163: What if you grew up in a violent gang?
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It was terrifying because I realized any sense of identity, no matter how fake, was better than no sense of identity. Yet, if I don't have a sense of identity, if I don't have this crutch that I'm comfortable with to lean on, then who am I as a person? Like, who am I? Welcome to the Permatemp Corporation. A presentation of the audio podcast, This Is Actually Happening. Episode 163.

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And the next, something goes wrong. But with ADT's 24-7 professional monitoring, you still feel safe. Because when every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com today. I remember as a boy thinking, I wish our family looked normal like the other kids around us. Or like the people on TV feeling like always nervous or like I don't fit in.

I even remember during the 80s, there were a lot of Kung Fu shows and they dubbed in a lot of the voices. I remember watching them speak and then their mouths not moving correctly. So I thought to myself, that's why people make fun of us. Is this what we look like when we speak? So I got in front of the mirror and I had to say like, hello, how are you? Just to see how my mouth moved. So there was just this part of me that never felt like I fit in.

I was born in Vietnam and my father's side of the family, they were originally plantation owners.

When the country first was liberated from the French, that's where they had executed a lot of the plantation owners. They said the plantation owners were French sympathizers. So my father's grandfather was one of the plantation owners that was executed. We also had an uncle that was assassinated. So I think that's why my father grew up with a hatred for the Viet Cong. He joined the military and he attended the Vietnamese Military Academy. That's in South Vietnam. That's where...

I was born. All of my family had lived in Vietnam up until the fall of our country so I can only imagine like they suddenly just lose their country and everything they know and have to settle in a new land, learn a new language and just rebuild themselves because they came here with nothing. So I came to the United States as a toddler maybe several months old and we settled in Provo, Utah.

For the most part, Utah was a beautiful place to grow up. But as a little boy, I remember people would point to us in public, laugh at us, said, get out of our country or get out of here. Our family was Roman Catholic. The vast majority of people in Utah are also Mormon. So there was just always felt like this deep divide.

My younger brother and I, we liked to go play in the ditches. Back then we had our G.I. Joe action figures and we'd make a raft out of our popsicle sticks and tie it together and we'd put our G.I. Joes on the raft and just let it float down the river.

Some older kids and either their uncles or their fathers were at the top of a fence and they had told us, "Go back to your country. Get out of here." And they were throwing rocks down at us. And my brother and I, for some reason, I guess we just felt brave because they seemed very far away. We said, "Come and make this." Those kids jumped the fence very fast and my brother and I tried to run. And as we were running, I dropped some of my G.I. Joe figures. So I stopped to pick them up and my brother turned around.

I was eight and my brother was six. And the kids shoved my brother into the ground, punched him and shoved him to the ground and they just began putting dirt in his mouth and I was crying. The adults were standing at the fence and cheering them on. Me and my brother both went home crying. My brother's face and mouth filled with dirt. And then my father, when he found out what happened, he told me like, "How can you let this happen to your brother? You're supposed to protect your family at all costs."

I remember just feeling so ashamed and somehow I let down my father, somehow I let down my brother, my family. I think it was worse that my father never brought it up again. So I'm pretty sure he just forgot about it. But for me, because the fact that we didn't speak about it again inside my own head, I made it a lot worse than it really was. My brother and I, because of that, were very protective of each other and very, very close.

I don't know if it was a month or two or whatever later, I was in the sandbox playing and another kid was in the sandbox playing with us. He said something about like, "Oh, your family eats grasshoppers." And I just went crazy on that kid, took his head and bashed it into the concrete. And that's the first time I'd seen blood on another kid. But I just, I remember holding onto his hair and not letting go. And it almost became where I went over the top

But where things always seemed okay for me was just with my father. His first job here in the United States was working full time at the coal mines. And my father later founded the Vietnamese Refugee Association.

My father loved giving back and helping out his community. And he became recognized with the local congressmen or senators because they started coming to our home. They would tell me as a little boy, they said, OK, we want you to be just like your father when you grow up. We want you to go to the military academy. You're going to be the first Vietnamese American to go to West Point.

So that was my plan and always my dream. I'm going to go to West Point and I'd look at endless pictures and just imagine myself being able to be a lieutenant just like my father was. And then it was around that time that he was diagnosed with leukemia. By the time I was 10 years old, my father's condition was getting worse because he kept going in and out of the hospital, in and out, in and out.

