Tinh, Tien, Tu, Toi, Thu--Love, Money, Prison, Sin, Revenge : An Immigrant Unravels a Myth-Fueled Dream That Ended Violently and Reflects on How a Good Son of One Country Becomes the Errant Child of Another

On the afternoon of April 4, 1991, 15 years, 11 months and 27 days after the end of the Vietnam War, four Vietnamese youths armed with semiautomatic pistols stormed into a Good Guys electronic store on Stockton Boulevard in Sacramento and held 41 people hostage. Speaking heavily accented and broken English, they issued what the Sacramento Bee described as “a series of bizarre demands.” They wanted a helicopter to fly to Thailand and fight the Viet Cong, $4 million, four bulletproof vests and 40 pieces of 1,000-year-old ginseng roots.

While a crowd gathered across the street, some enthusiasts equipped with their own camcorders, TV reporters informed viewers that three of the gunmen were brothers--Loi Khac Nguyen, 21, Pham Khac Nguyen, 19, and Long Khac Nguyen, 17--and the last, Cuong Tran, 16, was Long Nguyen’s best friend. The Nguyen brothers had come from a poor Vietnamese Catholic family headed by an ex-sergeant of the South Vietnamese army. All four were altar boys. Three of the youths had dropped out of school or had been expelled. None had been able to find a steady job.

The gunmen could be seen on live television behind the store’s glass doors, strolling back and forth with their firearms, their hostages bound at their feet. Sacramento County Sheriff Glen Craig, who had implanted listening devices in the store, reported that the gunmen were jubilant at seeing themselves and hearing their names on TV--”Oh, ah, we’re going to be movie stars!” The sheriff had also told reporters that the gunmen belonged to a loosely knit gang called Oriental Boys--an error, as it turned out, since police couldn’t prove membership in any gang.

As the siege wore on, negotiations between the gunmen and the taut-faced, gray-haired sheriff reached a stalemate. The gunmen, for their part, had grown increasingly edgy and refused to negotiate after authorities met only part of one demand--providing them with a single bulletproof jacket. Sheriff Craig, on the other hand, later told reporters that the four would not “focus on any single demand. They were attempting to gain notoriety, attention and, perhaps, some transportation out of the country.”

Eight-and-a-half hours later, after the gunmen wounded two of the hostages, a SWAT team raided the store on live television. Three of the young men were killed immediately, but not before one of them sprayed the hostages with bullets, killing two employees--John Lee Fritz and Kris Sohne--and a customer--Fernando Gutierrez--and wounding eight more. Loi Nguyen, the oldest, and the one who wore the bulletproof jacket, was seriously wounded. His trial on 49 felony counts and three counts of murder is set for July 11. He is pleading not guilty.

As I watched this tragedy unfold on my TV set that night, I remember being overwhelmed by an irrational fear. It was the fear that the Vietnam War had somehow been renewed by those gunmen and by those helicopters hovering over the store. And though I was on the safe side of the TV screen now and judging their barbaric acts, I was not without this singular sense of foreboding: Six years ago I could have been one of them.

If the story of the Good Guys ended in carnage on the linoleum floor of an electronics store, it began an ocean and an epic journey away, nourished by numerous subterranean streams. It is those streams I am foundering in. I am at once too close and too far from their story. Though an American journalist now, I came to this country as a Vietnamese refugee, the son of a South Vietnamese army officer. The young men and I, through our fathers, are veterans of a civil war we never actually fought. In their demands, I hear the thematic echo of vengeance, which forms and shapes all Vietnamese youths who grow up in America. Perhaps all this binds me to the Good Guys hostage-takers nearly two decades after the last U.S. helicopter hovered over a burning Saigon before heading toward the South China Sea.

WHEN I ASKED FOR DIRECTIONS, THE blond kid on Stockton Boulevard rattled off names of generic American landmarks in an amiable tone: Midas . . . Shakey’s pizza . . . Carl’s Jr. . . . man, you can’t miss it. . . . Turn left at the House of Fabrics. Next to it, you’ll see the Good Guys.

