Restaurant Shooting an Early Warning Signal? : For Some Uprooted Vietnamese Youths, the Trappings of a New Culture May Include Violence

Quy Ngoc Nguyen said he wasn’t in the mood for dancing. Besides, he had promised to attend a dinner in memory of an old friend on the anniversary of his death. So while the rest of his friends went to a popular Vietnamese nightspot in Anaheim, Nguyen went to the dinner and left several hours later with another friend, Dien Phan, for a cup of coffee.

By the time they arrived at My Nguyen, a Garden Grove restaurant known for its good food, reasonable prices and late-night hours, dozens of people were trickling in from the nightclub to the small shopping-center cafe. An hour or so later, Nguyen got up to pay the bill and Phan went to the restroom.

When Phan came back, Nguyen was lying dead on the floor, felled in a sudden spray of gunfire that hit five other customers and employees. Phan cradled Nguyen’s body in his arms, moaning softly, until police arrived and pulled him away.

The violence that erupted in the noisy cafe last weekend would not have been unexpected in the poor neighborhoods of Santa Ana or Los Angeles or other urban areas across the country where gang shootings hold an almost routine place on the weekend agenda.

But this was Garden Grove, in the heart of Orange County’s “Little Saigon,” a quiet commercial center for Southeast Asian immigrants with a reputation for hard work and a fear of anything that would tarnish the community’s image.

The shootings, thought by Vietnamese community leaders to be the result of an argument among several youths that began at the Anaheim nightclub, were the second such incident to occur in recent years at a Vietnamese restaurant--and typical of the kind of quick and deadly violence that is no longer uncommon in the refugee communities of Southern California.

“In 1977, a lot of the kids who came over here were 5, 6, 7,” said Tay Nguyen, owner of a Vietnamese coffeehouse where video games lure teen-agers at all hours of the day and night. “People come here without families. Nothing to do, you know; they live with friends, they live with an uncle, nobody controls them. Ten years after, they’re 16 or 17. They make some money. And they buy a gun.”

Growing up with dim memories of a violent homeland and a culture often disturbingly at odds with their own, a new generation of Vietnamese youngsters may have trouble reconciling the real warfare of their memories with the make-believe warfare they see on television, Vietnamese community leaders say.

Often, they find it difficult to understand the strict behavioral codes that their families demand when confronted with the relative freedom of their American friends.

“My children tell me about things they see at school and don’t understand,” said Dieu Le, editor of a Vietnamese-language newspaper in Orange County and a former director of the Saigon government’s information ministry. “They think the American children act strangely. They come to class late, they just sit down, they don’t ask the teacher for permission.”

“They want to be equal with other kids,” said Westminster Police Detective Marc Frank, who has worked with the Vietnamese community for the last six years. “They want to be accepted. If they can’t do it in sports or something like that, then they’ll go to something else, which oftentimes is a gun. . . . Guns are the great equalizer.”

The majority of Southeast Asian youngsters present no problems. Most are disciplined students who attend school regularly and earn high grades, often far higher than their American counterparts. Among Garden Grove’s eight high schools last year, for example, all but one had Southeast Asian valedictorians.

Oanh Doan, who works with the Garden Grove Police Department’s crime-prevention unit, said problems usually begin when parents, with limited English skills, depend heavily on their children, who have attended school and learned to deal with the outside world. Too often, that breaks down the pattern of respect that Vietnamese parents expect from their children, she said.

Don’t Want Them Home

“I have a lot of parents calling here and complain to me their kids are so bad that they just don’t want to see their kids anymore, they don’t want to have their kids live in their home anymore,” Doan said.

“I usually see the situation where parents, they don’t speak very good English, so the kids just like the head of household,” she said. “So if parents need to communicate with someone, they need the kids to communicate for them. So the kids just like, ‘I’m better than you are now. You’re not as good as you should be.’ The parents, they’re confused, they’re frustrated, they say, ‘How can I discipline my kids?’ ”

Often, parents tell Doan that their children and their friends are stealing money and jewelry but they are afraid to report their own offspring to police. “They’re afraid if they tell the kids, ‘I know you been stealing, you been bad,’ the kids will say, ‘I won’t help you no more, I won’t drive you around no more. I won’t translate for you.’ The parents kind of have their hands tied,” she said.

Caught Stealing Stereos

One family, recently moved to Santa Ana from Long Beach, called Doan a few days ago for advice on what to do with their 13-year-old son. He is in juvenile hall for the third time, arrested for a string of automobile stereo thefts that his father vows the boy will repeat once he gets out.