My thing was always, okay, I'll pray for my father. And then he gets to come home and I go, okay, I did something right. Like, okay, God is listening to my prayers. Then he gets worse. And then suddenly in my mind, I did something wrong. I must not be a good boy. And it just became this roller coaster going back and forth every time he goes in and out.

So by the time we were 10, my father decided we were going to move out here to California because that's where his family, most of them stayed out here in Cali and he wanted to be closer to them because he knew his time was getting short. This is the first time that I went to school with African-American kids, Hispanic kids, Vietnamese kids.

I remember one of the first conversations I had with another Vietnamese kid. He asked me how old I was and I think I said I was like 10 or 11. And he asked me what was my Vietnamese age and I was like what do you mean what is that like I'm 10 I'm 11. And then he had told me he was several years older like 13, 14 his Vietnamese age. So I didn't understand that until I went home and asked my mom and then that's when she told me that some of the new Vietnamese refugees

were falsifying the ages of their children so that they could go back a couple of grades and learn the English language. So a lot of my peers that were Vietnamese were emotionally and physically more mature than me because they were older than me. So I remember they used to poke fun at me and they said, you're whitewashed, you're not truly Vietnamese. So then it just went back to this part of me that I never felt like I fit in. I think it just reinforced that voice in my head that tells me there's something wrong with me.

By the time I was 13, my father had been in the hospital most of the time. That was right around the time of our first communion. In our faith, I believe that the day that I get my first communion, I get a special prayer with God.

My mother had told us, your dad doesn't have much longer to live. The doctor said he's going to die soon. But we were all in denial behind it. And I had told myself, you know what? My first communion is coming up. I'm going to be able to rescue my father by praying. And God will have to grant my prayer that day.

So on the morning of our first communion, I woke up to get ready and my younger sister who was in the bathroom tells me that my father had died the night before. I believed that God killed my father just so he wouldn't have to grant my prayer, my first prayer because there was something wrong with me like I'm a bad kid or there's something wrong with me and he didn't want to grant my prayer.

I felt so alone. I was angry at God, like why? And then I'm angry at my mother because she's telling me to pray and just be a good kid. And then I feel like that she sold us a fake dream. I'm angry at my father for passing away. Just angry at the world and just not really even realizing that it's anger. It was a dark time for me. It was a dark time for the whole family.

I remember some of my father's military friends came up to me and they would tell me, "You're so brave. You're such a strong man. You're gonna be just like your dad." And inside, I did not feel like that. I just felt like I want to cry. I don't know what to do, but I can't cry because I can't show anybody that I'm weak or I can't show anybody because it will disappoint my father.

It's weird and I could see it now, but we never talked about it. We never processed it. Each of us just shoved it into a dark corner and that's what I did. I just shoved those feelings away. Before my father's death and before his leukemia, I felt absolutely safe and loved as a child.

My father was like the rock that we all could lean on. So when he was diagnosed, that's probably when I started to become fearful. Like, I don't feel safe anymore. I always felt loved by my father. I'm not sure if I ever totally felt loved by my mother. She can't say, I love you, but she only says, I love you through her cooking. And she has this funny habit of

watching us eat and making sure that we eat. But she cannot say the words, I love you. She doesn't express much emotion. It was true before my father's death, but it became much more pronounced after his death because then now she's depressed, hurt and angry. And then she took it out on us. She never did it to hurt us, but it did hurt us. And it hurt me. And I always felt demeaning and harsh.

That was the year before I went into high school. So I go into high school, not even beginning to grieve his death. You know, by that time we're in poverty, we were on welfare. I did not feel like I fit in. I mean, I was so tiny. I think my freshman year, I probably weighed 88 pounds. I just felt so self-conscious. And then that's where I started to hang out with like kids that were not on the right path.

One of my friends, he was also Vietnamese. He had some older brothers. He was bigger than me and he seemed, for some reason, he was always very protective of me. He had older brothers that had driver's licenses and cars. So then I felt, okay, at least I'm a cool kid that could get in a car and go out on the weekends.

They were already into breaking into and stealing cars. So at 14 in high school, I learned how to get into the cars. I learned how to get the stereos. Under my bed, I had like about 10, 12 stereos. And I remember the first time my mom looked at it, she's like, oh, what is that? I said, oh, I'm fixing it. I'm fixing it for some of my friends. She said, oh, you're just so smart. She did not know that those were stolen car stereos. And we were just selling them just so we just had some money.