Inside, the first thing you noticed was yourself. Walk through the glass door and a dozen camcorders gave you back your reflections on the various TV sets. For as little as $549, you could be (oh, ah) your own movie star.

I saw but tried not to look at my own faces on those TV screens. The faces, my faces, appeared expressionless, the thick brows slightly raised, touched perhaps by a tinge of skepticism. I do not believe in instant fame, had always thought Andy Warhol’s prediction an odd American curse.

But teen-agers are daily worshipers in this secular temple of high-tech consumerism, their eyes mesmerized by the son et lumiere. At the Nintendo counter, five Asian teens vied to compete for world championship of Street Fighter II. At the cellular phone display, two Latino girls pretended to gossip, using those palm-sized communicators. And at the store’s far end, a hundred or so TV sets formed a kind of electronic wall that talked and sang and showed the shopper the panorama of America--talk shows, soap operas, commercials. A fat housewife described her sex life on a dozen or so screens. In a hushed tone, she related intimate details of her marital betrayal to Oprah and 14 million other people--”I never told anybody this but . . .”--and managed to blush.

It is here, in this American postmodern public square, that the ethnic private meets the mainstream public. At dinnertime on the night of the Good Guys siege, Papa and Mama Nguyen suddenly saw their three eldest boys holding American hostages at the neighborhood electronics store. One can assume that their sons were simultaneously watching their own drama on dozens of TV sets. It is a kind of instantaneous real-life opera made popular by television these days, the blood opera with all nuances flattened so that viewers get only a reporter’s sound bites and vivid endings. Narrative is shaved to the bone, history and background ignored.

That sort of ignorance is peculiarly American, or so it seems to many of the 12,000 Vietnamese in the Sacramento area. A few who watched the siege recall a dangerous combination of arrogance and confusion among the TV reporters and especially the authorities. “They ran around like chickens without heads,” said one Vietnamese man who volunteered to help the police but was turned away. “The boys were Vietnamese Catholics and the sheriff initially had a Laotian monk at the scene,” he said.

Yet clues that would have helped the sheriffs and the journalists unlock the gunmen’s psyches were just minutes from the Good Guys, in Little Saigon. In a mini-mall a mile or so away, a video store called Ngoc Thao (Precious Herb) catered to a Vietnamese clientele. Colorful posters of gangsters and cops holding Uzis and of ancient swordsmen in silk brocades flying above temple rooftops covered the walls and glass windows. Here, as in many other video stores frequented by local Vietnamese in Sacramento, one can find 1,000-year-old ginseng roots--the precious cure-all usually discovered by the lucky hero in kung fu epics--or other magical panaceas and cursed swords. They’re in hundreds of Hong Kong videos, dubbed in Vietnamese, that line the shelves.

The cashier, a heavily made-up woman, was having a busy day. Like a high priestess with holy water, she dispensed pieces of Asia’s fabled past to hordes of homesick Vietnamese.

“Sister, when is the Royal Tramp video coming out? I’ve been waiting for months.”

“Sister, we want ‘Dragon Palms’ and ‘The Revenge of Black Orchid.’ I hear the woman in ‘Orchid’ is the best fighter and, like a man, kills everyone who assassinated her parents.”

“Aunty, how much does a karaoke machine cost? Everybody in my family is dying to be a rock ‘n’ roll star.”

At the entrance, an 8-year-old holding a plastic bag filled with kung fu videos was his old man’s pride and joy. Papa urged youngest son to say something to a friend, an army buddy wearing a fatigue jacket. Youngest son shrugged, then, without enthusiasm, recited a quote from a movie:

“Honorable father, I must leave you now and find a mentor to learn the martial art way. I will avenge our family honor after I have mastered the Iron Palms of Death.”

