Violent, Defiant Vietnamese Form Girl Gangs : Crime: Brawling, knife-carrying female groups are a recent addition to Orange County’s Asian gang scene.

At 16, the Vietnamese-American girl who calls herself “Tomboy” is wanted for burglary. She has dyed amber hair, a knife-cut tattoo on her forearm that says “I Love Tuan,” and a way of hunching her shoulders that tells adults to drop dead.

She sits in silent fury, under arrest, in a lawn chair outside a Garden Grove motel room packed with 16 Vietnamese-American teen-agers. Inside, a police search is turning up a switch-blade, a holster for a pistol, high-caliber bullets, a stun gun and what police think is stolen property.

Garden Grove police say Tomboy and the four other girls in the motel room are part of Orange County’s new Asian gang problem: Groups of rival teen-age girls fighting with knives and arming themselves with semiautomatic weapons.

They give themselves names such as “Wally Girls,” “Pomona Girls,” “Junior Wally Girls” and “Dirty Punks.” Police have identified at least six gangs, each with 10 to 20 members ranging in age from about 13 to 20.

Each female gang is allied with one or more male gangs, including the “Santa Ana Boys,” “Cheap Boys” and “Natoma Boys,” police say. But in the past month, the girl gangs have begun fighting each other.

“They say Vietnamese girls look innocent but they’re vicious,” an 18-year-old member of the Dirty Punks said of her fellow gang members.

Since Thanksgiving, female gangs in Fountain Valley and Garden Grove have engaged in a series of fist and knife fights. The rivalry culminated in a brawl in Santa Ana’s Centennial Park on Dec. 1, when five Vietnamese-American girls were stabbed, said Sgt. Frank Hauptmann, who heads Garden Grove’s Asian gang unit.

The next night, police were interviewing gang members on Brookhurst Street when they heard gunshots and found a Cheap Boys gang member shot in the arm, Hauptmann said.

While Garden Grove officers were investigating, they heard more gunfire among four cars of teen-agers. When they stopped two of the suspect cars later that night, seven teen-agers--including one Wally Girl--were arrested on charges ranging from suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon to possession of loaded firearms in public.

It is unclear to police whether the girls are pulling the triggers or just carrying the guns. “I can’t say for sure whether or not they’ve shot anyone,” said Officer Mike Martin, a member of the gang unit. “I wouldn’t put it past them.”

Several female gang members, however, said it is the boys who do the shooting.

“Girls only fight with knives or high heels,” said one girl gang member, whom police had arrested on suspicion of breaking into a car.

The escalating violence among the female gangs and their male backers prompted Hauptmann to order a crackdown. On Friday night, 20 officers were sent out to interview as many gang members as possible, frisk suspects, confiscate weapons and broadcast the Police Department’s new gang policy: zero tolerance.

One of those stopped Friday night was the 18-year-old Dirty Punks member. Police say her boyfriend hangs out with the Cheap Boys and they believe his car was involved in the Brookhurst Street gunplay.

In tight jeans, black boots and a black sweater, the slender and pretty Dirty Punk bragged about her fighting skills. She said the rival Wally Girls are complaining to police that the Dirty Punks “did the drive-by” on Brookhurst.

“When it comes to fighting with fists, they can’t win,” she said of the Wally Girls. “These girls are saying I did the shooting, but I was at work. . . . Why should we go in (jail) for something we didn’t even do?”

The young woman, who came to the United States from Vietnam when she was 3, said her friends’ parents are powerless to control their daughters.

“They know, but Vietnamese parents, you know, if they’re strict, then the girls run away,” she explained.

Gang members often use motel rooms as staging grounds for crime capers or just to get together, police say. Usually, one person will rent the room, then invite a dozen friends to sneak in.

Acting Sassy

In the Anaheim motel room Friday night, police found a dozen young men they identified as members of the Santa Ana Boys and their friends, and four females they identified as Wally Girls. The girls lounged on the beds, reading their horoscopes in Vietnamese and sassing the officers as they rummaged through the girls’ bags.

Officers asked them what they want to be when they grow up. Tomboy said she wants to be a cop. “I’ll catch only white people, no Vietnamese,” she snapped.

Police have documented up to 40 male and female Asian gangs based in or passing through Garden Grove, Hauptmann said. The male gangs’ stock-in-trade is burglary (car radios, stereos, cash and gold jewelry) and auto theft. Several girls have been arrested for breaking into cars, but they more frequently engage in shoplifting and petty theft, police said.

The recent surge in both male and female teen-age gang activity has Garden Grove police particularly worried because it coincides with an increase in the violent robberies that police have begun calling “home invasions.”

Typically, eight or 10 gang members will target a Vietnamese family known to keep cash or jewelry at home, Hauptmann said. They force their way in with semiautomatic weapons, round up every member of the family and terrorize them until they hand over the goods.

“Home invasion robberies have been around for several years now, but the frequency is picking up,” Hauptmann said. “We’ve had five or six in the last two months.”

One former Junior Wally Girl worked as a front for such robberies, Martin said. The girl was arrested for robbery and is now in jail, he said.

“She would knock on the door; she would make contact with the victims,” Martin said. “They would open the door and the guys would go in.”

Home invasions are also growing more violent. In the last three months, three children have been threatened or harmed to make their parents cooperate. In one case, the assailants held a gun to an 8-year-old’s head and, in another, they held a child under hot tap water until he screamed, Hauptmann said.

Vietnamese community leaders are startled by the phenomenon of female gangs.

“I was shocked to hear that,” said Long C. Le, a Vietnamese-born English teacher at Fountain Valley High School. “I’ve heard of girls hanging out with gang members but I never heard that they formed their own gangs.”

Social Dislocation

Le said normal adolescent identity problems are made worse among Vietnamese refugees because of the cultural and social dislocation they face, and because their family structure has often been undermined or destroyed by the Vietnam War, life in refugee camps and immigration.

In some cases, gang members are orphans, or have only one parent, or are living with relatives or foster parents, Le said. In other cases, parents who themselves are poorly educated or do not speak English come to depend on their children for help, which undermines their authority, Le said.

“They develop a kind of inferiority complex when dealing with their children. And their children, because they speak the language, tell them one lie after another,” Le said.

Problems of identity and self-esteem are especially acute among Vietnamese-American teen-agers who are not doing well in school because of the extremely high value placed on education, Le and others said.

To such children, they said, the gangs offer a sense of belonging that school, family and a wounded community have not been able to provide.

“I don’t think it’s adolescent rebellion,” Le said. “I think it’s despair.”