The first time that we break into a car, I didn't know what I was doing, but I would just sat there in the car with them while they were doing it. And I remember the first time we got one with a wallet and a credit card. And then they told me, yeah, good job, you found a wallet. And suddenly I feel like, oh, this is another way where I could distinguish myself and gain the acceptance of these older guys.

From that, it led into bank fraud. They were depositing payroll checks into Bank of America and they drew out a map. They said, "Okay, you have to hit all these Bank of America." So by the time I'm 16, I had my own car and I drew out the map of which B of A I would hit throughout Southern California and then how I could put all the payroll checks in. And the next day they had somebody go and pull out the money.

They got it pretty organized later where they got local gangs to go into a liquor store to stick up the liquor store and to make people like, OK, give me your money. But then they would always go to the back and get the payroll checks and they printed it. So it looks like a real payroll check. And then they would deposit just into one account.

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Never expressed love, never expressed much emotion. It was just always disappointment or expectations. So these kids, they just became like an extended family for me because it touched on all of those parts of me that didn't feel like I fit in, didn't feel like anybody would like me or accept me.

I didn't have great study habits, but luckily I still was able to get okay grades. And, you know, there was always this part of me that still wanted to go to West Point, but I could, I knew like, how am I going to get to West Point?

I took my SATs and I did terrible on it. And I didn't have the courage or even the ability to say, mom, there's no way I'm going to go to West Point. It was always just more an expectation. It was like not even discussed. It wasn't like, where do you want to go? Or what are you thinking of your future? It was like, oh, you're going to go to West Point.

With my friends that were running on the streets, I didn't have this pressure. I didn't have this expectation. All I was expected to do was, "Okay, we'll break into a car. This is our sense of excitement for the night and go and party." And they became my extended family of sorts. My first arrest was at the age of 17. There was a group of skinhead kids that we had had a couple run-ins with already.

One time we got in a fight with them at the beach and it was a few months after that that I was working in Subway at the time. My brother came in with a couple of my friends. They said that the skinhead kids had called my house and threatened to kill my mom, my sister, and my family. By that time, one of my friends, he had a gun, a .22 caliber gun, and people on the street started to know like, okay, Quan and Tommy and his friends carry a gun.

coming out of our mouths at the time we just said okay yeah we'll find them and we'll shoot them up that's just how we talked okay let's find them we'll shoot them up they drove to the house and my friend red ended up going up to the house knocking on the door they opened it up and he ran inside and he ended up shooting three people inside fortunately they all survived but within a few weeks uh me my brother all of us were arrested

They arrested me and they charged me with a conspiracy to commit murder. And this was at 17 and we were facing 45 years to life at the time. In a very twisted way, it took this huge pressure off me of, okay, now I have an excuse of why I won't make it to West Point. Yeah, I was doing great in school. I had straight A's until I got arrested for something I didn't do. And that was my mentality. I didn't do this. I should have never been arrested.

The American justice system screwed me, the world screwed me over, so I don't owe nothing to anybody. So it just became like this chip on my shoulder. The more I continue to tell myself that narrative in my head of not taking any sense of responsibility in this and just blaming or making an excuse of why I couldn't fulfill what it means to be a success. It was expected of me as the firstborn that I would have to be the one to make money and take care of the family.

Suddenly, sitting at juvenile hall, I remember feeling that sense of relief facing 45 years of life. I was tried as an adult and I was sent over to the county jail as a juvenile. The jails are separated by race. Vietnamese hang out with Vietnamese, the whites are over here, the Crips here, Southern Hispanics here.

Even though it's by race, it's also by gang. During that time, there were quite a bit of Vietnamese gangs already going in. But then after that, it wasn't even about, okay, this gang or that gang. It's always all the Vietnamese were there to protect each other, regardless of what gang or which affiliation.

It was there where my criminality deepened, my gang ties deepened, because now I knew this gang, that gang, this gang, and we were all on equal footing in there. And I go, I can hold my own against the gang members too. And I wanted to prove myself that I'm just as willing to volunteer myself to help protect our race against others.

The more violence I inflicted, the more recognized, the more in my head that I was liked, the more that I felt like I fit in, even though part of me never felt like I fit in. But I go, this is a way that I feel I fit in. So finally, for once in my life, I think this is where I was meant to be.

