict violence on others was the sense of acceptance and reputation I gained. The guys liked me and started referring to me as “Youngster.” That’s the nickname I carried into the gang life later.

My first large-scale race riot happened a little after that. A Vietnamese gang had a shootout on the streets, and stray bullets killed an innocent Hispanic boy coming out of church. It was all over the news. This caused a lot of tension, and the Mexican gangs put a green light on that Vietnamese gang. A green light meant all Mexican gang members were required to attack anyone from that gang. But many times, they would attack anyone that looked Asian. One of the Vietnamese in our dorm went out to court one day and ended up in the hospital because he was jumped by twenty Hispanics at court inside the holding tanks. I knew it was only a matter of time before I would get jumped. It was hard for me to sleep at night, and whenever people would group up and begin whispering, I broke out in a cold sweat. I kept imagining my head bursting open from being stomped on.

One evening, I heard my name called over the speakers to report to the officer’s sally port. They said to bring my bedroll and property, which meant I was getting housed in another dorm. This happened quite often, but because of the green light, I feared getting jumped in my new dorm. I stepped into the sally port and saw the most welcome sight. Sprawled all around inside the barred gates were about twenty other Vietnamese with their bedrolls. About half of them looked like they had recently been in fights, with black eyes and swollen lips.

The jail authorities decided to consolidate us into a designated collection of dorms. They finally realized that all Asians were getting jumped throughout the jail and thought putting us together in bigger numbers would prevent it from happening. They were wrong. They moved us into another seventy-man dorm, but the races were still mixed. There was a palpable tension and fear in the dorm as we shuffled in.

“As soon as the cops close the gate, get out your knives and stab them all!” one of the guys shouted in Vietnamese. It was time for revenge, and many of the guys had toothbrushes sharpened to be used as knives. Others began to shove soap bars into empty socks to swing as weapons. One of them broke off a metal shower nozzle and handed it to me.

“Here, Youngster, put this inside your sock.”

I shoved in the heavy piece of steel and knotted the end like I witnessed the other guys do with their soap bars. It had a nice comforting weight. I had never swung a sock as a weapon before, but I did not let anyone know that. The other races began to group up, the whites and Hispanics on one end and us on the other. Then we began attacking each other. It was utter chaos, and I swung my weapon as hard as possible at anyone who I saw was not Vietnamese. I had been scared all these months and tired of being picked on. These faces represented all the groups who picked on me. Hispanics had picked on me. Whites had picked on me. I was in jail because some whites threatened to kill my family. They were all the reason why everything was wrong with my life at that moment, and they were going to pay for it. Every time I struck someone, there was a satisfying crunch.

I did not know it at the time, but that was where I began to hate and resent all other races and, eventually, become a racist. I finally felt accepted and knew where my place was in the world. I finally found where I belonged, and it was against every other race. I believed we were superior and looked down on anyone who was not my race.

Years later, this us-versus-them mentality would turn me against everyone else in the world, including my family. One of the angriest conversations with my mother was during my time incarcerated in the Youth Authority. I was fascinated with the writings of Karl Marx, George Jackson, Ho Chi Minh, and other revolutionaries. I loved that they spoke about fighting against an unjust system since I felt I was a victim of an unjust system.

During one of our visits, she suggested I should be praying.

I grew angry and yelled, “Why should we pray to a god that does not exist?”

There was so much anger inside me at the world, God, and where I was in life. I told my mom we should not be praying to a white god and that the concepts that she believed in were all fake. Tears welled in her eyes and she stood in silence as I continued stabbing her with my words. I let her know that our family had fought on the wrong side of the war and we were traitors to our race.

She muttered, “Your father would be saddened to hear what you are saying. Your grandfather was thrown in a concentration camp, and our family and many others lost our country because of the Viet Cong.”

I looked at her and whispered, “I wish I had been born twenty years earlier. I would have been a freedom fighter, and a revolutionary, and would have fought to liberate our country with the Viet Cong.”

My mom gasped.

“Please don’t talk to me about any white god,” I continued. “I don’t want to hear any of that anymore.” I was so certain that I finally knew who I was. Yet, if that were so, why was I still searching? 

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