This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, April 28, 2011 -The living room in Lan Nguyen's apartment in south St. Louis County is dominated by a table holding a photograph of her father and a burning candle. She lights it daily as a way of dealing with the grief growing out of an inexplicable attack that claimed her father's life and injured her mother.
On Saturday morning, April 16, Hoang Nguyen, 72, and his wife, Yen Nguyen, 59, were walking in an alley near their apartment at Spring and Chippewa, when police say they were assaulted by several people. One, Elex Murphy, 18, has been arrested and charged with first-degree murder, among other offenses. Other suspects are being sought.
Although some police have speculated that the incident was a game of random, unprovoked attacks on innocent bystanders, the official police report says, "It is unclear if the suspects were attempting to rob the victims or what may have led up to the assault. The suspects ran when they saw a vehicle approaching in the alley."
A Close Family
The Nguyens are Vietnamese. The daughter, in her 20s, has lived in the United States for a decade. About three years ago, partly out of loneliness and partly out of a wish to be with her family, she says, she "felt really lucky" to be able to arrange a move to the United States for her mother, father and brother.
Sitting in her sparsely furnished living room, where her young son sits on the floor and uses a laptop computer, Lan Nguuyen talks about the attack and how the lit candle has helped her cope with grief. "I have burned it every day to keep the feeling in my heart. I do this for my dad and make the family feel warm about him."
With a sigh, she adds that she doesn't want to talk about her father and his death, but in the next breath she starts again.
"Everything is a shock with me now. My dad's gone, but I cannot believe that either. When I wake up, I cannot believe he's already gone. It's so confusing. You feel like you lost something, you know, really big."
Until the family's weekly routine was upset by the attack, the daughter spent part of every Sunday at her parents' apartment in the city, where the clan would talk over a Vietnamese dish of rice and either beef or pork, prepared by the daughter. Those conversations and family meals now continue at the daughter's apartment, where her mother has moved.
Like many other Asian families, the Nguyens are a cohesive clan, dedicated to helping one another. That explains why Lan Nguyen joins a carpool six days a week and heads for Sullivan, Mo., where she works nearly 10-hour days in a nail salon.
It can be tiring work, but "I have to take care of my family now, my mom, my brother and my son. So I have to keep working."
While her father adjusted well to life in this country, he mentioned missing friends back home in Vietnam, Lan Nguyen says. But the things she remembers most about him was his determination to master English and become a U.S. citizen. She regrets that she never had the chance to hear him speak even a single word of English before he died.
Aging and Adapting
Anna Crosslin, president and CEO of the International Institute of St.Louis, isn't surprised that learning English was a challenge for the father. Almost every day, she says he'd walk the few blocks from his apartment to the Institute to attend English classes.
"Not speaking any English is an adjustment for all foreign born," she says. "But the ability to acquire English, as with any language, diminishes the older we get. By the time we're seniors, our ability to retain what we're learning becomes even more difficult."
Another difficult adjustment is related to age. Younger immigrants might want to throw away their "cultural traditions, history and everything else. But the older you get, the more some of those things from your childhood and young adulthood become important to you. You realize there's great value to that, and there is the sense of loss many times."
The Nguyens lived in south St. Louis, close to the institute and other services.
"He didn't drive and many other Vietnamese lived in the neighborhood. So he had some kind of social life. He could walk to the grocery store, and the Vietnamese Church (Resurrection of Our Lord Parish) wasn't far away. These were all more accessible for him," Crosslin says.
Rev. Dominic Nguyen, the main pastor at Resurrection of Our Lord Parish, says the church serves about 300 Vietnamese families. He is not related to the victim (Crosslin says Nguyen is a common Vietnamese name), but knows some of the challenges facing immigrants from Vietnam since he came to this country about two decades ago.
"I flee. I came here for the same reason they did, for opportunity and freedom that they didn't have in their homeland, a better life than they experienced in their old country. I find what happened to him very stupid. It shows we're living in an imperfect world. One day they act OK, the next day they're out of control."
In spite of the horror, the attack opened the eyes of the family to another side of St. Louis, the priest said.
"The one thing that came of this is that people in the community are compassionate. Even strangers who didn't know that man at all reached out to the family."
Funding for the Beacon's health reporting is provided in part by the Missouri Foundation for Health, a philanthropic organization that aims to improve the health of the people in the communities it serves.