I took a deal for seven years in the California Youth Authority. I did about two, two and a half years. And I came out. The guys I knew for the last two, two and a half years, you know, we had lived with each other for years. We had got into riots. We had protected each other. They're all out here in Orange County. So I started hanging out with some of the guys that I knew inside the county jails and the youth authorities, which later on became, you know, that's our group, which later on became that's our gang.

Jail and the youth had hardened me and it got me to a place where I could not express emotions, especially anything to do with fear. So I remember one of the first weekends home, I was sitting in the car with some of my friends and we got shot at for the first time.

I was absolutely scared, but then I couldn't tell anybody I was scared. So I overcompensated by making sure that I had a gun. Just like in jail, when I felt any sense of fear, I felt it's easier to attack somebody first. And then once I attack them, then I don't have to sit with that feeling.

In a weird sense, that gave me more fame and it gave me more recognition with people. So I carry that same thinking to the streets where if I'm feeling any type of fear, I don't sit with it. And I'm the first to pull my gun and I'm the first to start shooting. And then suddenly everyone's, oh yeah, Kwan is not scared of anybody. He's down. So I'm

That also became its own self-perpetuating narrative about me because now I had to continue to fulfill it because everyone says I'm not scared and I'm down and I have to continue to prove that narrative right to everybody around me to continue to have to pull out the gun and to be the one to pull the trigger.

Our crew were violent, we pulled guns and we shoot first. And that's what people knew us for on the streets. And we wanted to make sure that's what people continue to know us as. So we were from a very violent and ruthless Vietnamese gang. And I've lost a few of our fellow members to gang violence.

I began working at the Gallup organization. They were known for like their Gallup polls. So I was working there and I got their 1998 interview of the year award. I got to do the Microsoft study where I was like one of four interviewers nationwide that got to do the exit interviews for Microsoft. So the management team asked me to take a management interview because they wanted me to help manage the Irvine location.

I finally felt like, you know what, finally something's going to go right for once in my life. Finally, I will be able to succeed or be a success and make my mom happy and hopefully make my father happy in some way. Once I get this, I'll be done with the gang life or I can walk away and I don't need to prove myself. Finally, I have a future. A couple months after the interview, they called me into the office and they told me, we're sorry to say, but you are not a fit.

Those were the exact words they use. And that's just Gallup's vocabulary to say, you know, it's not a fit. But for me, it just touched on that part of me like, yeah, you are not a fit. You don't fit in. I was devastated. I remember that day I went down to the local bar. I got drunk.

I called up my homeboys from the gang and I knew like usually they go to a nightclub so I went up with them. I brought my gun along, went up to a nightclub up in Hollywood, got drunk, came out and found out that some of my friends had gotten in a fight with a different gang.

Some of our homegirls had called and said that the guys we had gotten in a fight with were actually following them on the freeway. So I had called them and said, okay, like what freeway you're at, what exit? And we started coordinating.

So we finally caught up to them and we spotted them and we stayed a little bit behind. I saw there were four people in the car and I had the driver of my car get to their left side, to their driver's side. And we just followed them until I saw there were no other cars on the freeway. When that happened, that's when I told the driver of my car to speed up.

I had rolled down the window on my side and I aimed first for the person sitting in the back because I figured that's the only person that could shoot at us from that side. And then after that, I aimed for the driver and just unloaded into the whole car.

Up to that point in my life, whenever something bothered me, let's say I get in an argument with my girlfriend or I'm upset about something in my life, I can't just call up one of my gang friends. Hey, you know, I feel upset today. It's more like, hey, what are you doing? You want to go out? And I bring my gun with me. And when we go out, we'll go to a pool hall or we'll go to a club or something. And inside these feelings, I'm pushing them down, but I'm looking for somebody to take it out on.

When something happens, then I have an opportunity to attack somebody or to relieve this sense of emotions inside. I couldn't talk to anybody that I got turned down a gallop. So I just shoved it into the corner and I said, I hope when I go to the club tonight, I get into a fight.

So when these guys got into a fight with my homeboys and then followed my homegirls, that gave me an opportunity. You know what? I may be a failure in this part of my life, in a part of my life that wants to succeed and do good. But I know that.

