Asian-American Village News US pledges to support India terror investigation SD Guard defendants seek discrimination case dismissal Mesa may rebrand go! airlines as Aloha Airlines Jury decides Fresno co. did not discriminate Bhutanese refugees start new lives in towns like Pittsburgh Supplement: Indian American rx. to Mumbai attacks Secret Asian Man The NEW Secret Asian Man Also Graduate School Opportunities QuickSearch: Jobs preferring Bilingual/ Multilingual Candidates

Red or Blue? An At-Risk S.E. Asian Youth Ponders the Choices

by Pacific News Service, PNS

There's something cloudy about the sunny days in Richmond. It could be the ominous oil refineries and chemical factories the town was built on fifty years ago, their fumes polluting the lungs of children who play confined to their yards by spike-topped black steel fences.

The cities bones are the industrial buildings, the rows of skeletal houses for families and the desolate train tracks. On one corner on the South Side of the city a group of black teenagers are posted up mean mugging passer-bys, on an opposite corner a group of South East Asian teenagers, nearly identical sans racial difference, do the same.

In mid-October 2003 a group of South East Asian teenagers in a car, reportedly members of a blood gang, chased another car full of alleged crips onto a Richmond freeway. The alleged blood gang fired shots into the other car while racing down the highway, wounding and killing a sixteen-year-old passenger. The Mien community feared this was a sign of things to come. Approximately two weeks later, a member of the crip gang S.O.D. shot a 15-year-old girl Chan Boonkeut as she opened her front door in what seemed to be an attempt at retaliation against Chan's older brother.

To many young Asians in Richmond dodging the gangster lifestyle while trying to remain positive is just as hard as being in a gang.

WAR CHILD

A tall, dark skinned teenager with a youthful face, Kao, 19, pulls his hands out of the pockets of his Nautica jacket, and places them in the pockets of his baggy navy blue jeans while we talk. He looks off into the distance and often trails off while making conversation, but his eyes come alive when he tells a story.

Like most Mien Americans, Kao's family came to the country through refugee camps. Their village in Laos was ravaged by the U.S. led secret war. Because the Mien fought with the U.S. the people fleeing after the Americans pulled out of the country were offered entry to the land of opportunity. Kao's family lived with Christian sponsors for a period of months upon arrival in this country before finding jobs and moving to Richmond.

"For Miens, you know, mostly the only jobs we could get is, like, the jobs no one wants to do." Kao says about his parent’s occupation: "Mostly under the table kinda stuff, lower than minimum wage. Lotta gardening, you know, landscaping, assembly line, janitor. Stuff that was hard work, and you didn't need to speak English to do it." His parents both worked full time leaving him in the care of his grandparents. He credits them as being competent and loving caretakers, though he experienced occasional moments of doubt, "They weren't like families on TV, like you know TGIF, people all hugging each other and saying I love you. We didn't get none of that. It's the culture, so I wasn't really tripping. They had different ways of showing they cared, but it's so different, sometimes I kinda wondered, you know, like, did they really love me?"

Kao spent his elementary school years living in one of two parallel apartments that were home predominantly to Miens and Laotians. The community was tight knit, all the families knew each other; still it was a dangerous place to live. Kao vividly remembers hearing sirens and gunshots frequently at night and occasionally watching police chase down a fellow tenant. His parents forbid him to leave after five in the evening. "All the Mien and Lao families knew each other. They were mostly just worried about the black people.”

GANGSTA ED 101

Kao learned about gangs as a child, "I 'member, I was like 6 years old, I was walking around and some Lao kids, who were maybe like, eight or nine, came up to me and was like, "What you claim?" and I didn't know what they meant, like, I don't think they even know what it meant, I think they just heard their brothers or cousins talking 'bout it. But they was like "red or blue", and I was like I dunno, so they banked on me, and was like, "you 'posed to say red." and I was jus' like, "red, red." And then they said, "Aight, mayn, you a blood now." and they walked away."

Though he grew up in South Richmond among blood gang members, many of Kao's cousins were crips from north Richmond. Because of them he also learned the name of the blue gang S.O.D. long before he knew what it meant. He saw the letters in the tagging books and arms of his cousins with innocent admiration and curiosity.

By the time he was in Junior High he had learned of the lifestyle that accompanied the name and was well on his way to emulating it. "The school was full of Mien and Lao, and we all kicked it. I started smokin' cigarettes and weed," he explains, " all that shit about peer pressure is bullshit, you right, like "Hey you, take some drugs, c'mon". You see they're the kids everyone looks up to and that's what you wanna be."

Kao participated in the Asian vs. Black and Mien vs. Latino group fights at Richmond High School, but tried to keep his illicit activities as much a secret from his parents as possible. Even when Mien parents find out their kids are cutting class, some of them are not upset, "A lot of Mien people, their parents don't really take education seriously. My parents grew up in a village in Laos, where school it wasn't an option. They just didn't have a chance, my Dad, he wanted to go to the city and go to school, and my grandfather dogged him, like ‘you're lazy, you just don' wanna work in the fields.’"

Unlike his peers, by the time he entered high school Kao decided to go the other route and concentrate on his studies. He had seen relatives die and go to jail over gangs and didn't want to end up in either of those positions. He also credits the decision partly to his parents and subsequently his sisters placing more value on education than other Mien families, "My parents personally they were pretty strict with education. My sisters would have to read all the mail to my parents cause they couldn't read English, and when there's a word they couldn't read my dad would kick them. It was really important to him, cause I think he got discriminated on for not speaking English."

RACE FOR PEACE

Still though Kao was never completely removed from that lifestyle even in high school. He still occasionally smoked weed, fought, and drank in high school and he continued to smoke cigarettes. From time to time he would hang out with relatives who were affiliated with gangs.

Kao managed to keep his grades up through high school and went on to college. However, he dropped out after the first year when his grades didn't meet expectations. Although it was his G.P.A. that forced him out, his social life may have also been a factor. To this day, Kao feels lost in the middle. "In college I really didn't fit in with no one. To the college kids I was hella ghetto, but to my Mien cousins and my old friends I was like a sell-out."

When he heard the news of the killing of 15-year-old Chan Boonkeut, Kao was shocked and saddened, "We had like two years that was pretty peaceful before that. Things was going pretty good... and then it happened."

Kao attributes the peaceful times to the emergence of the import car street-racing scene. "There isn't really that much to do as a Asian kid in Richmond. We play 'ball and stuff, but we can't really be the best. Wit' racing though man, Asian people dominate. The import car scene, I think it took away from the gang violence cause people was more competitive about they cars, not they set. You know, racing crews that settled shit wit' racing. I mean, there was some gang incident at car shows and races, but a lot of that, people don't really know if it was gang shit or racing shit, so I think it kinda helped."

A brilliant sunset starts to creep into the sky, thanks in part to the pollution from the factories. "It's getting dark," Kao tells me, "you got a pretty nice camera. Maybe we should get inside."