Murder in the Melting Pot
Vu Dinh Chung survived the Vietnam War, only to become a victim of American culture. But why did he make his four children victims too?
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When Vietnamese people think about the United States,” said Tran Van My, who assists Vietnamese refugees for Lutheran Social Service in Houston, “they think about heaven.” The same promises that have drawn immigrants to the U.S. for generations drew waves of Vietnamese after the fall of Saigon in 1975. These are people who find America’s anti-war protests of the late sixties and early seventies incomprehensible, people who fled the communist regime in terror, who count themselves lucky if they lost only their fortunes to their northern adversaries. These are people who, in the late seventies, survived starvation in prison camps by feeding themselves a diet of the American dream. In the U.S., they told one another, they would have a house, a car, and plenty of money to live on. Best of all, they could assure a vast, unlimited future for their children: “America is the country where you create geniuses,” one refugee explained. “Doctors, lawyers, educated people.” These are people for whom the word “freedom” is almost always pronounced with astonished, passionate reverence.
As the numbers of Vietnamese immigrants grew, Americans created a corresponding mythology about them. The newcomers reminded Americans of how they liked to see themselves: as honest, ambitious people who made their own way without government handouts. Each time a Vietnamese child became valedictorian of a high school class, it served as proof to both cultures that this country makes good on its promises.
What is seldom, if ever, discussed are the costs of those successes. The price of giving up a country has been glossed over, including the profound differences between Eastern and Western culture—everything from pace of life to the way people relate to on another. The most critical difference is that of family life, long the source of Vietnamese strength and solace. “In Vietnam the society is not made up of individuals but of families,” another social worker explained. “When the family unit is destroyed, everything goes wrong.” Ancestor worship prevails in Vietnam, and divorce is extremely rare. The family structure is resolutely traditional: Men work to support their families, and their rule is unchallenged; women stay at home and tend to domestic life.
To exert control over a family in the U.S. is much harder. Already bruised by their war experiences, many Vietnamese men arrive here only to find menial jobs, compounding a loss of both social and economic status. To make ends meet, like so many other Americans, they must ask their wives to follow them into the work force. (It isn’t just the immediate family that Vietnamese couples work to support, but the extended family back home.) Many Vietnamese women working outside the home find the same low pay and tedium encountered by their American counterparts, but they also find another kind of freedom. To women previously cloistered in their homes, often married to men their parents choose, the working world offers social and financial opportunities they never would have had in Vietnam. The U.S. public school system provides the same opportunities for Vietnamese children—in Vietnam, education is a privilege of the very few.
The result has been a predictable explosion of divorces among Vietnamese Americans (the divorce rate is 12 percent, low by U.S. standards, but agonizing for the Vietnamese) as well as the implosion of family life. The strict obedience a man expects of his wife and children is no longer a given, as the American zeal for independence and self-reliance overtakes the Vietnamese values of mutual support and interdependence. Such stresses have greeted immigrants to the U.S. for generations; now they met the Vu family upon its arrival and began to curl around the family’s dreams with a force as insidious as it was invisible.
Allen Parkway Village is a dilapidated dun-colored public housing project on an intensely valuable piece of Houston real estate just west of downtown. These days the place is virtually empty, the windows boarded up and painted over in an eerily complementary shade of rust. But when Vu Dinh Chung arrived in 1975, Allen Parkway Village was the destination of thousands of Vietnamese refugees. They did not intend to stay long—with many it was a point of pride to take only the amount of government assistance to survive—and perhaps it was just as well. As it has been for immigrants over centuries, the first home for many Vietnamese provided a dangerous dose of American reality. Allen Parkway Village was cheap and centrally located; beyond that, its attributes were few. To save even more money, two, sometimes three families crowded into apartments meant for one; there was often racial tension between the newcomers and the blacks who had preceded them in the complex. Crime was a constant concern, not just from local toughs, but from other Vietnamese, who knew fellow refugees kept their gold and other valuables hidden at home because they did not trust American banks.
In spite of the difficulties, the Vietnamese tried to make Allen Parkway Village over in their own image. They planted vegetable gardens in the weedy strips between buildings, started communal businesses, and even put on plays. Because so many of the tenants were devout Catholics, mass was held on the basketball court. They tried to hold fast to one life in the midst of another.
Vu Dinh Chung arrived with his father, Vu Dinh Kham, his mother, Nguyen Thi Mau, his wife, Hue, and two daughters, Hong and Yen. Their journey was not so different from that of many others who came to Houston from Vietnam at that time. Chung’s family was originally from the North. They were among thousands of Catholics who migrated south after Vietnam was partitioned in 1954, and they settled in a coastal city near Saigon called Vung Tau, where the family was well respected but not wealthy. One of Chung’s uncles became a priest, which added to the family’s prestige. When what the Vietnamese call the American War broke out, Chung served as a helicopter pilot for the South and was captured and held prisoner by the Viet Cong. After Saigon fell, he, like so many men in the military, fled to America, leaving his wife and daughters in the care of an elder brother. He had no choice; to stay would mean execution or internment in prison.
Sometime later, with the brother’s help, the rest of Chung’s family slipped out of Vietnam and pressed forward to the United States, where, through Catholic Charities, they were reunited with him and resettled in Houston. Chung’s brother was not so lucky: After several unsuccessful attempts to escape from Vietnam, he made it out, only to die on a boat headed for Guam. It would be years later before the surviving family member—Chung’s nephew Vu Dinh Chi—would make it to the United States.
The Vus wasted no time upon their arrival in Houston. They were northern Vietnamese, after all, true to the geographical stereotype that pegged them as thrifty, hardworking, and determined. Chung’s father, Kham, set up shop as a barber in the Allen Parkway Village apartment. He was a garrulous, good-natured man, so their home was often full of people, sometimes for business and sometimes just for the comforts of a cup of steaming tea and gossip. There were problems—Chung’s mother began to display signs of Alzheimer’s—but there were joys as well. When Hue gave birth to a son, the family threw a party to celebrate their good luck.
Chung looked for work through the job-placement program at St. Joseph’s, a small gothic church near the main police station, and became a favorite of the volunteers there. “He was one of those special ones,” said St. Joseph’s social worker Theresa Leal. Chung was a small, slight man—he stood only five feet two—with a patient air and a crooked, if slightly sorrowful smile. Leal remembered him as “kind, sincere, and inward,” a man who never ventured into her office until he was invited, who was too polite to help himself to a cup of coffee unless it was offered. He always refused the church handouts of free bread and was persistent about following up on job offers. Often, Chung would leave for an interview full of anticipation, only to return a day or so later softly disappointed but eager to try again.
Soon his determination paid off. Because he was a skilled cabinetmaker, he was hired to make custom doors for a company called Plywood Distributors. The general manager, Jerry Fesselmeyer, had contacted the church when Houston’s incipient boom forced him to scramble for employees. Chung came to work each day carrying his lunch of rice in a steamer pail; he did not mix much with the other Vietnamese and Cambodians there. At Christmas he sent a religious card from his family to the Fesselmeyers, complete with a grateful inscription.
“He seemed to want a part of the dream that all of us want in this country,” Leal recalled. And for a while, it seemed entirely possible that he would get it.
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