March 15, 2006

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  Okay, it was in 2003 when I saw this movie at the Smithsonian.  Justin Lin, the director, and Sung Kang and John Cho were there to talk to us, and I got to talk to them one-on-one.  Let me say this now:  JOHN CHO IS THE BIGGEST D*CK YOU WILL EVER MEET!!!!  HE'S A D*CK AND DESERVES TO GET THE BIGGEST BEATING OF HIS LIFE, EVEN WORSE THAN WHAT HE GOT IN THE MOVIE!!!!  HE'S NOT EVEN A GOOD ACTOR, NOR IS HE FUNNY IN SUPPOSED COMEDIES!!!!

  
  

  Anyway, on to my entry of the day....

  
  

   

  
  

                    A Real-Life 'Better Luck Tomorrow' Story : BFK Meets BLT

  
  

  I took this past Monday off.   I did various things like clean my condo and buy running shoes.  I talked on the phone with this one guy in my Korean-speaking Bible study to get some advice about buying a car.  He said he was getting off work at 3:30 and could meet me at the Starbucks near Tyson's Corner mall.

  
  

  The guy wanted to sit outside because it was a nice day.  He asked me if he could smoke (he's a LOT younger than me, so he was showing proper respect to me).  I said no problem, that I was going to ask him the same thing.  We both lit up and drank our caramel frappucinos.

  
  

  I still hardly knew the guy.  We had met two weeks prior to this Monday.  He was a new Christian who was trying to turn over a new leaf - or at least he seemed to be.  The week before, he confessed to our small group leader and to myself that he had been a member of a gang in LA and had done some pretty awful sh*t. 

  
  

  Over coffee and smokes on Monday, he asked me about who I had banged at the church.  I shouldn't have told him anything about b*ning, but the point I was trying to make was that he look to our Bible study leader as a role model and not me since I was so bad that I had b*ned a certain girl with whom I had done homework for Bible study.

  
  

  "Come on, Hyung (older male friend to younger male)," he said with much curiosity.  "You gotta tell me who it was!"

  
  

  "Nah," I said.  "I can't do that."

  
  

  "Why not??  After all the sharing of personal information I gave you, you can't trust me??  All right, I see how it is, Hyung."  Haha, good psychological ploy.

  
  

  He ended up asking me the same damn question for about a hundred consecutive times....as if I was really going to tell him.  "Look," I explained.  "The girl is trying to live a new life now, and the last thing she needs is for me to sully her image by letting it get out that I banged her."

  
  

  "I won't tell anyone!"

  
  

  "Can't do it."

  
  

  "Damn, Hyung," he finally said resignedly.

  
  

  I was really getting tired of him asking who at the church I had b*ned, so I asked him about his past life.

  
  

  "Quit changing the topic, Hyung!" he said in response.

  
  

  "No, listen," I replied.  "Was it really that bad??"

  
  

  His face got serious for a second.  "Yeah," he said.  "It was pretty bad."

  
  

  He said how he often got into fights.  He said he wasn't really a good fighter or anything but that he often participated in a gang beating.

  
  

  "It all started when I was in the sixth grade," he said.  "On my first day at this new school, this Korean guy told me to meet him after class.  I got into a fight with him."

  
  

  "Who won?"

  
  

  "Ah, it went back and forth.  No real winner.  Afterwards, we shook hands.  Then I started hanging out with his friends."

  
  

  As he progressed through high school, the kid said he was angry a lot and that being in a gang gave him the freedom to beat the hell out of someone if he felt like it.  "Man, if I thought someone even looked at me the wrong way, I would start some sh*t.  And then my friends and I would kick the sh*t out of him."

  
  

  I listened to this calmly.  I was neither disgusted nor fascinated.  Five years ago, I would have thought the guy was making all this sh*t up.  But I had learned enough about Asian gangs since I had moved to this area.  In DC alone, it's bad enough, but I had heard it's out of control in LA.

  
  

  It turned out that the true story behind the movie, "Better Luck Tomorrow" took place at the kid's very own high school (though it was years before he was a student there).  And unfortunately, after that movie came out in 2003, supposedly gang activities only increased in that area.

  
  

  Then he got back on his original topic:  "So come on, Hyung, who'd you f*ck at the church?????"

  
  

  "Will you stop it?!?!?  I told you I won't reveal!"

  
  

  "Come on, Hyung!"

  
  

  "So, tell me some of the bad sh*t you did out in LA."

  
  

  "Quit changing the topic, Hyung!" he said again, smiling.

  
  

  "Seriously.  What was the worst thing you did out there?"

  
  

  His face got serious again.  "Well, once the heads of our gang sent me and some others to hurt this one kid 'cause he claimed to belong to our gang."

  
  

  "Hurt???" I said.  "What do you mean 'hurt'???"

  
  

  "I mean as in pipes and bats," he said calmly.  Looking at his face, I knew he was being 100% serious.

  
  

  "But for WHAT?????" I said.  "For claiming to belong to your gang????"

  
  

  "The guys in our gang were pretty touchy about that," he said smiling.

  
  

  "F*ck, man!"

  
  

  "Yeah.  So we went to his house and waited outside.  We knew his parents weren't there.  When he came home, we started to beat the hell out of him."

  
  

  "With those pipes and bats?!?!?!??????"