I can still be recognized in this part of my life, the gang life. And this is where I won't fail. I know what to do. And at the same time, this will help alleviate all these emotions that's going through my head and everything right now. And I could take it out on somebody. So I had no hesitancy when I just pulled out my gun and just aimed. And then when I told my driver to speed up, and then I just started shooting. And then after, it's that sense of excitement, this exhilaration.

There was no sense of remorse. There was no sense of, oh, what did I do? It was more, I felt powerful and I felt I could take back this part of my life or have control over this part of my life. After we did the shooting, we took off down the freeway and then I got a phone call again from the other vehicle with the home girls and they said, hey, those guys aren't following us anymore. And that's when I first realized that they didn't even hear the shooting happen.

I just told the people in my car to get out. And I said, don't talk about it. So nobody talked about it. The next day, though, the driver in the other car, her house got raided by the police because they said there was a murder that happened on a freeway the night before. And the occupants of the other vehicle had taken down her license plate right before they got shot. So they wanted to know what she knew about it.

So she had called me crying and I went out and talked with her and I said, what do you know? She's like, nothing. I go, did you see any shooting? Do you see anything? She goes, no. And I go, then that's all you need to worry about. Don't talk about it. Don't ask me stuff. So then I started coaching her to, if they come, plead the fifth, don't talk about it. I got rid of the gun. I broke the gun down and talked to a couple other people that I was afraid they were going to take in.

It wasn't until about five months after they did a whole gang raid and they took us all in for this shooting and suspicion of some other shootings. When they told me I was going to be transported to LA for a murder up in LA, that's when I knew, oh crap, somebody has said something. Somebody must have said something.

In my mind, I thought it was one of the women had said something. I go, it must have been one of the women. None of my homeboys would ever snitch on me. We're a tight crew, you know, and that was just this. That's what I really believed. And I ended up finding out it was one of my supposed homeboys had given up. I felt betrayed. I felt angry. I felt disbelief. After all we've been through these years, and it's disbelief itself.

My own homeboy had turned state's evidence and was now going to snitch on me. I get brought up to Los Angeles and the first day on the arraignment, they said they were trying me for the death penalty. You know, I'm in jail and now I'm fighting first degree murder and facing the death penalty.

My mind from there was, OK, so how can I still beat these charges? What will he say? What will he know? What will he lie about? Because he'll have to get understand. And that's the way I approached it for the next year and a half, two years while I was in there fighting the case, plotting it out with my attorney of, OK, well, this guy says I did it. I'm going to say he's lying and I'm saying that he's the one that did it.

So the DA had argued, it doesn't matter if you think Quan did the shooting or not. If he was there, he's part of this gang, then he is also just as responsible. And that is how they convicted me. That just continued that pattern of myself, right? Of all those years of not taking responsibility for anything, always finding an excuse to be able to say it's because of this or it's because of that.

In my head, I was only convicted because my own homeboy snitched. Not to say, oh yeah, I shot and killed a human being. It's a way of me of being a victim somehow, or it's not my fault that I'm in prison. I was given a 15-year-to-life sentence, which in the state of California was the same as a death sentence. During that time, they had not paroled one single life-term prisoner since 1977.

So I thought, you know what? I'm going to die. I'm going to die in here. This is the rest of my life. I went into prison and I just carried that same gang mentality into prison where now that I'm in this new environment, I have to be recognized. I have to fit in. I have to be liked. I'm definitely not going to follow the rules. I'm going to do whatever I can to live a comfortable lifestyle while I'm in prison.

Getting involved with the drug trade, the tobacco trade, the contraband cell phone trade. I was involved with all that, running the gambling rackets. If there was a hustle there, then I was involved. And that's how I just looked at it. Like, this is what we do in prison. My 10th year of my prison sentence, several things happened during that time. My dad's father passes away. My niece is born. It's my brother's daughter, and she just...

reminded me so much of my brother. And it just reminded me so much of our childhood, which also reminded me so much of my father. By that year, I think I was 36. And then I was thinking my father died when he was like 37. Look what my father created and did for people in his 37 years on earth. And then I contrasted that with how much death and pain and destruction I had done

Is this what my life is meant to be? Is this it for me? I've always been a bookworm. So during that time, I was fascinated with business books and personal development books, but then also books on the saints, especially stories about saints that had early failures in their life. The more fantastic the failure, the more it resonated with me. And then seeing what they were able to do with their lives after that.

