ABSTRACT
The life history of Huc provides an illustrative example of the experiences that led this Vietnamese youth to join a gang. Huc was born during the Vietnam War and raised outside of Saigon in the aftermath of the war. Life was marked by fear and hatred of the communist government. His father, imprisoned in the government’s “re-education camps,” was absent during most of Huc’s childhood. When Huc’s father was finally released, he made plans to send his entire family to America, where he had heard there was freedom and the streets were literally paved with gold. Huc and his family boarded a dilapidated ship and escaped from Vietnam in 1979. However, the ship capsized, drowning his mother (who was pregnant at the time), all of his siblings, and his aunt. Such losses were not uncommon among Vietnamese “boat people;” as many as one-third of all Vietnamese refugees lost their lives in the sea during their attempt to escape (Grant, 1979).