The two men laughed and applauded the mythological voice of China, a voice that provides a kind of parochial snare in the Americanization process. Thanks to CNN, satellite dishes, cable TVs, VCRs, jumbo jets, camcorders and fax machines, integration turns retro-future-active. Technology renews old myths, shrinks oceans, packages memories, melts borders, rejuvenates old passions, redefines the assimilation process. For Asian children immigrating to America today, their parents’ homelands are no longer as far away as they were for children in earlier times. The American-born Vietnamese boy who mouths ancient wisdoms may not know their meaning, may never, for that matter, master the Iron Palms of Death, but somehow Asia has already exuded mysticism into his soul. Indeed, the alluring incense, the singsong languages, the communal and familial Confucian values of loyalty and obligation, the old-world gestures of self-sacrifice and revenge--all that earlier generations of American-born Asians tried so hard to exorcise--is now in style, evidenced in the Little Saigons and Little Seouls that dot so many California urban landscapes.

TWO DAYS AFTER THE GOOD GUYS SIEGE,a Sacramento Bee photo that ran the length of the page showed the Nguyen brothers’ parents standing in their living room as if facing a firing squad. Though stricken with grief, Bim Khac and Sao Thi Nguyen admitted journalists into their tiny two-bedroom unit in the Laura Dawn Manor Apartments, a two-story structure rented out mostly to Southeast Asian families.

The photo shows a sagging sofa, a VCR and, of course, a large TV set. On top of the TV stands a South Vietnamese flag--three red horizontal stripes against a gold background--representing a country that no longer exists. On the opposite wall, a three-tier shrine displays crucifixes, statues of Mary, Joseph and Jesus and various martyred saints, all with mournful faces.

The Nguyens and their six children spent four months in a refugee camp in Indonesia before coming to the United States in the early 1980s. In Sacramento, they were receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The ex-sergeant from the South Vietnamese army, who is active in church, said through an interpreter that he was no help to his children when it came to explaining American things such as homework or news on TV. Still, wasn’t what he wanted for his children the same as what any Vietnamese parent wants--that they do well in school but keep “Vietnamese traditions”?

“Please tell the people of Sacramento I am very sorry for what my sons have done,” the patriarch offered. Asked how his quiet, obedient boys wound up becoming hostage-takers, Nguyen and his wife provided only a miserable silence.

This is the silence of an older generation of Vietnamese refugees who no longer feel anchored anywhere but in their impoverished homes. The exterior landscape belongs to America, strange and nonsensical, not their true home. Inside, many Vietnamese refugees tend to raise their children with stern rules--the way they themselves were raised back home. Vietnamese is spoken, with familial personal pronouns--youngest son, older sister, aunt, father, great uncle, and so on--lacing every sentence to remind the speakers and the listeners of their status in the Confucian hierarchical scheme of things. These parents are unprepared for children who lead dual lives, who may in fact commit rash and incomprehensibly violent acts--not at all the docile and obedient Vietnamese children they had hoped to raise.

“They are no longer really Vietnamese, nor are they really Americans,” said a former teacher, who recently came from Vietnam and now lives on welfare in Sacramento, of his own children. He called their tangled assimilation “crippled Americanization.”

For Loi, Pham and Long Nguyen and Cuong Tran, who failed school and grew up between the Good Guys electronics store and the Ngoc Thao, there existed two separate notions--notoriety and revenge, revenge being the stronger impulse. One encourages public displays (i.e., confessing on “Oprah,” or holding shoppers hostage and giving incoherent speeches) that may lead mainstream America to acknowledge that they exist. The other fulfills the old man’s extraterritorial passion--”helicopters to Thailand to kill Viet Cong”--and rejects America as the wasteland.

