To Live and Die in (or East of) LA
The life of a former Asian American gang member
As a designer, I have a passion for understanding people better so I can make things better for them. This includes myself. Being Asian American and having to deal with my own identity struggle growing up, I took an Asian American Psychology course at USC. It was more like a therapy session though, as I got to listen to others describe their experiences and feelings. I was exposed to research confirming what I had already come to realize from my observations throughout the years. During the progress of that semester, I chose to further study two topics: why Asian Americans embrace Christianity and why well off young Asian teens turn delinquent sometimes. I interviewed a former gang member to better understand this latter question and found it to be a mix of larger organized crime, peer pressure, and suburban boredom.
Prelude
We met at night just as he stepped out of InkFiend Art tattoo parlor in Alhambra, eleven miles east of Los Angeles. “I’m getting a tattoo of a dragon here.” He motioned to the back of his shoulder. He finished the bottle in his hand and set the empty glass on the sidewalk. I thought he it was a beer at first but I saw that it was only a Jarritos soda (I would later learn that he was allergic to alcohol). “Let’s go get something to eat.” We stepped into his new Acura and drove down the street to an old haunt of his. “This is where we used to come hang out after doing shit,” he said in reference to his street gang days. “One of the guys knew the owner so we came here.” We stepped inside the diner filled with Chinese patrons and sat down at a booth near the window. He ordered a steak and started recounting to me his life and the war stories he had lived to tell as a foot soldier in an Asian American gang.
Introduction
While society typically labels Asian Americans as smart, hardworking, and productive members, the reality is that like every other group of people, the Asian American community has its own problems. Imported along with things such as cheaply manufactured goods and bright minds, China also gave the United States a new organized crime problem. According to the Encyclopedia of Organized Crime in the United States, “Chinese crime groups are now considered by law enforcement authorities as the second most serious organized crime problem in America” after the Italian mafia. 1 Globalization, with its improved transportation and communications technology, allowed some of the world’s largest organizations to expand and become multinational. Among these one typically thinks of corporations, but less often is organized crime considered.
The face of Chinese American organized crime isn’t the leaders or the Chinese Triads that they are aligned with, but the youths of street gangs serving as foot soldiers that commit much of the drug running and violence on their behalf. Immigrants in San Francisco formed one of the first Chinese street gangs on the West Coast during the 1950s. The Wah Ching (Youth of China), which was intended to protect immigrants from American-born Chinese, was used by the Hop Sing Tong to run errands and protect gambling operations. A Southern California chapter was formed in 1965 as Wah Ching recruited immigrant students to protect other immigrants from Latino gangs,2 and to expand its operations of gambling, illegal-alien smuggling, extortion, protection, and drug trade to Los Angeles. 1
As Wah Ching battled for control against other Asian and minority gangs in Southern California, its influence waned upstate and Wo Hop To superceded Wah Ching in San Francisco. 3 Based on accounts from a source with ties to Chinese organized crime, Wo Hop To is not very active and Wah Ching is nearly non-existent there today. However, in the greater Los Angeles area, it wasn’t until the last few years that the police have been able to get gang violence under control after the gang wars of the early 2000s. The following narrative examines the Asian American experience of Chris Shen, a former Wah Ching member in the Southern California San Gabriel Valley, and how he was both a scourge and victim of Asian organized crime in America.
Growing Up Asian in a “White” Culture
Like most Asian American gang members, Chris Shen wasn’t always on the path to hardcore gangbanging that he eventually took. In fact, his experience is rather atypical of a Chinese American born into a middle-class family in San Gabriel. His father is a well-respected entrepreneur and his mother assists in the family’s Downtown LA business. During his childhood, his family moved several times from city to city, but always stayed in the San Gabriel Valley. What makes his experience unusual is that even though Asians were starting to heavily dominate the area, his father tried to make sure Shen wasn’t surrounded by Asians growing up. His father wanted to make sure that Chris assimilated into American culture speaking unaccented English, and would know how to relate to and get along with different people.