“I beg the people in juvenile hall, keep my son there. I don’t want him,” the man, a Long Beach shipyard worker, had told Doan. “What can I do? Should I take a gun and shoot him, and maybe shoot myself?” the man had added.

So far, police say, Vietnamese youth do not present a significant crime problem. Most of the reports involve a small percentage of the community’s young people, “no more than 100 of them” in Orange County, for example, one police officer said.

“I get reports on everything involving the Asian community every week, and 85% of the time the reports involve Asians as victims, not suspects,” said Lt. Glenn Ackerman, who heads the Los Angeles Police Department’s Southeast Asian Task Force.

“There’s a problem there, and some of these young folks get out of hand, but by and large they’re pretty law-abiding folks,” he said.

Problem Could Worsen

Yet police officials say they are seeing the seeds of a crime problem that could become much worse.

“If you look at the gang wars in L. A., with the drive-by shootings and things like that, you don’t have it here on that kind of scale,” said Frank of the Westminster Police Department. “But if you look at other types of violence, then, yes, it’s there.

“They’ve taken to victimizing their own people,” he said. “Take residential robberies. This is where three or maybe six of them, all armed, are going in and taking over a house. They terrorize the family and take their valuables. Before 1978, you hardly ever heard of these. All of a sudden we’re having an increase in these, and they’re a very violent type of crime.”

Some Vietnamese youngsters appear to be familiar with guns and how to use them, Frank said.

“From the movies and television a lot of them saw in Vietnam, the American cowboy has always been a macho image to them,” he said. “The cowboy is this self-reliant individual who depends on no one. A lot of the young ones feel that if they’re going to be macho, then they’ll all model themselves after the cowboy. With that role model, guns are an accepted thing.

“And because of the (Vietnam) War, these kids saw a lot of guns. They do seem to be more willing to use them than others who have not been exposed to guns the way they have.”

Gunmen ‘Acted Macho’

At the My Nguyen restaurant, witnesses who talked to a Vietnamese newspaper said that the unidentified gunmen were “posing,” displaying guns under their coats and “acting macho.” Some witnesses said it appeared that the youths may have been arguing over a girl. The police say they are investigating a range of theories.

But whatever the explanation, Nguyen’s family and friends complain bitterly that he died without reason.

A recent engineering graduate of Cal State Long Beach with a job interview with the Northrup Corp. coming up, Nguyen, 25, had everything to live for, said a friend and classmate, Duc Tran.

“He’s very friendly, he sees everybody as his friend, and he very cheerful,” Tran said. “See, I brought with me these pictures, and you see him, what kind of personality he had. This is picture at his graduation, he’s the one in the middle, you see, he just smile all the time. Look at this, he joke, see, he put the graduation cap on his mom. . . . I have lost a great friend.”

Tran and Nguyen’s brother, Phu Nguyen, say they know about the kinds of youths who are turning increasingly to crime. But they don’t understand them.

‘Too Much TV’

“A lot of people who come to a new place, they constantly want to be part of it, so they imitate,” suggested Phu, a graduate of the Chicago Art Institute who is employed as a bus driver in Orange County. “But some people pick the wrong thing to imitate. These kids watch too much TV, and see that sort of violence, and horror; we’re talking about ‘Rambo,’ we might be talking about families who have to work so hard to support their families, they have to spend a lot more energy to get jobs for survival. So their kids have to go someplace else, and the only way to get attention outside the family is on the street.”

“They have no obligation in life,” Tran said. “They live one day at a time. They don’t worry about their future. They don’t care. I don’t know why. I don’t understand that.

“It has to be stopped, because this is not any movie or anything. This is real life. I think those people, they got affected by the movies, ‘The Year of the Dragon’ and all that stuff--it’s crazy! It’s violent. That’s just movie: that’s unreal. This is real! This is life!”

Phu, Tran and another friend of Nguyen’s, Vincent Trinh, were gathered at a Vietnamese cafe on 7th Street in Long Beach a few blocks from where Nguyen lived. The assistant manager, who came to join the party after a few moments, said Nguyen had come to the cafe nearly every morning.

‘Soup and Coffee’

“He come and have a bowl of soup and have a coffee,” Phu Do said. “His brother, too. When he came here, I know what he want to order, I just bring the food.”

In the background of the tidy, light-washed cafe, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and a Strauss waltz fed the steady hum of Vietnamese chatter. The four men sat silent for several moments.

“My brother would say that the one who leaves doesn’t hurt as much as the one who stays,” Phu Nguyen said. “Not to be philosophical, but Samuel Beckett, an Irish existentialist, a playwright, would say something: ‘Man is the victim of his own freedoms.’ You know, Quy found freedom, and he die.”