To grow up Vietnamese in America, after all, is to grow up with the legacy of belonging to the loser’s side and to endure all that entails. To grow up in America is to desire individual fame and glory, a larger sense of the self. Driving on Stockton Boulevard, it suddenly occurs to me that, while I myself might have learned to walk that strange Vietnamese American hyphen, it continues to hurl young and hapless Vietnamese down into a dark and bottomless pit.

AFTER GOOD GUYS, THE MEDIA OFFERED A VARIETY OF EXPLANATIONS. One had to do with the chronology of waves, as in waves of Vietnamese immigrants. The first wave of refugees who came to America in 1975, my wave, comprised intellectuals, educators, army officers, skilled civil servants, professionals--Vietnam’s best and brightest--those who had not experienced Vietnam under communist rule. This wave adjusted readily to American life, to an America of the 1970s that was economically stable and motivated, in part by guilt, to be generous to the newly arrived: There were English as a Second Language teachers, low-interest loans, job-training programs.

The later wave, the boat people who came in the ‘80s, were a different group--people who had been traumatized by re-education camps, cannibalism, rape, robbery, drowning at the hands of sea pirates, people who had suffered a chaotic and broken society back home under communist hands. These less-skilled, less-educated refugees were ill equipped to adjust to a less generous America.

But there were deeper currents that fed this second-wave refugee family that the media failed to detect. According to one Vietnamese who has been a social worker and knows the family well, the Nguyen parents had been burned not once but twice by communism. They fled to the South in 1954 when Catholics were persecuted by Ho Chi Minh and his army, and they fled Saigon as boat people a few years after the communists ransacked the South in 1975. Communist crimes, Viet Cong crimes, human-rights abuses by the Hanoi regime--all are meticulously documented by Vietnamese Catholic newspapers and magazines in the United States. The Viet Cong, whom the eldest Nguyen boy barely remembered, nevertheless figured as the prime villains in the household cosmology--the chief cause of their family’s suffering in America, the robbers of their father’s dignity, the blasphemers of the crucifix in their church, called the Vietnamese Catholic Martyrs.

The Nguyen brothers and Cuong Pham (whose more-affluent Chinese Vietnamese parents, unlike the Nguyens, refused to open their doors to journalists) were reportedly Hong Kong movie fanatics. All four youths watched the highly stylized films whose sword-crossing heroes and gun-toting detectives and gangsters duked it out amid Hong Kong high-rises, filling their waking dreams with homilies to honor, fraternal loyalty, betrayal and, of course, revenge.

To many Vietnamese living in Sacramento, these Hong Kong videos are the real culprit in the Good Guys shootout. Gangster films like John Woo’s “A Better Tomorrow” and “Bullet in the Head” were the rage among Vietnamese youth in the late 1980s. It was in re-enacting these gang-shooting scenes, some speculate, that the gunmen coolly flipped coins to decide which of the hostages would take the first bullet.

In “Bullet in the Head,” three best friends--blood brothers from Hong Kong looking to make a name for themselves (they have been losers up to this point)--travel to Vietnam during the war to smuggle illegal ampicillin. With the help of an assassin, they end up fighting everyone, including the Viet Cong. Though profit was their original quest, they are searching for their lost souls--they cannot decide whether they are good guys or bad guys. Along the way, the brothers are captured by the Viet Cong and tortured. They escape when Army of Republic of Vietnam helicopters arrive and attack the Viet Cong stronghold.

What moves the plot along and prompts young Vietnamese viewers to whooping-oohing cheers, is the escalating interplay of terror and death from one scene to the next, culminating in a betrayal of camaraderie and leading to vengeance. A few weeks after Good Guys, Sacramento police received a mysterious letter signed by the Brothers of the Dragon.

“On 4-4-91 you have killed our brothers in Sacramento for no reason,” it announced. “For this reason there must be revenge. The Brothers of the Dragon have decided in a meeting a lesson will be made.” On the margins of the letter were the Vietnamese words that embody the Hong Kong video gangster mythos, words that many Vietnamese gang members have tattooed on their own skin: Tinh, Tien, Tu, Toi, Thu --Love, Money, Prison, Sin, Revenge.

