Brothers Unmet

Trac Minh Vu heard about the brutal killing of Thien Minh Ly on a Tustin High School tennis court through an e-mail message.

It came three months after the murder occurred on Super Bowl Sunday in 1996 and two months after a pair of suspects, both stock clerks at a Tustin store, were arrested by a police SWAT team.

Vu, then in his junior year studying filmmaking at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., received the message from Mai Pham, a close friend of Ly’s who had launched a media campaign to help convince skeptical prosecutors that Ly had been the victim of a racial hate crime.

The details of Ly’s death “utterly shocked me,” Vu says. The 24-year-old victim, Vietnamese like Vu, was in-line skating not far from his parents’ home when he encountered his killers by chance.

Both white supremacists, as it turned out, they robbed him, then savagely attacked him. Ly was stabbed in the chest and abdomen as many as 50 times; his throat was slashed; his head was stomped on. The killers left a trail of his blood some 300 yards long.

(They are now in prison. Gunner J. Lindberg, 22, was convicted of murder motivated by racial hatred, a capital crime, and on Dec. 12, 1997, was sentenced to death; Domenic Christopher, 19, was convicted of first-degree murder and on May 30 was sentenced to 25-years-to-life imprisonment.)

“I began making plans for a documentary almost immediately,” Vu, 22, recalled in a recent interview while he was here to bring attention to the film. He contacted Ly’s younger sister, Thu, met her in Tustin and received permission from the Ly family to make his documentary.

Now, two years after Thien Minh Ly died, “Letters to Thien” will be screened Saturday in Orange County at UC Irvine as part of an Asian Pacific American Awareness Conference sponsored by UCI’s Asian Pacific Student Assn.

Vu shot the 55-minute documentary on high-resolution video. He and his creative team--Kerry Seed (assistant director and co-producer) and Michael Yesenofski (composer and sound designer), both high school classmates from Portland, where they all grew up--completed it on $8,000, including post-production.

The soft-spoken, slightly built filmmaker says he made the documentary partly because of his “sense of personal identification” with Ly. “When I read about who he was, and when I got to know him better through reading some of his journal entries,” Vu said, “it really hit home that this guy was so similar to me.

“I felt like I was reading my own journals. Then seeing the way his younger brother viewed him reminded me of how my younger brother saw me. In a way I play the same role in my family as Ly played in his.”

The Ly family allowed Vu to film their son’s room and gave him video footage of a candlelight vigil that had been held for him, as well as photographs from his childhood. Vu also filmed extensive interviews with the family and dozens of Ly’s friends and acquaintances.

Ly graduated eighth in his class from Tustin High School. He went on to UCLA, where he received his bachelor’s degree in a double major of biology and English, then got his master’s in science from Georgetown University, specializing in physiology and biophysics.

He loved poetry, Shakespeare and writing and had an insatiable curiosity about Vietnam and Vietnamese culture. He had been a community activist at UCLA as president of the Vietnamese Students Assn. and hoped to return to Vietnam one day, perhaps as a lawyer.

Ly and his parents made a harrowing escape from Vietnam in 1983; Vu and his parents came to the United States as penniless refugees of the Vietnam War.

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Sponsored by a church group in a small Iowa town, Vu’s family arrived there in 1975 from Saigon, where he’d been born two months earlier. His parents took low-wage jobs in the town--”My mom was a seamstress, and my Dad was a machine operator”--and later moved to Minneapolis.

During their first Minnesota winter, Vu’s mother came down with pneumonia. She went to Portland to visit friends and “decided she wasn’t going back,” Vu recounted. “So I came out with my dad.” His parents now work as computer-program analysts.

What does Vu hope “Letters to Thien” will accomplish, apart from launching his career?

“I want people to leave the theater with the same feeling of personal identification that I felt the first time I heard about Thien’s story. On a political level, I hope it’s a step in combating the problem of hate crimes and racism.”

Perhaps for that reason, the documentary does not dwell on the grisly details of the murder. In avoiding tabloid-style sensationalism, moreover, “Letters to Thien” denies the killers, who showed no remorse at their trials, added notoriety.

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Vu says he never experienced any overt racism while growing up. “But,” he noted, “there was subtle racism that people of color have to stomach every day. It’s just that each little incident is not enough to call out.

“Thien’s younger brother, Thai, said he thought that if the killers had known who Thien was, they wouldn’t have been able to kill him. I think it’s a basic truth that if people know each other, there will be less room for hate crimes.

“Because [assistant director] Kerry knows my story,” Vu added, “I’m no longer afraid he’s going to come up and kick me in the shins the way he used to when we were in second grade. And because I know his story, I’m able to trust him to collaborate with me.”

Following its UCI screening, “Letters to Thien” will begin making the rounds of college campuses and independent film festivals. It will be screened next month at Southern Oregon State University in Ashland, at Tufts University in Boston and at Cornell.

In March, it will be screened at the San Francisco Film Festival, which features the nation’s largest and most prestigious gathering of Asian-Pacific films.

Vu says he has been offered distribution by the National Asian American Telecommunications Assn., a major Asian American media group, but hasn’t decided whether to take it.

“We’re thinking of self-distribution,” he said. “Because of the film’s educational nature, there’s a huge education market for it. Right now we’re developing a package presentation to take it into high schools and colleges. Our main goal is to get it into as many as we can.”

* “Letters to Thien” screens Saturday at the UCI Student Center, Emerald Bay Auditorium, Rooms D an E, Pereira Road and West Peltason Drive, as part of the Asian Pacific American Awareness Conference. 2:20 p.m. Free, with $6 preregistration fee for conference attendees; $8-$10 (at the door). (714) 824-2224.