by CW Ullman
One night as Trieu was leaving a restaurant with a Vietnamese man and his ten year old daughter an alarming incident happened. In an alley, a white man with blondish-red hair ran them down, grabbed the child and repeatedly apologized to her. The father tried to push the man away, but was then confronted with a more serious threat when the Viper Family Junior Gang appeared.
Of the many Asian gangs, this one, lead by a five-foot-tall chief, Little Tam Qui was feared the most. His reputation for cruelty was legendary; he was known throughout the Vietnamese community. He had been expelled from school in the eighth grade for attempting to cram a chalkboard eraser down a teacher’s throat. He had tangled with other gangs and was known for using any weapon, but was especially partial to knives for killing. He shook down Vietnamese businesses, but made the most money from drug sales.
Little Tam Qui intervened in the altercation between the little girl and the red-headed man. Tam Qui took money from the man, kept half for himself, and gave the other half to Trieu’s date. Trieu, the man and his daughter left hurriedly, but watched from the other end of the alley while Tam Qui beat the red-headed man. He put a gun to the man’s bloodied head, but the gun misfired. It appeared as though the man was begging to be shot and just as Tam Qui was about to fulfill his wish, a group of white men led by a Los Angeles Sherriff stopped the execution. They gave money to Little Tam Qui and he released the red-haired man into the sheriff’s custody.
When Trieu reached home, she called My Ling and asked to come over. When she arrived at My Ling’s, Trieu related the gang experience. Trieu had not seen My Ling descend into such a dark mood for a very long time and Hao had never witnessed his wife’s smoldering hostility..
My Ling turned to Trieu and said, “You’ll all stay with us until your new house is ready.” She brooded for awhile and finished with, “I’ll handle this.”
Hao did not know what that meant and was hesitant to even ask.
<>
The next time My Ling was finished work at the probation office, she took a file home with her. She called a phone number from the file and asked if she could meet the person in a Santa Ana coffee shop.
Don Padre pulled into the coffee shop parking lot and before he could get out of the car, My Ling opened the passenger-side door and got in.
“How do I know you?” Don Padre asked.
“I work in the probation office for Orange County. I held your daughter while you drug tested,” My Ling said.
Don Padre still not sure what this was about, inquired, “You said you have something for me?”
“I have your file. I know your complete history, and I also know you’re still running Los Familias 19,” My Ling stated flatly.
“You got it wrong, lady. I’m no vato,” he denied.
“Your phone is wire-tapped and I have the tapes. They’re tearing the probation department apart looking for them, because a judge will not issue a warrant for your arrest without them,” My Ling explained.
“Why don’t I just take the tapes from you right now?” Don Padre threatened.
“Because, I have this,” My Ling pulled open her tote to reveal the .45 she had brought from Vietnam. “Also, I wouldn’t be so stupid to bring the tapes with me.”
“So, what do you want from me?” he asked, while warily eyeing My Ling’s tote.
“You have history with the Viper Family Junior. I want you to take out Tam Qui,” she ordered.
Don Padre was stunned into silence. He lifted his eyes up to My Ling’s face and wondered who is this woman?
“You want me to kill Little Tam Qui? Why?” He asked.
“I have my own reasons. You do this and I’ll give you the tapes. I know you hate him as much as I do. You two went to school together and there has always been bad blood between LF 19 and the Vipers,” she stated.
She got out of the car, “You’ve got a week,” then closed the door and left.
Don Padre sat in the truck for ten minutes trying to make sense of what just happened. She knew everything about him and the Vipers. And she was right that he hated Little Tam Qui since he first met him in grammar school. The first thing he wanted to do was see if the phone was tapped.
When he arrived home he took apart the handset and found nothing. He called a fellow gang member, a telephone lineman, and asked him to come to his house. The lineman climbed the telephone pole outside and pointed to a wire that was not supposed to be there.
“I’ll be goddamed, she was right,” he stated.
When the lineman came down, Don Padre told him to gather the rest of the gang together at the lineman’s house and that no one call his house and talk business. Later that night, LF 19 went looking for Viper Family Junior. They found a few of them in Fullerton, and even though Little Tam Qui was not there they assaulted them anyway. Don Padre knew when Little Tam Qui found out, he would come to Santa Ana, LF 19’s turf. Once Tam Qui showed, Don Padre would be waiting for him.
My Ling would have liked to have gone to the police regarding the Vipers, but every time the police arrested the Vipers, the gang would be back on the street as though nothing had happened. She had watched Tam Qui from afar, and even though he intervened on Trieu’s behalf, he made the mistake of scaring Trieu. When someone caused that reaction within My Ling’s family, it became personal, and My Ling would not have that. After years of being brutalized in Southeast Asia, My Ling felt the only way to stop brutes was to kill them. Cin said that in the jungle it’s easier to spot the predators and the prey. My Ling was a predator.
While working in the probation department, My Ling had become increasingly aware of children involved with all aspects of gangs: those in gangs, those who lived in fear of gangs, and the ones left fatherless when their gang member fathers were killed. In early 1992, she learned of an opening in Los Angeles County Child Protective Services and transferred to work there part time. While she would only be a clerk, she thought that her experiences from Vietnam with the girls in the orphanage and the Khmer Rouge might be useful.