I TRY BUT CANNOT REACH LOI NGUYEN. HIS DEFENSE LAWYER, LINDA M. Parisi, refuses to answer my letters and phone calls. She traveled to Vietnam at her own expense to better understand the case and is known to be extremely protective of her client.

Then I go to interview his parents, both under psychiatric care. Although I imagine myself to be an American journalist, the closer I come to their home, the more I realize this has been a false assumption. Sitting in my car outside the Laura Dawn Manor, I am overwhelmed by fear and guilt. Once the door opens and the old couple welcomes me in, in my mother’s language, I know I will lose all perspective. An American journalist would ask the old couple, “How do you feel?” but I can’t. Among Vietnamese, a collective understanding assumes that we have all suffered an epic loss, so it is pointless to ask. Once inside, I might as well put away the note pad and declare my loyalty to the old couple, whatever their shortcomings.

I am also aware that I will somehow benefit from their tragedy. If the youths were inarticulate and failed to become stars, I, the one who has a public voice, am about to gain a measure of notoriety as the teller of their sensational tale. Irrational as it may be, I feel like a cannibal. And this, perhaps more than any other reason, is why I can’t bring myself to knock on their door.

Defeated, I return to San Francisco, the city of glassy high-rises and rolling hills, where I live. It is, I realize, a different narrative that I am after now, one that moves from the incidental toward the historical. I go to Tu Lan, a Vietnamese coffee shop in the Tenderloin area where Vietnamese men wearing unkempt army jackets argue about Vietnamese politics in low voices on a weekday afternoon. Cigarette smoke hangs in the air like a white mosquito net. A song entitled “Mother Vietnam: We Are Still Here” echoes from the stereo.

Thuan, a 22-year-old who came to the United States five years ago, stares at my laptop with large, sad eyes as I jot down some notes. Of course he has heard about the Good Guys siege, which has become a legend among his friends.

“What those guys tried to do is to make America notice us. To me they’re martyrs. Brother, America doesn’t care if we live or die. At night, I see Vietnamese kids wandering the streets like ghosts. Some run away from home, some have no home to go to. Some travel from one city to the next looking for something, not knowing what. Maybe if I had come early and become articulate and educated like you, it would be different. But it’s too late. Now I’m just a nobody. No education. I’m just stupid like a pig.”

Thuan, whose father died in a communist re-education camp, has an easy explanation for the hostage-takers’ demands. “The ginseng roots are to increase your internal strength tenfold. Everybody knows that. Some say you can see in the dark if you drink enough tea made from it. The older the roots are, the more potent and powerful. The helicopters are for revenge. If I were the sheriff, brother, I’d have given them the helicopter and ammunition and sent them to Vietnam to kill all the f------ Viet Cong in the world.”

IF I WERE ARTICULATE AND EDUCATED LIKE YOU, BROTHER . . .

But no matter how articulate a Vietnamese becomes, dear brother, when we set foot on the American shore, history is already against us. Vietnam goes on without us. America goes on without acknowledging us. We, like our defeated fathers, have become beside the point, a footnote in a small chapter of the history book. Our mythology is merely a private dream in America: There is no war to fight, no heroic quest, no territory to defend, no visible enemies.

I remember that day when my father, the South Vietnamese general, remained behind in Vietnam while my family and I escaped to Guam. We sat on a beach near our refugee camp with a hundred or so Vietnamese countrymen, listening to the British Broadcasting Corp. detail Saigon’s fall. I heard screams, saw wailing women tear their hair, saw men beat the sand with their fists, saw children weep. Then as the sun set, an old man stood up and sang our national anthem. “Let’s go to the battlefields together, why regret one’s life? National blood debts must be avenged by blood. . . . Oh, citizens, sacrifice your lives for the flag. . . .”