By that time, I was also reading books on meditation and mindfulness. And then I began to ask myself, you know what? Why can't I leave a legacy of some sort in here, even if I'm supposed to die? I remember the sun was coming up over the hills that morning, and I was able to feel the warmth. I saw the individual blades of grass, the dew drops. And up above me in the razor wire, I heard a sparrow chirping.

They'd probably been chirping my whole prison term, but I had never heard it. From that day, prison did no longer feel like this cold, harsh, ugly place. It became a place of contentment. It became a place where I woke up each morning with curious wonder of what can I learn today to make myself a better person? Or what can I do to discover a new way of thinking?

I became a place where I connected with other human beings, some much further along on their journey and others further behind. But I just looked at each of us as this is our journeys. And then this sense of liberation, like I had such total freedom while serving this life sentence, because every day looked like an opportunity for me to learn about myself.

I enjoy how I feel for once. I feel alive for once while in prison and I feel alive for once in my life and I finally have some type of fulfillment and meaning. I had gotten in trouble probably a few months before that where I was deemed a program failure because they got me write-ups for getting cell phones, tobacco. So they sentenced me to 270 days in the hole.

But because the hole was already filled to capacity and my write-ups were not violent, they just held me inside the dorms. But they only let me out of my dorm room for one hour a day to get my exercise and get showered. I had to do that all within one hour.

So that was during that time that I had 23 hours to sit at my bunk area and stay inside my dorm. So that's when I just began to continue to read and read and read. And all these things began to fill up my head. And during that time was also, you know, like I shared when I got the pictures of my niece and my grandfather passed away. So all of that was building onto it.

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From plumbing to electrical, roof repair to deck upgrades. So leave it to the pros who will get your jobs done well. Hire high-quality certified pros at Angie.com. It was during that time I saw a therapist. She asked me to write a letter to my father and say to him the things that I could never say.

And I wrote him a long letter. I was on my bunk bawling without anybody knowing. So I had to grieve him and cry my heart out laying in my bunk and into the pillow. I remember bringing that letter in to the therapist and saying, I want to read it out loud.

When I was reading it, there was the ugliest crying session you've probably ever seen. It was not running down my face and everything. And I was able to tell my father, though, like how sorry I was. I was sorry for being angry at him. I'm sorry for letting him down. And things that I was never able to say, I didn't know I had bottled it all in.

Once I began to grieve it, then I came to realize God didn't kill my dad. I wasn't a bad kid because my father died. God did not think there was something wrong with me.

This is the first block I built up. And then what was the next block about myself and another block? And it was like all these that helped me to build up this wall around myself, like my whole sense of identity and role and the words I used to describe myself, like, you know, a hustler and a gang member and anything that gave me a sense of my warped identity I realized was fake.

And it all began with removing that stumbling block of my father, his death, and me not being able to grieve it. But once I addressed that, and I started to remove all these other threads of a narrative that I've told myself over the years, and I realized, you know what? I've been living a whole big lie. I have made excuses my whole life about myself.

I was a good person, but God killed my father because he didn't want to grant my prayer. I'm a good person. It was gang members that I got snitched on by my homeboy. I'm a good person. And Gallup didn't accept me, said I'm a fit because they were looking for something else or whatever. So it's all excuses. It's all to alleviate the part of me that just wants to be liked and to be accepted and to say that I have some sense of value.

And then just the narrative that I had told myself over the years, like, you know, this sense of identity of wanting to impress others and wanting to be liked and wanting to be recognized. I saw this was all so shallow.

Up until that moment, there were words I described myself or this narrative or this script in my head that I continue to try to fulfill. I am a gang member. I am a hustler. I am Vietnamese. I'm part of this Asian car and like all these things in my head.

and not really having a sense of substance to myself when I realized like, if I removed all this, I have no sense of identity. And that was terrifying. And there was a part of me, the very shallow part of me wanted to lash back out and say, you know what? I think I should just hold on to this and not walk away. Facing myself and saying that you are a fake. That was the most challenging part when I had to say, I have no substance. I have no true sense of identity.

It was terrifying because I realized any sense of identity, no matter how fake, was better than no sense of identity. Yet, if I don't have a sense of identity, if I don't have this crutch that I'm comfortable with to lean on, then who am I as a person? Like, who am I? And then I felt that, you know what, there's something better on the other side, regardless of what it is. There's something better on the other side of this.

