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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And then joy appeared in the form of Tran Van Duong. Her attraction to him would have been easy to understand. He was tall and slim, a handsome, clever man with an easy charm, something of a show-off, a man who always seemed to know more than he was letting on. He made friends easily: “Whoever talks to him likes him,” his ex-wife said, with mournful simplicity. That Duong was radically different from the man Hue had married would probably have been enough to draw her to him, but there was something more profound at work. The two had been childhood friends in Gia Kiem but had not seen each other since the war. While Hue was making her home in the United States, Duong was incarcerated. The police appeared at his home in Saigon one night in 1975 and took him to the station. Someone had told the communist regime that he had supplied food to the rebels; he spent the next five years in a reeducation camp. His wife visited him as often as she could, sometimes hitching a ride on a forestry truck, sometimes with a child in tow. Food was a luxury the camp rarely provided—when the food Duong’s wife brought him ran out, he survived on crickets and tree roots. Eventually he escaped to Thailand, where his wife and children joined him in 1981.
The promise of America seemed to hold little allure for Duong, or at least he was not especially enchanted with the relationship of hard work to material success. Duong moved his family from the Washington, D.C. area to New Orleans to Houston, and they lived mostly on money his wife earned, first as a cook and then as a seamstress.
According to Xay Dung, when Duong moved to Houston he heard that another woman from his village lived there and sought her out. Hue refused his advances at first—he frequently called the Highway 6 tailor shop where she had gone to work—but he persisted until she gave in. Duong had told his wife that it was Hue who had approached him, looking for a way out of her marriage, and that she believed he was divorced. Whatever the truth, the two fell deeply in love, and like all people newly in love, they were careless and extravagant with their passion. They began to meet at local restaurants, where they were inevitably seen by people who knew one family or the other, and the talk began.
The affair reminded many Vietnamese of what they had lost, which is why they would later judge Hue so harshly. Just as Chung had no control over his life or his family, they were trying to live by old rules in a new society. When they talked about Hue, they reminded one another that in Vietnam, she would have been shunned for her actions. Here there were only warnings, which she was too much in love to heed. “Hue was like a butterfly” was the way one person described her.
The danger was not ephemeral. Many Vietnamese seemed to know that Chung’s anger was growing. With family honor at stake, he warned her in implicit and explicit ways that he had thoughts of violence. Once, Hue’s brother Tuyen asked the apartment complex’s handyman where he might buy a gun. Concerned, the handyman told the manager, who went to Chung with the story. In an oblique admonishment, Chung had the man return to the apartment when Hue was home and repeat the story for her benefit. In this way she learned whose side her own brother was on.
Whether it was this incident, the warnings from co-workers, or the growing tension at home, Hue finally took action in April. In a move that would never have been available to a woman of her class in Vietnam, she went to a lawyer. Hue told the attorney that her husband had been violent, that she was frightened, and that she wanted a divorce. Don’t serve him with papers, though, she told her lawyer; she would tell him herself. He would need time to get used to the idea.
The spring of 1991 should have been a glorious one for Vu Lam Hong. It was the season in which the eighteen-year-old became a U.S. citizen and learned to drive; it was the season in which she was to graduate from Sharpstown High School, standing thirteenth in her class. The eldest of the four children, Hong was the first to fulfill her parents’ dreams. “You are very lucky over a generation of teaching to have students like that,” one teacher said of Hong and her sister Yen. In spite of tensions between Chung and Hue, they managed to raise four exceptional children, and in spite of the strains that tore at their parents, the Vu children managed to keep trouble at home from their friends and teachers, as well-brought-up Vietnamese children were supposed to do.
Even the Vietnamese teenagers who knew Hong slip into stereotypes when they describe her: She was quiet and pretty, with her father’s wide-spaced eyes and high forehead; she was unfailingly polite and very smart, they say, a young woman whose sly sense of humor was her only defense against strict family dictums. Hong was the student who always kept the neatest notebook, who never cheated on tests, who always asked her teachers how their weekends went, and who always answered that hers went fine.
Had she lived, Hong would have made her father proud. She was not one of those immigrant children who would break her parents’ hearts with her American ways—she did not wear makeup or ask for plastic surgery to get an American nose, as some of the Oriental kids do. She wasn’t clothes crazy, and she didn’t chase after American boys. She gave herself an American name like many of the girls—Krystle, after the Linda Evans character on Dynasty—but that was her only concession to glamour; Hong wore the same clothes year after year and turned down offers of more fashionable hand-me-downs from friends. She did not complain when her father would not let her date, and she stopped borrowing romance novels from the Alief library after her father hit the roof when he found them hidden in her room. “I’m only allowed to check out intelligent books,” she told her friends afterward.
Vietnamese parents fear for their children in America, worry that they will squander their futures just as they fail to appreciate their abandoned past. Chung believed he could provide a proper future for his children only if he guarded them jealously, and if he failed in other aspects of his life, at this he succeeded. It was as if he wanted to protect his children—and himself—from some American infection. When Hong had a summer job at a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant two blocks from the apartment, Chung walked her home from work each night, but he always waited for her outside the front door, never venturing inside the entire time she worked there.
Just as her father protected her, Hong protected her parents. When a Vietnamese friend’s mother asked to meet them, Hong demurred, saying they were too busy. She only hinted that her father could be violent; like most Vietnamese children, she would not bring embarrassment upon her family by revealing their problems. As the crisis built, friends sensed trouble only because when they called, more and more often Hong told them that it wasn’t a good time to talk.
She was trying to find a solution to an insoluble problem. It was Hong who agreed that her mother should leave for a week to let her father cool off, now that she had asked for the divorce. Though Hong had been absent from school only once before—the day she became a U.S. citizen—she told her teachers on April 17 that she would be absent the next day, for personal reasons. Before she left school that day, she composed a poem on her computer. She didn’t have a great deal to look forward to, she wrote, and she was lonely with only her books for company. Maybe, she noted, tomorrow would be better.
From the moment Hue announced her decision to get a divorce, Chung started making plans of his own. On Monday, April 15, he called his nephew Chi and told him to change the joint account Hue had helped him open when he came to the U.S. last year. At twenty, Chi was Chung’s only relative in Houston, the son of the brother who had drowned so many years before. Baby-faced but cocky, Chi thought his uncle’s warning was excessive—he only had $600 in the account—and so he did nothing.
On Tuesday Chung did not go to work. Things had been looking up—after almost a year of unemployment he had found a job as a carpenter with another furniture manufacturer in April 1990. He had walked out in November when some of the other workers had made fun of his broken English, but when his boss learned the reason some months later, he offered Chung his job back. For the past few weeks he had been working again, happy with his job. Now he let it go.
On Thursday Chung called Chi again. He was calm but told his nephew that Hue had left him and had started divorce proceedings; she wanted custody of the two youngest children. Chung told Chi that he missed him an asked why he didn’t come over more often. In truth, Chung had grown weary of his uncle’s drinking, but he agreed to a visit.
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