And so on. But no one joined the old man in the song. There was only silence. Then my mother whispered a challenge: “We are no longer citizens, we are now ma troi (wandering ghosts).” And the sun, blood red, dissolved into the horizon where Vietnam was, behind my mother’s words.

Silence enshrouded the two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco where 10 of us--two grandmothers, six grandchildren, two struggling sisters--made our new home. Our bodies hurtled through the narrow, dark corridors like bats, avoiding the tiny kitchen where only the women were allowed entrance (and the smell of fish sauce seeped out). We ate in silence (but always with the television turned on) in the dining room that served as another bedroom at night; waited silently in line for the bathroom, took showers together, slept together, yet we negotiated these intimate acts with the gestures of mimes. Why talk at all if everything to be voiced would only invoke sorrow? Where once we had been lively, upper-middle-class families in that tropical country so far away, here we were mousy, impoverished, miserable exiles living in a deep, dark hole.

The Vietnamese refugee’s first self-assessment in America is, inevitably, of his own helplessness. It is characterized by blushing, by looking down at one’s feet, by avoiding eye contact and by waiting: for welfare and food stamps, for the free clinic exam, for free jackets donated by charity, for green cards. As for the Vietnamese child, at some point he comes to the brutal realization that “his” side has lost, and “his” nation is gone; that his parents are inarticulate fools in a new country called America, and he must face the outside world alone.

As I did. One autumn morning in the locker room of my junior high, Johnny M., the blond and blue-eyed boy standing gloriously naked, asked, “Refugee boy, which side were you on? The winner’s or the loser’s?”

English still an unbendable language on my tongue, I answered, “Me: Loser’s side!” The locker room immediately erupted into a chorus of laughter, and I felt Johnny’s wet towel on my face--the white flag, I supposed, to surrender with. In geography class, Mrs. Collier brought out the new map of East Asia. Vietnam, that country coiling in the voluptuous shape of an S, was no longer mine. It was repainted now in a uniform color--red--the South flooded with blood. Mrs. Collier didn’t know why, exactly, that strange Asian kid, so quiet, suddenly buried his face in his arms and wept.

It was my father’s passion that I was feeling. A couple of months after our arrival, my father, the defeated general, made it to America. He and Aunty Tuyet’s husband, a paratroop captain, had commandeered a ship and escaped from Vietnam. The defeated warriors shattered the silence with tales of battles. The women evacuated to other corners of the apartment, but we boys sat and listened, half in rapture, half in fright. Late at night, over Johnnie Walker whiskey, the living-room warriors recounted the time when they were young and brave and most alive.

The Captain: “I remember going up Cambodia, brother, in ’71. We killed so many Viet Cong up there, we lost count. There was this Mien, and he would kill and kill, crazy for blood, and take out the VC livers and eat them raw. . . . I swear in front of my ancestral grave I know no one more loyal than that guy.”

The General: “Viet Cong were everywhere, hidden in the jungle, in the tall bushes. From my helicopter, I ordered napalm. You could see the balls of fire brighten the tree line when they exploded. I remember an American adviser friend of mine, killed in a helicopter. Incroyable! Blown up by a SAM missile. My own helicopter was shot at by snipers. We landed before it exploded. But we killed at least 800 of them that day.”

How can such language not stir a child’s imagination? America is dull by comparison; it is too real, too impersonal outside the window--a parking lot, a supermarket, Coke machines, the fog drifting harsh and cold. But inside, napalm fire, helicopters exploding, paratroopers landing, bombs oozing out of a drunken warrior’s fragmented sentences, transforming the dilapidated apartment into a battleground. Did I not hear the wailing voices of Viet Cong under fire? Did I not see a helicopter burst into flame? Smell the burnt flesh?

Outside our apartment there was a stairwell, dark and cool. The voices echoing from it now--giggling voices trying to be serious--belonged to my cousins and me, four child musketeers, swearing a sacred oath of vengeance after our fathers, drunk, had gone to bed. We talked of eradicating the Viet Cong from the face of the earth.