In understanding that, I had to realize, okay, I was not born a murderer. I became one through a series of choices and lies I told myself. So how do I get myself back up? If I got to this place of lying to myself, how do I get to a place of intentional choices and intentional truth that I tell myself each day?

So it's not, okay, this person made me mad. It's more, you know, I'm choosing to become angry because of this comment. And understanding that gave me such a huge sense of freedom and liberation while inside.

it became liberating in the sense that I did not have to fulfill other people's expectations of me anymore. Whether that as a son or as a friend or as a hustler or as like all these roles that I put in my head of how do I want to be showing up to people around me. I didn't have to fulfill that anymore. I could just be myself.

I can openly share and be vulnerable and authentic and genuine. That is where a lot of my own freedom came, except that it's all fake, except that I don't want to identify myself this way anymore. And maybe I have to go back to rebuilding myself from that young little boy. And just how can I make myself better from there?

The next step for me naturally became like, how can I make an impact? How can I do something on this yard in this little corner of the world that's been forgotten? This little area of the world that I'm residing in. Always being that bookworm, I became fascinated with grief and loss. And then recognizing it in men around me, I realized, you know what? A lot of men in here are facing grief. And I realized, you know what? There's a lot of people here in pain.

It becomes a fishbowl where I could see other personalities playing themselves out, other narratives of what a person has told themself and holding onto that narrative for so long. So I drafted a syllabus and I reached out to the prison psychologist and he read it and he loved what I put together. So we created the first grief and loss group at the prison.

And we went into the group for the first time and I saw the hunger and the pain behind each man's eyes, but also the willingness to begin the healing process. So then for me, it just, it made me feel even more alive. Like, oh my goodness, I can do something for others for once. And I could do something for my community for once, but in a good way.

So that was one of many groups I got involved with. I got involved with like a victim's awareness group, got involved with alternatives to violence groups. I was like, okay, how can I make an impact now? How can I change people's lives and how can I make this a better place for all of us in here, even while we're in prison? It also started to change the culture on that prison yard where people were able to express themselves more, able to at least understand each other's perspectives and to slow down a little bit.

Now I feel alive for once and now I feel I have a sense of purpose for once in my life. And this was even if I'll probably never get out, but it doesn't matter. Like I feel free. I feel like this is where I'm meant to be at this point in my life right now. Whenever people ask me what I was in prison for, I used to say, oh, gang murder or yeah, it was a shooting, gang related shooting. And that's just how I described it.

But then when I got involved with these different groups and I was trying to make an impact on a yard and beginning to come to a sense of what remorse was for me, I realized, OK, it wasn't my homeboys fault, the one that snitched on me that I was in prison. I was in prison because I actually killed somebody. Another main thing I had to face then was choosing to shoot and kill another human being and realizing that is what I did.

So I got interviewed by the NPR radio. They came in and so she was asking me about all these different groups. And then they came inevitably to the question, you know, how long you've been in prison? I think by that time, 12, 13 years. And she said, what are you in prison for? And that day I told her I'm in prison for murder. I saw her looking at me waiting to explain and like, you know, this silence, this

Everything in me wanted to explain like, but wait, it was gang related or, oh crap, what if she thinks I came to prison for killing a girlfriend or a wife? What is she going to think of me?

And even if I feel this need to justify it, I don't have to verbalize it. And I could just sit with it because it doesn't matter what she thinks. It doesn't matter how uncomfortable this is making me. This is the type of person I want to be in this world. I don't want to make excuses and I don't want to be like this anymore. So I will just own this because that's what I did.

I realized the longer I sat with it, the more sense of freedom and liberation in my mind I felt. So it was after that moment that when people asked, I just said, I'm in prison for the murder of another human being.

I had this habit. I have a journal and in each night I would write into the journal what I did well that day or what I could give myself a pat on the back for. Because I realized like my mom was harsh in the way she talked to us. But then I had to realize I was even more harsh to the words I said to myself in my head.

And I never once gave myself room to forgive or any sense of being okay with messing up, especially never acknowledging that I had any good qualities.

So I intentionally wrote down in my journal each day, what did I do well today? And what am I giving myself a pat on the back for? And then I would also put in my journal, where did I fail today? And failing specifically so that I could just get past that failing is okay. So that's how I ended my day each day inside prison during that time.

