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?
(Page 3 of 5)
Among new immigrants, the pressure to get ahead does not come solely from the American ethos—the Vietnamese put pressure on one another to succeed in their adopted country. The newspaper and television descriptions of the Vus’ small apartment and modest furnishings, which many Americans interpreted as signs of a family trying to better itself, were interpreted differently by Vietnamese—as signs of a family that was simply struggling. In the days after Chung’s death, Xay Dung pondered why the Vus had lived in the U.S. for sixteen years and had not progressed.
But in the late seventies at least, Chung was as guided by dreams as any newcomer to Houston. When a friend told him he could make more money at another company, Chung gave notice. Fesselmeyer tried to persuade him to stay by showing him that the pay wasn’t really better than Plywood’s pay plus benefits, but Chung insisted on leaving. He had given his word.
The promise of the new company was not fulfilled. In 1980 Chung followed the treacherous path of so many immigrants—he worked in a convenience store. Then he found a job with Bison Building Materials, a lumber company on the eastern edge of town, but he quit after several months for unspecified personal reasons. He moved to an oil-field equipment company for another year but somehow wound up at a gas station, where he waited on an old friend from Plywood. When Fesselmeyer heard the news, he told the man to go back and offer Chung his job again. That was in 1983. By then Chung had shuttled his wife and children—now three girls and a boy—across the city, from Allen Parkway Village to the Montrose and then southwest, where the city’s newest immigrants crowded into apartments abandoned by upwardly mobile singles. The boom had gone sour, and Chung’s character was put to the test.
Chung was, from the beginning, a man who could not keep his temper in check. Xay Dung reported that at some point he “lost his motivation,” and his work history reveals a man who had mastered his craft but not necessarily his environment. On the job, he had trouble fitting in. While family members described Chung as a calm, serene person, co-workers did not always see that side of him. He was tense and precise; he usually ate alone, making few friends and not seeming to want any. He was given to brooding. “He looked normal but his eyes looked far away; sometimes he was just thinking, thinking, thinking,” said a Cambodian émigré who worked with Chung at Plywood. Perhaps as a holdover from his days as a prisoner of war, Chung did not like taking orders; he had a tendency to stalk off the job if he felt pushed too far. He quit his second job at Plywood after an argument with another employee, and when Fesselmeyer could not mend fences, he sent Chung off with a kind letter of recommendation, praising his carpentry skills, and regretting that the misunderstanding could not be resolved.
The misunderstandings grew increasingly frequent. After returning to his job at Bison in 1984, he was fired in December 1985. “Employee was not willing to put forth effort to work on a timely basis,” a note in the file reports. Chung seemed thwarted. He spent several years working for a furniture manufacturer in the Houston Heights, but quit when he found a job paying $10 and hour instead of $9. After two months he was laid off again, in August 1989. Once, Chung had managed to save almost $50,000. Now he needed that money to live on while he struggled to find work again. For the next eight months, Chung’s beer drinking increased, along with his anger and frustration. The family’s savings dwindled, along with its prospects.
In the restaurants of little Saigon, between downtown and the Montrose, the aroma of Vietnamese coffee, a thick brew made thicker with sweetened, condensed milk, mixes with the smells of cigarette smoke and fish sauce. It is, for the inhabitants, the unmistakable fragrance of another place and time. Travel agencies offer discounts to Thailand, the route by which most Vietnamese travel home; car mechanics chatter in Vietnamese as they test engines; beauty salons feature posters of Oriental women in spiky new-wave dos. Little Saigon is a place to begin easing into a new country, and it is here that Vu Lam Hue’s passage to America truly began, thirteen years after she first arrived in Houston.
She appeared at the Chinh Tailor Shop, a large room bathed in Milam Street sunlight, where whitewashed burglar bars and bolts of fabric line the windows. Hue was a tiny woman with an anxious step; she carried herself shyly, her head slightly bowed, like any proper North Vietnamese woman, though her long black hair carried a seditious wave. When she asked for a job, the owner, Nguyen Van Chinh, asked, “What can you do?” Alterations, she told him. Chinh needed help, and so Hue was hired.
“She was a perfect North Vietnamese woman,” he recalled. Hue had come from Gia Kiem, a farming village about fifty miles northeast of Saigon, known throughout Vietnam for the devoutness of its people. It was established in 1954 by Catholic refugees who moved together from the North. The countryside was fertile in Gia Kiem—corn, rice, peanuts, tea and flowers grew there—and the days passed simply. “Life was good mentally, morally, ethically,” recalls one member of the community.
A Confucian principle governed the relationships between men and women there: Tai gia tong phu, xuat gia tong phu, phu tong tu, tu tu tong ton, which, translated, means, “At home, I obey my parents; leaving my home, I obey my husband; when my husband dies, I obey my oldest son; when my children die, I obey my oldest grandson.” It was to this precept that Hue adhered when she accepted her parents’ choice of a husband, Vu Dinh Chung, and when she left them behind to follow Chung, first to Saigon and then to America. She was true to her upbringing when she stayed home to raise her children and tend to her husband’s parents, and again when the family’s financial situation demanded that, in the fall of 1988, she look for a job.
Even out in the world, Hue initially did not choose to join it. Chinh put her to work in a back room, where she toiled quietly and diligently. She wore no makeup, and her clothes were so shabby that after a few weeks, Chinh sent her home with fabric and instructions to make a new outfit for herself—he told her she had to look nicer for the customers.
Hue was amenable but unapologetic. She used the word “freedom” to explain her feelings—she wanted nothing for herself but to be free of government support; her greatest happiness was to be free of the communists. She wanted to raise her children well, but she wanted to protect them from materialism, a word many Vietnamese use to encompass the negative aspects of life in the U.S. Freedom was just a political concept for Hue at that time; she knew nothing of the personal freedom of America. She saved her money to buy a cemetery plot for her in-laws, and to put her brother Lam Ngoc Tuyen, who had recently arrived, through trade school. She told Chinh that she did not want to put her money into a house because she would rather spend it on her family. She did not go to dances because she did not know how to dance; it was a rare pleasure when her father-in-law stopped by the shop to take her out for coffee. After work, she went straight home. The children needed tending, as did her husband: If she was just a few minutes late, Chung would phone angrily, and Hue did not want to annoy him. Vu ham Hue put her trust in the men in her life, as she had been taught to do.
“Everybody know” is the way one Vietnamese woman described the love affair between Vu Lam Hue and Tran Van Duong. There may be more than 60,000 Vietnamese in Houston, but after the deaths it seemed that everyone knew someone who knew the people involved.
By the time she found Tran Van Duong, Hue’s life was defined by domestic pressures. Money was tight, and though at times Hue’s salary alone often supported her husband and children, Chung complained bitterly about the amount of money she sent back to her family in Vietnam. As time passed, the problems increased. In 1990 Chung’s father died. He wanted to bring his mother to their apartment to live. Hue resisted: Six people were living in the two-bedroom apartment already. She wanted to put his mother in a nursing home, a solution that might be sadly pragmatic in the U.S. but that is an abomination in Vietnam. Chung’s mother dutifully went to the home, but she tried to commit suicide there.
During the winter of 1990-91, Chung remained unemployed. He looked for work in the furniture factories in Southwest Houston with no luck. (“Hardworker attitude, speech may be a problem,” wrote one interviewer.) As his interest in the outside world narrowed, his grip on his family tightened; behind perpetually closed curtains, the children did their homework while Chung drank. For Hue, it was a joyless life.
My Library