“With bazookas, with M16s, with kung fu power.”

“With Bruce Lee’s swiftness and endurance, we can massacre them all.”

“We can bomb the levees north of Hanoi during the monsoon.” I, the 12-year-old, the plotter, offered. “We can flood the nasty Viet Cong out to the South China Sea.”

In this way the dynamic of the exiled Vietnamese family is formed.

So I still understand my brother in the coffee shop. But while he speaks of vengeance, I have learned a different lesson, the American lesson: the knack of re-inventing oneself. To survive in the New World, we must, likewise, challenge the old world’s blood-for-blood ethos and search for a new story line.

I am no longer simply Vietnamese. I have changed. I have, like many I know, driven down that hyphen that stretches like a freeway from the mythological kingdom with its 1,000-year-old ginseng roots toward the cosmopolitan city, the wind in my hair and Springsteen on the radio. English is a bendable language now, English my own song.

I am, for that matter, no longer moved by the old man’s martial words on that Guam beach. I believe instead in self-liberation, in American rebirth. But never mind. I am thinking now of those four boys and their fatal gestures and what distinguishes good guys from bad guys in the new Vietnamese-American fable.

I AM NOT A CATHOLIC. There is no three-tiered shrine in my family’s living room for martyred saints. My mother is a Buddhist but she stopped praying for a time when we lost the war. My father, born a French citizen when Vietnam was a colony, was given a Christian name but never went to church. Unlike the Nguyen brothers, I am only half a Northerner, and I take my cardinal points from the South, from Saigon, my birthplace, where bourgeois sensibilities and Southern irreverence replaces Northern pieties. I have been to Paris and Nice, where my father’s relatives live and where--for the first time since leaving Vietnam--I felt, shamelessly, somehow I had come home.

“The Northerners are fanatics,” my father said at dinner one night after the Good Guys incident. My father had lived in Paris and liked wine more than jasmine tea; within five years of his arrival in America, he obtained an MBA and lifted us out of poverty into a suburban middle-class life. “The Northerners immolate themselves and talk too readily of martyrdom. They don’t think rationally. They think emotionally. Tu sais, comme ta mere! Those boys must have ingested all the plots for tragedy from their Northern Catholic parents.”

My mother dropped her chopsticks and feigned anger. “We Northerners defeated the French while you drank their wine,” she said, but we all laughed. She was, like the rest of us, also drinking French wine. As the entire family sat there under the gaudy faux-crystal chandelier, in my parent’s five-bedroom house with its kidney-shaped swimming pool, the irony did not escape us: Historical tragedy had come to seem beside the point.

How did this happen? Perhaps only a loser knows real freedom. Forced outside of history, away from home and hearth, he can choose to remake himself. One night America seeps in, and out goes the Vietnamese soul of sorrow. For the Vietnamese refugee family, the past is an enigma best left (at least temporarily) alone. Didn’t I see America invade the household when the conversation at dinner in our new home leaned slowly but surely toward real estate and escrow, toward jobs and cars and GPAs and overtime and vacation plans--the language of the American dream? Even my father’s dinner conversation had shifted to memories of an earlier time, a time before the war, when B-52 bombs were not falling and Vietnam was a lush tropical paradise or when he was living in Paris as a young man, tempestuously in love.

But I suspect irony was a luxury unavailable to those young men. Without the warriors-turned-businessmen, the pool, the chandelier above the dining room table to anchor them in a more complex reality, their passions remained colored by old-world vehemence.

A big difference between me and them was that my father helped me with my homework. I trusted my father’s version of America, that “it was built when Europe dumped its nonconformists on America’s shore.” That to make it in America, you need shrewdness, flexibility and a good aptitude for knowing your place in the world. My father, who saw himself as living in exile, nevertheless taught me how to interpret Walter Cronkite’s bad news, taught me how to drive.