It made me more acutely aware of how the words that we use to describe ourselves really dictate on how a person shows up in a world. So a person that has not come to that self-understanding yet of that script or that narrative in their head will continue to talk out of that narrative.

So it's always interesting for me to listen and to see, wow, this is so prevalent around us. And then more importantly, what other narratives or script that I am telling myself in my head that I still need to get rid of or that I still need to address or to become aware of.

I started to explore, okay, who else did I affect with this? Yes, there's a living, breathing human being that's no longer alive because of me. And I didn't just affect me being here. Look how I've affected my family. Look how I've affected my victim's family. Look how I affected myself.

my community, look how I affected each of the men that were inside the car with him, my homegirls who were arrested with me. You know, what was the ripple effect of my single action and how many countless lives I affected because of it? And it became pretty sobering, like, damn it, I'm a piece of crap. And look at all this that I did to people all around me. And how are people still affected to this day? Like, how is my mom still suffering to this day, hoping that I could somehow go home?

The first time I went to the parole board in 2013 was the first time officially on the record. I went in and I said, I committed the murder. I did the shooting. I lied at trial. I coached witnesses. I got rid of evidence and I just owned it. I owned it because by that time, that's how I wanted to live my life. Like, what is a point of life of personal responsibility if I'm still lying? They gave me a five-year denial for multiple write-ups.

My aunt had written me a letter right after my denial and just she researched and saw that, you know, I think at the time less than 1% of life term prisoners were getting paroled. So I shouldn't try to get all my hopes up there like that because she was concerned that I would go into depression or whatever. But I remember writing her a letter back and just saying, you know what? I'm not crazy. If I don't believe in myself, whoever would?

I've found my freedom already. It's 2013. The parole board has given me a five-year denial, but I guarantee you I will be home before 2018. 2015, I'm brought back in and that's when they told me, "We no longer find that you're a threat to society and we believe that you are now suitable for parole." November of 2015. So this November, it will be exactly five years.

I went in in 1999 for the murder of a human being and I was paroled in 2015, 16 odd years later. So that was November of 2015. I was paroled, flew home and got to eat my first meal with family members. My mom, my brother, my sister getting to hug my niece for the first time outside prison walls. But then sitting there feeling like, where's my life going to go?

So I created my first company six months after I paroled. It's a commercial cleaning company. I was involved with this organization inside prison called Defy Ventures. It's a nonprofit that helps men and women with criminal histories to transform their lives through the journey of entrepreneurship. And I stayed involved with them after I came home and was still a participant in the program and created my first company.

Two years after I had been home, they expanded out here to Southern California, actually, and asked if I would be interested in hopping on board as one of their program staff. So I did. And I jumped into the nonprofit world. And that was about two, three years ago now that I was involved with that.

So I still get to go back into prison and help the men and women once they come home. So that's what I get to do for a living nowadays, which I totally love. And I still have my commercial cleaning company on the side. And for the book I'm writing, it's called Sparrow in the Razor Wire. And it's written for men that are doing long or life-term sentences. And in it, I share with them my own journey into darkness and how I found my way out.

My biggest challenge was rebuilding my relationships with family members because I had went in one person and I think that's the only person they knew. So in their head, that's all they knew of me. You know, I've had my share of conflicts with family members and friends. And then I had to realize, you know what, all these years...

I have been able to examine myself and I have been able to grieve my father's death and I've been able to learn how to communicate effectively or intentionally want to communicate better. But some of them have not. So it gives me a better sense of I don't have to change the world or them. I can just look for ways to continue to change myself.

Today's episode featured Quan Huynh. You can read more about Quan's story in his memoir, Sparrow and the Razor Wire, Finding Freedom from Within While Serving a Life Sentence. You can also find out more about Quan and his work at quanxhuynh.com. That's Q-U-A-N-X-H-U-Y-H-N dot com. This Is Actually Happening is brought to you by me, Witt Misseldein.

If you love what we do, you can join the community on our official Instagram page at ActuallyHappening. You can also rate and review the show on iTunes, which helps tremendously to boost visibility to a larger community of listeners. And if you want to help sustain the show for the coming years, you can contribute a small monthly donation through our Patreon page at patreon.com slash happening. Thank you for listening. Until next time, stay tuned. ♪

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