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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Chung had been hitting the beer pretty hard when Chi arrived at the apartment. The two men sat in the small living room and talked idly, and with his own youthful preoccupations Chi did not sense anything amiss when Chung asked him to take care of his grandmother when Chung could not be there for her. Sure, Chi told him. Chung smiled, chatted some more, and then told Chi that there were important papers in a brown paper bag in his brother-in-law Tuyen’s apartment should he ever need them; inside were the payment schedule for his parents’ cemetery plot, ten ounces of gold, and $500 in cash. The conversation ebbed, and Chi decided it was time to leave. When he got up, Chung did something his nephew had never seen him do, even when his father had died. He started to cry.
Meanwhile, Vu Lam Hue had left Houston with Duong, heading for a reunion of Gia Kiem students in Atlanta. They fell into the kind of masquerade lovers do: Duong told friends that he and Hue were married. Perhaps he hoped it would soon be true. He had told his wife he was going to Atlanta to find a job, only to call her from there to ask for a divorce.
Hue was on the phone too, and she was growing more and more alarmed. The couple was staying in the home of an old Air Force buddy of Duong’s who later provided an account of the next few days in a letter to Xay Dung that ran a few weeks after the murders.
According to the letter, Hue made her first call home on Tuesday night. Chung picked up the phone and told her he had quit his job and intended to find a hit man to kill her and her boyfriend. He also said he had transferred all his money to her younger brother. Hue then put in a call to Tuyen, who took Chung’s side. He told her that he had the money—and it would be used to buy her coffin. Frantic, Hue tried to explain that she had been terrified of Chung and that even her eldest daughter had agreed that she should leave for a while.
When Hue called Chung on Wednesday night, he told her that the children had begged him not to kill her. He promised not to kill her if she would come home right away—though, he told her, he still intended to kill her lover. According to the letter, Hue refused. “If you’re going to kill him, then you have to kill both of us,” she told him, adding that she planned to tell her attorney about his threats. Chung was unmoved. If the police come, he told her, he’d shoot them too.
Hue pleaded with him to be reasonable. Why couldn’t they separate for the sake of the children? Chung refused. His solution, according to the letter, was this: One of them should die.
“In the old days I married you because my parents forced me to marry you,” she told him. “I cannot live like this anymore.” Once again she asked for a separation, and once again Chung’s answer was venomous; he would kill both Hue and her lover. “If you come to Houston, people will find both of your corpses in three days,” Chung told his wife. “If you are somewhere in America, both of you will die in two weeks.”
Again Hue begged to be released from the marriage. “Why can’t we solve this peacefully, divorce each other like other couples in America do?”
Chung cursed her. “If you do that,” he told her, “then you will regret it for the rest of your life.”
The next day, Chung worked with speed and precision to make good on his promise. He took his children to K mart, and when they got inside, he sent the girls to look for clothes while he took his son to buy a camera. Another customer was ahead of him, and when Chung broke into the conversation, the customer whirled around and angrily ordered Chung to wait his turn. The girls appeared, eager to show off their new clothes; Chung scowled and told them the clothes were too small and sent them back for larger sizes. Chung then bought the Polaroid after learning how to use it and took his family home. That day he also bought a case of beer and a .45 automatic. Calmly, he told the salesman he wanted it for protection and asked the location of the nearest shooting range.
Sometime that day Chung also wrote two notes. One was to his employer. He said he was sorry he had never been able to meet the owners of the company to thank them for allowing him to work there. It was, he said, the best job he had had in America. He also wrote a note with instructions to Tuyen and a postscript to Hue: “From now on I return to you the freedom you wanted—wishing you much happiness.”
Then, with dinner ready and a day’s drinking behind him, he called his children to the table, where his wife’s place was empty. He took several portraits, and then he executed the perfect punishment to torture their mother forever.
Close to five hundred people crowded into Notre Dame Catholic Church for the funerals. The principal of Sharpstown High School had announced that any student wishing to attend the service would receive an excused absence, and so the pews were full of juniors and seniors who had been friends of Hong’s and Yen’s. Their teachers went too, sharing the cramped space with hundreds of somber Vietnamese.
Hue had tried to leave Atlanta on Thursday, but flight schedules and thunderstorms had delayed her departure for one more day. She reached Tuyen’s apartment on Friday, and he gave her the news. She thought he was joking. Now, after fainting on her way into the church, she drifted through the funeral like a wraith, accepting the condolences of the children’s friends and teachers.
But from many Vietnamese there was only scorn. Chi, as Chung’s eldest male relative in America, was now in charge. Wanting revenge, he refused to let her put on the traditional white Vietnamese funeral robe or join in the processional until she admitted her affair.
“Did you do it?” he demanded, knowing the answer. “If you did something, don’t try to bury it, because if you try to bury it, I will bury you.”
Hue looked at the ground and whispered, “Yes.”
How long had it been going on, Chi wanted to know.
“Eight months,” she told him.
Chi wasn’t the only person with retribution on his mind. As Hue stepped toward each open casket to stroke the faces of her children, many Vietnamese around her stepped away. When she placed the wedding ring the funeral director had removed from Chung back on his finger, some of them sneered. Finally, an elderly Vietnamese man came to her pew, and, pointing in her direction, blamed Hue for the deaths of her children. In the end, she had to be helped out of the church.
Several days later a student from the high school came to the apartment to give Hue a plaque meant for Yen—she had been chosen Junior of the Month a few weeks before. Hue studied the award and then turned to the girl. “What future do I have now?” she asked.
It is, perhaps, the one Chung wanted for her. The priest at Notre Dame is Hue’s protector now; he turns away the curious by declaring that she sees no one, does not read newspapers, watch television, or go out. Duong seems to have vanished from Hue’s heart; her only activities now seem to be volunteering at the church and visiting the cemetery.
As with any inexplicable event, people have invented stories and morals to make this one more comprehensible. Americans lapse into stereotypes—they say that Orientals do not value life as we do, or that perhaps Chung felt there was simply no hope for the children with both mother and father gone, and so he took them with him to his next life. The Vietnamese tend to blame the pleasures and the pressures of life in the U.S. “They are both victims of the Western disease,” said one who knew the story of Chung and Hue. “They forgot why they came to America.”
Finally, there are people, many of them teenagers, who do not understand why the children did not run from their father, if they died willingly, obedient to the end, or whether, perhaps, they sacrificed themselves to save their mother’s life. It is a question that could provide hours of haunting speculation, but the truth is this: They faced a man possessed of a lethal anger and a gun that could kill as fast as he could squeeze the trigger.
As of early fall, the Vus’ apartment had not been rented. A priest was brought in to bless the place; the bullet holes were patched and new carpet laid. Often, while the repairs were being made, Hue came by. For a while she busied herself by going through the children’s things. After they were given to the church, she took to wandering back to her tiny garden on the strip of dirt between the patio and the wooden fence, to tear a leaf from the herbs she had planted. Sometimes she came just to roam through the empty apartment. Finally, the manager told her she had to stop. He wanted her to know that, in this country, that simply wasn’t done.
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