She saw things one of two ways with the gangs: most members could have been prevented from joining with counseling, while others were psychotic, lost causes like Tam Qui and should be killed. She saw many of the members were intimidated into joining and most of them were without fathers who lived at home. My Ling once told Trieu, “The mothers spend more thought on what kind of car they want, than on having children.”
While they all complained about what their children needed, they did not think it was their responsibility to provide it. What disturbed My Ling more was that the governmental agencies reinforced that idea.
She understood how gangs provided a facsimile of family: the young members were held accountable, they had comrades who became siblings, and they had a leader who acted as a father figure. The rhetorical question she asked was not why were kids in gangs, but, why wouldn’t they be?
When she went to work for Child Protective Services in Los Angeles, she realized the depth of the problem from the government’s perspective. The caseworkers fought a bureaucratic maze of regulations and lethargy. If they pulled children out of homes, the trauma it caused the child and the mother made problems worst. If they left the children in the home, the situation rarely improved because the mothers, who were frequently sixteen or younger, were not open to advice.
Along with the lack of parenting from so many of the young mothers, she found people in the agency to have their own agendas. The worst of them was Wilamena Leumveld. Whenever My Ling received paperwork from her to file, it was illegible or incomplete. Leumveld always complained that the agency was insensitive to mothers because it was run by men. She said there was little respect given to women, yet she was the one who spoke most harshly to the young mothers and was as dismissive of them as she was of My Ling. The irony was that Leumveld had no children of her own nor did she even like them. She spent a large part of her time flirting with the men in the office or the fathers while on her visits.
At the opposite extr
eme, My Ling thought Kathy Wiley, another social worker in the office, was the picture of a conscientious agent. She was thorough, compassionate, dedicated, but mostly she was patient. She thought it was crucial to make the children feel they were liked and the parents and grandparents, some who were barely thirty, that she was there to help them and would not abandon them. It seemed as though the best family outcomes were under her purview.
My Ling and Kathy became friends. After she found out about My Ling’s life in Southeast Asia, including Lotus Blossom, she helped her set up a foundation to send donations to Tuyen Mam.
Once in America, My Ling wanted to make a difference, but felt the problems were overwhelming and the cultural differences bewildering. She decided that April of 1992 would be her last month at Child Protective Services and would instead focus on helping the Lotus Blossom.
My Ling’s plans were altered when an event that would have overwhelmed anyone else soon enveloped her. While the majority of the population of two Southern California counties reacted in fear and horror, behind locked doors, My Ling found herself in the middle of it and knew instinctively how to survive in the chaos.
The event unfolded one afternoon as she left downtown Los Angeles to make her usual hour and a half trip home to Corona Del Mar. On this afternoon, as she drove home, she found herself in the middle of the Rodney King riots.
On the drive home, she listened to a tape of classical violin music and missed the newscasts of the riot’s beginnings. She pulled off the Harbor Freeway to shop at a Vietnamese store near Normandie and Vermont in South Central Los Angeles. When she turned a corner, she found her car stuck in traffic as gangs attacked automobiles that could neither pull forward nor back up. She witnessed roving youths coming down the road between cars, dragging people out, and beating them. She opened her tote, emptied a box of bullets into her pocket and pulled out the .45 she always carried with her when she drove to downtown Los Angeles. She stashed her tote under the seat just as she saw the men advancing down the traffic lane on her driver’s side. She rolled down the passenger-side window, slipped out of the car, and stayed crouched between vehicles.
She waited for the men. They opened her car’s driver-side door and looked inside. They felt around for the ignition keys on the steering column that My Ling had already pocketed. When the men could not find the keys, they stood up and looked around to find the driver. My Ling, in plain sight, but using the technique of melding she had learned from the Pear tribesman in Cambodia, was invisible to them.
They went to other cars in her lane, and when they found nothing, moved on allowing her to go back to her vehicle. Her car, hemmed in by four vacant vehicles, would have to be abandoned. She looked up and saw another gang coming her way and again crouched near the fender of a nearby car going unnoticed by the passing men. She did this five more times as gangs would stand close to her and she would go unseen.
When the coast was clear, she went to a car parked by a curb, looked around for ignition keys but could not find any. She had learned from Thanh how to hot wire a car and used that skill to start a 1985 Lincoln Continental. She went back to her car to retrieve her tote and returned to the Lincoln, dwarfed by the size of the vehicle. As she moved the seat into a position allowing her to drive, she spotted a pack of boys moving toward her. She was about to put the car in gear, when a hand reached through the window from behind and grabbed the wheel. She slammed the butt of the .45 on the hand, and when it let go, she threw the gearshift into reverse and rammed a car behind her, pushing it back. The thugs were now on the hood of the Lincoln as she got ready to put it in drive. One of the boys was about to swing a pipe at her windshield, when she quickly fired two shots out the window into the night sky. The boys were surprised that a diminutive Asian woman, who could barely see over the steering wheel, fired a gun. They fell over each other in a panic, as the sedan jumped the curb, just missing them.