I did not, because of my father’s help, fail school. That singularly most important American-making institution embraced me and rejected those boys. I am also nearly seven years older than Loi Nguyen, old enough to record the actual war in my memories as an army brat. I do not need John Woo’s slo-mo gore. Because I thought it through myself years ago, I know the illogic of killing Viet Cong from helicopters in peacetime--how would you distinguish them from ordinary Vietnamese? Which conical-hatted figure would you shoot?

A FRIEND WHO WORKS IN Palawan refugee camp in the Philippines recently sent me a poem he found carved on a stone under a tamarind tree. Written by an unknown Vietnamese boat person, it tells how to escape tragedy.

“Your mind is like a radio that you can dial to a different voice. It depends on you. So do not keep your mind always tuned to sorrow. If you want, just change the channel.”

When I turned 30 recently, years after I switched the dial, as it were, my father said, “At your age I was already a colonel.”

“We are very different now, Dad,” I snapped, a little irritated. “I don’t have a need to be a warrior here in America.” My father smiled a sad, knowing smile. What relevant words of wisdom can an exiled general pass down to his fully grown American son, the one whom he sometimes introduces to his ex-army buddies as “the American one,” which in Vietnamese could translate, depending on the context, as “bad,” “soulless” or “traitor”?

As I think about those young men and what they did, I realize that I, in Vietnamese eyes, haven’t been a very good son. I had denounced my father’s passion for his homeland as parochialism, had learned to listen to his war stories as tales of nostalgia, had, in fact, taken the private angst of his generation and disseminated it in public light--an unfilial act.

I imagine the Nguyen brothers adoring their father, the ex-sergeant of the South Vietnamese army. They must have loved and trusted his war stories. According to the Sacramento Bee, the Nguyen brothers had folded their arms, the Vietnamese filial pious gesture, and asked their parents for permission to leave the house that fateful day. This image haunts me. They tried to bring dignity to their father by fighting his war. They coveted being good Vietnamese sons: To assuage the old man’s grief, the young man must defeat his old man’s enemy.

But Hamlet’s unfocused vehemence is not to my taste, his bloody rampage to be his father’s son inappropriate to the New World. I am more intrigued by the complicated character of Indar in V.S. Naipaul’s “A Bend in The River,” who has lost his family home and fortune to political upheavals and been forced outside of territorial boundaries. “I am lucky,” he said, “I carry the world within me. . . . I’m tired of being on the losing side. I want to win and win and win.”

“To be or not to be” is no longer the question, for some of us Vietnamese children in America have learned to escape the outdated passions. These days, after a weekend visit I hug my mother but cannot approach my father. We regard each other instead from a distance, nod, and no more. We are veterans from different wars, and I have won mine.

A MILE OR SO FROM THE Good Guys store, at the newest plot in St. Mary’s Cemetery, flanked by a large statue of St. Pius and an American flag, Long and Pham Nguyen are buried side by side. It takes awhile to find their tombstones behind the pink mausoleum. It is late afternoon, and a few birds chirp as the sprinklers spray mist that forms rainbows. The only other visitors at St. Mary’s are a Vietnamese family busy burning incense sticks. The smoke, blown by a warm breeze, wavers alluringly.

This desert-like landscape, with it sandalwood fragrance, is not part of Joan Didion’s California anymore. The dark epic journeys that end in California have new players. Searching for the Nguyen brothers’ tombstones, I find names that leave a kind of phosphorescence on my mind--names like Le, Tran, Vuong, Nguyen--Vietnamese last names that once belonged to emperors of millennia passed, etched on new tombstones on plots where the grass has not yet fully grown.

Between the two brothers’ tombstones I place ginseng roots, $10.99 a box in a Vietnamese grocery store. The box has a plastic cover with the American Stars and Stripes painted on it. And printed in the lower right-hand corner is the word USA.