Over the past couple of days, Duong had seemed to take an interest in Ma’s well-being. But Ma was leery, all too aware that it was Duong who had been the first to point the gun at him. For all Ma knew, Duong was playing an angle the other inmates didn’t see. As always in the States, the hardest people for Ma to read were his fellow Vietnamese.

He had felt wronged by them so often in his life. When Ma had landed in California in 1992, with a wife and four kids, he’d struggled. The war and his time in the labor camp had placed him nearly two decades behind the first wave of immigrants who’d left Vietnam for the U.S. after the war. For years he took menial jobs, and he would later say that his siblings—dentists and pharmacists and white-collar success stories—who had arrived earlier, made him feel ashamed of the life he had made.

The complete story

Paul Kix — GQ

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