  
  

  "Yeah," he said calmly.  "And see, his parents had a safe in their house."  I didn't ask him how he knew this.  "So the guy was begging us to stop.  And I made him give us the combination to his parents' safe.  And we took all the money out of it."

  
  

  I looked at the kid, not knowing what to think.  I looked at his face.  He could have been a young pretty-boy once, but he had the marks of a smoker already on his face.  Also, he looked like he'd seen life.  I knew he was telling the truth. 

  
  

  He continued, "So the guy ended up in a wheelchair for a while.  And we thought he would snitch, but it turns out he didn't.  But some of the guys in our gang thought they had to 'finish the job', so they went back into his house.  I didn't go with them.  No one was there, but they figured out someone had broke into their home.  So that guy thought we were going to kill him.  Now I wasn't with them the second time, but he knew I was there the first time when we were beating him up.  So he told the police on me even though I wasn't there the second time.  That's how I ended up in jail."

  
  

  I had known already that around the age of 16, the kid had gone to jail.  I never asked the question which had been on my mind, did you get raped????  But apparently, he had had enough back-up in there, so I think he avoided that....I hope.

  
  

  He said that that trouble was why he had moved to Maryland, in the greater DC area. 

  
  

  "Did you stay out of trouble then?" I asked.

  
  

  "Nah.  That sh*t kept following me.  Pretty soon, I was doing the same thing here."

  
  

  "What do you mean 'that sh*t kept following' you????" I said.  "Did you LOOK to join a gang here???"

  
  

  "No," he replied.  "I guess people could see the look on my face when I got bumped accidentally at a club or something.  They could tell I had been in a gang before.  Pretty soon, I started hanging out with this one Chinese guy and his friends.  I don't really like the Korean guys around here."

  
  

  "Why not?"

  
  

  "Well, once I was hanging out with ssome Korean guys.  And this one Vietnamese guy started talking sh*t to me.  I said some sh*t back, and we started to fight.  Then all his friends jumped in and beat the sh*t out of me.  Split my lip wide open." He pointed to his mouth where I could see a bump.  "I had to get stitches.  Anyway, the Koreans all just stood there and watched me get beat.  Can you believe that sh*t?!?!?!??"

  
  

  "They just stood there????"

  
  

  "Yeah.  So after that I quit hanging around Koreans.  But right after I got beat up, I called my Chinese friend.  He told me to stay right there.  Next thing about twenty cars came out.  They were all his friends.  So we went and found those Vietnamese guys and beat the sh*t out of them."

  
  

  "You found them out pretty fast???"

  
  

  "Yeah.  We got 'em good!"

  
  

  "Damn...."

  
  

  "But I never did hang out with just Koreans after that.  Can't believe they just stood there watching me get beat up!"

  
  

  "Sheez.  Yeah, that is bad."

  
  

  "So come on, Hyung!" he said with a smile. "Who'd you screw at church????"

  
  

  I sighed and looked at him with a steady stare.

  
  

  "You're not gonna tell me, are ya."

  
  

  "Nope."

  
  

  "Come on!  All right, Hyung, if that's the way it's gonna be," he said smiling. "Here I've spilled my guts to you and you don't even share back."

  
  

  "Look, I gotta protect her reputation!  How would you like it if I shared with everyone at the church your secrets??"

  
  

  "I don't care if you did."

  
  

  "Well, that's because what you just told me is semi-macho sh*t that you can sorta brag about.  The same doesn't go with this girl.  It'd be like if you got f*cked up the *ss, and I went around and told others about it."

  
  

  "Aw come on!  It's not the same thing, Hyung!"

  
  

  "Yes, it is."

  
  

  He finally let it go.  Meanwhile, I had more questions.

  
  

  "If you had stayed in that gang....would you be pretty high up now?"

  
  

  He thought about it and said, "At this point, yeah.  Some of my friends from high school are still in gangs and are pretty high up.  Some of them have been involved in kidnapping girls and selling them off."  God, has it come to this??  I looked at his eyes and knew he was telling the truth.  What I didn't see clearly was necessarily repentance or remorse. 

  
  

  I asked a final question.

  
  

  "Did you ever kill anyone??"

  
  

  "No," he said.  He thought about it.  "At least I don't think so.  We beat the sh*t out of people and usually left them there unconscious.  But I don't think we ended up killing anybody."

  
  

  Around 6 we got ready to go our separate ways.

  
  

  "Hey, <his name>," I said.  "Listen.  I know you and <our Bible study leader's name> are pretty tight, and you like him."

  
  

  "Yeah," said the dude. "He's a good guy."

  
  

  "Well, look to him as a potential role model as to what a Christian should be.  Don't look to me.  I'm a hypocrite, okay?  Look to him."

  
  

  "No, Hyung, I feel like I can talk with you, too."

  
  

  "Well, anyway, if you really want to be a good Christian, there are a lot of good ones on the Korean-speaking AND English-speaking side of church.  But then again, there are the ones like me who aren't as sincere as we could be.  Don't let any of us hypocrites lead you astray if you want to walk the narrow path."

  
  

  He looked at me and knew I was speaking seriously.  He said okay.  We then parted. 

  
  

  But not before he asked me one more time on the way to his car, "So, who'd you f*ck, Hyung???"

  
  

  "F*ck, man!  Shut up!" 

  
  

  He laughed.  "See you Sunday, Hyung."

  
  

  "All right, man.  See you then."

  • 11:20 am
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