She drove down the sidewalk for one hundred yards, when she came upon a cab that was getting hammered by five teenagers. Checking her review mirror to make sure there was no one behind her, she skidded to a halt next to the cab. The teenagers stopped beating the cab at the sight of a five-foot-tall Asian lady stepping out of a Lincoln Continental with a gun aimed at them. She fired a few feet over their heads. When they fled, she motioned the cabbie and his occupants to get into the Lincoln. They ran out of the cab and dove into her car. She put it in drive and took off down the sidewalk until the road opened up and she could steer onto the street.
“Hold the wheel,” she ordered the cabbie sitting next to her, surprising him with her command.
She popped the magazine out of the .45 and replaced the four bullets she had fired with four from her pocket. The cabbie did not know if he was more astounded by this small woman driving such a big car, that he was steering from the passenger seat, or that she was loading a gun.
“Is everyone okay?” My Ling asked. The other equally astounded passengers nodded.
“Do you know what’s going on?” My Ling asked the cab driver as she set the gun on her lap and took the wheel.
“Blacks are angry about the Rodney King verdict,” he explained. She was not completely aware of the trial until the cabbie explained it to her.
“Do you know your way around here?” My Ling inquired.
“The problem is we’re in the middle of the riot and many of these side streets are either blocked or neighborhoods you don’t want to go into,” he stated.
They were coming up on stopped traffic and My Ling ordered, “Hold on.”
She drove up onto the sidewalk, scattering pedestrians, while laying on the horn. Teenagers were throwing bottles, rocks, and pipes at the car as it passed by. She found a side street and drove down it.
“Where did you learn to drive like this?” the cabbie asked.
“Vietnam…Cambodia.”
“Do they all drive like this?” he responded in surprise.
She stopped at the end of street and looked at the cabbie, “We have to get back on the freeway. How can I do that?”
He suggested a route to take hoping it would be free of any obstructions or gangs. It wasn’t.
They had turned down a corridor and encountered a gathering of teenagers running in their direction, shooting.
She did not move the car. She turned to the cabbie who was under the dash and coolly asked, “Did you see any barricades behind them?”
“What!? No, I don’t know…” he yelled from his crouch.
She was waiting for the group to separate so she could see what was behind them and when they did not, she fired a warning shot out the window. They scattered and some reflexly fell on the ground. When she saw there was no barricade, she floored the car in the direction of the gang, passing them before they could fire upon the Lincoln.
She turned right onto a main thoroughfare and saw an entrance to the Harbor Freeway. She looked down on the cabbie, still on the floor.
“I need some help,” she calmly stated. “Do you know how to work the high beams on this car?
From the floor he nervously answered, “Yeah.”
“Okay, I need you to work them while you hold the wheel,” she ordered.
“Are you crazy?” The cabbie accused.
“Now,” My Ling ordered.
He sat up grabbed the wheel and started flashing the high beams. My Ling was hitting the horn and firing out the window. The entrance to the freeway was blocked by a group of teenagers and some furniture. She did not want them hitting the Lincoln with any gunfire and figured if she drove at them fast with lights flashing, the horn screaming and her gun blazing they would duck for cover, which they did. The cabbie continued to drive from a kneeling position as the car barreled onto the freeway doing eighty miles an hour.
My Ling took the wheel again and coolly observed, as though she were taking little My Ling to violin lessons, “We’re good.”
The passengers in the back seat and the cabbie were not so sure. My Ling looked in the rea
r view mirror and asked, “Where were you going?”
The cabbie said, “The Watts Towers,” historic landmarks in the riot area.
With irony, My Ling stated the obvious, “It probably isn’t a good night for that. Where are you from?” she asked the back seat passengers, as she grabbed the cabbie’s wrist to hold the wheel again so she could reload the .45.
“We’re from England. We’re on holiday?” The woman stated in a proper British accent.
“If this is your first time here, you have to go to Disneyland,” My Ling encouraged. “It’s really fun.”
The woman answered in dazed amazement, “We’ll take note.”
“I don’t think it’s safe to drive back into Los Angeles. We’ll take you back tomorrow. You can stay with my family. We live on the beach in Corona Del Mar,” My Ling offered.
“That’s very nice of you, but we don’t want to be a bother,” the woman demurred.
“It’s no bother. We live in a big house,” My Ling concluded, as she finished loading the clip and popping it back in the weapon. She turned to the cabbie, “Find 1070 on the radio; I want to hear what’s going on.”
Thirty minutes later, My Ling turned into the circular driveway in front of a large ranch-style house. “This is where my husband and I live with little My Ling, Dao, Di.u, my sister, Trieu, and her son, Tu.”
Hao came out of the house and hugged My Ling, who kissed and hugged him back.
“Have you seen the television?” Hao exclaimed.
“Darling, these are the…” My Ling realized she did not know their names.
The man dressed in a blue blazer and tie stepped forward, “I am Reginald Hastings; this is my wife, Edith, her sister, Hildegard, and our cab driver…I’m afraid I don’t know your name, chap.”