During his years at Westhoff Elementary School, he befriended children from all the major ethnic groups of the area from whites to Asians, blacks, and Latinos. He was an active boy, meeting most of his friends through group activities such as basketball, baseball, and soccer. He wasn’t the model minority stereotype of the academically gifted and reserved Asian. He was quite the opposite, seeking attention at any opportunity. This resulted in his spending a significant amount of time in timeout for being a class clown.
At Susan Middle School, the diversity of his group of friends dropped to a point where he was hanging out almost exclusively with white kids. He was an average student but continued to be active in baseball and basketball. Eventually his family became very close to his coach’s family. When his father went to trade shows across the country his coach would take care of him as if he were part of his own family. Beyond this tight bond with a Caucasian family, Shen attributed his dearth of Asian friends to the skateboarding subculture that he chose to be part of. Very few Asians participated in skateboarding and the skate subculture at his school.
Skateboarding became Chris’ defining passion as he approached his teenage years and it would also be the start of his deviant behavior. On weekdays, he would spend hours after school meeting up with his skater friends and practice skateboarding. His parents were unaware that he was not at home because they both worked. He would phone them pretending he was at home doing homework or some other approved of activity. In some cases he would have his younger brother cover for him if they called the house by telling his parents that Chris was napping. In a Los Angeles Times article on Asian gangs, Rodel Rotis, a Filipino American attorney who represents Asian youngsters in trouble posits that this lack of family at home because parents are making sacrifices at work is one of the factors leading youths into trouble. “You lose your extended family when you arrive in America…Back home, there are aunts and uncles, grandparents and neighbors who all take part in raising the young.” 4 Between lying to his parents and skating in the afternoons, he got so good at skateboarding that Sobord Clothing sponsored him. The real trouble started in 8th grade when his sense of identity started to be questioned.
Being an Asian male who excelled at a sport dominated by whites led to both popularity and discrimination. Even at that young age, societal perceptions of Asian males affected the white girls around him. One of these girls told him “he was pretty good looking for an Asian guy.” This statement demonstrated the negative perception of Asian men by white women that Chua and Fujino found in their study on Asian American masculinity. “[W]hite women view…Asian-American men not as masculine and physically attractive compared to white men.” 5 Shen had to overcome the negative image of being an Asian male by proving that he was better than white males at the physical activity of skateboarding. It was through this talent that he was accepted by his white group of friends and the girls that hung out with them. Along with his popularity came racist remarks by those who were jealous of his success. He received threats of getting beat up but nothing ever came of it. Instead, he found support through his friends, though he was now moving back and forth between a group of Asian buddies and white friends. His Asian American identity was slowly being influenced by discrimination and he was starting to seek the company of other Asian.
In 8th grade Chris was introduced to marijuana for the first time by one of his skater friends who had gotten it from his older brother. At first “blazing” was a weekly or biweekly practice. Then he began to smoke out more and more often, which eventually caused him to give up skating. Having always been a curious boy, yet without a fully developed common sense, he embarked on other “experiences.” He smoked cigarettes, used ecstasy, and stole things. He wanted to experience different things in life but didn’t fully consider the consequences of his actions at the time. This would eventually lead him into deeper trouble as he entered high school.
- Kelly, R. (2000). Chinese Street Gangs. Encyclopedia of Organized Crime in the United States: From Capone’s Chicago to the New Urban Underworld. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
- Grennan, S., et al. (2000). Chinese Street Gangs. Gangs: An International Approach (pp. 201-18). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
- Huston, P. (2001). Tongs, Gangs, and Triads: Chinese Crime Groups in North America (pp. 102-108). Lincoln, NE: Author’s Choice Press.
- Kang, C., & Saar, M. (1996, January 25). Asian Gangs Rise Strike a Paradox; Violence: Members often come from well-to-do homes and do well in school. A group of concerned citizens meets to talk about how to deal with the problem. Los Angeles Times, pp. B3
- Chua, P., & Fujino, D. (1999). Negotiating New Asian-American Masculinities: Attitudes and Gender Expectations. In N. Zane & B. Kim (Eds.), Readings in Asian American Psychology (pp. 525-544). Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt.
To Live and Die in (or East of) LA by Daniel Yang is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.