The first moment we see Shang, he’s pulling up to his coastal Texas trailer home in a red Ford pick-up. A good ol’ boy war vet shrimp fisherman, he’s played by a young and precociously craggy Ed Harris, in full beard and white rubber shrimper boots. Who knows why his name is Shang. His three blonde toddlers stand wailing in a kiddie pool in the yard. His blonde wife worries aloud about his roving eye; he mulls the threat of losing his boat to the bank. Then viet refugee Đinh meanders onto the property, and Shang barks at him to get off–a sentiment picked up soon after by white fishermen yelling, “Hey gook, learn how to drive!!” and later by Klansmen chanting, as they burn a giant cross, “DEATH TO THE GOOKS!!” The swell of white ferocity brings a sob to your chest. This is the forgotten-to-time 1985 film Alamo Bay.

I watched it last year in a motel room near Galveston, Texas, less than an hour from where the movie was filmed. Much of the area still mirrored the townscape you see in Alamo Bay: coast-worn and sun-bleached, open skies and stripping paint.

If you don’t like the weather, wait an hour, goes a local saying.

Everything passed in a dreaming rush. I remember almost nothing about the motel other than the desiccated body of a bird flattened on the asphalt of the parking lot. I half-expected to spot Chiên as an extra strolling matter-of-factly across a backdrop of the movie. Or strolling down a sidewalk in downtown Galveston. Which doesn’t make any sense, as I didn’t know what he looks like. But part of me felt sure I’d recognize him. This is the man I came to Galveston to find.

My name is Karen Nguyễn. I’m a journalist. Chiên is my story.

The bird—pressed like a leaf in a book.

It was my first time in Texas. I’d left home before, but never picked up and left to leave. I had a duffel bag of clothes, a backpack, no savings, a cardboard box of cooking stuff. My car. A mention of Chiên in a local paper is what brought me to the area. I’d been searching online databases across a web of towns radiating outwards from his last known location, New Orleans—Baton Rouge, Slidell, Bogalusa, on to Lafayette and Opelousas to the west, Hattiesburg and Brookhaven to the north—hoping he’d stopped in one of them in a way that might register on paper.

No trace, town after town after town, until Galveston, 5 hours down the coast due west. And here’s the strange thing: the hit, when it finally appeared, wasn’t from anytime in the last few years. It was from almost 30 years ago, 1981.

I got in my car the next morning.

The sensation of leaving: it was one of those times you feel pulled along by an invisible tether, watching yourself from inside and outside your body at once. It made no sense to go, and it was the only thing to do. Galveston was the only lead, even if the trail was decades cold. I felt crazed and a little giddy. Who knows, if Chiên was in the area before, maybe he’d come back since. Maybe he had family there. I mean, most of us in the viet diaspora probably have at least distant relatives in coastal Texas. As for Alamo Bay: that I ran across by accident in the bargain DVD bin at the checkout counter of a convenience store an hour outside Galveston.

It all ran together, Shang’s sad, grave eyes, Đinh’s goofy smile, the movie’s score, the stories the movie’s based on, the pieces of Chiên’s story, viet community stories, everything I stumbled across during my month or so in Texas. It’s still hazy to me now. I’m only starting to pull clues from the mish-mash.

they crashed into Port Arthur & realized the shrimp

followed them / there too when they set up / shop &

they started making a life / when white-hooded men

thought they owned the sea & all the fish / underneath

—from “Boat People,” by Joshua Nguyen

On August 9, 1979, the New York Times ran the article "Killing Sharpens Texas Feud on Vietnamese Fishing." The killing was of white fisherman Billy Joe Aplin, by gunshot, by viet fisherman Sau Van Nguyen (no diacritics provided), in the coastal town of Seadrift, 160 miles west of Galveston. Nguyen and Aplin’s personal feud was over crabbing territory, a microcosm of the cross-community feud stretching all around the buckled arc of the Texas coast.

Chiên’s not in the article.

A longer 1980 New Times Magazine feature, by Ross Milloy, on the same rough story, would inspire Alamo Bay; Milloy would end up an executive producer for the film.

Chiên’s not in that article either.

The 1981 Galveston Daily paper where Chiên finally shows up has an article about Gulf-area viet fisherfolk, with a mention of the 1979 trial of Sau Van Nguyen. But that’s not where Chiên appears—he’s in a different story, not even a story, really, and nothing to do with the killing or feud or crabbing or shrimping. Or ghosts.

On the back page of the sports section, beneath a small black and white photo of a very, very big fish, is the caption “Largest alligator gar caught in the Bay this year, 175.2 lbs, 89”, by Mr. Chien Vu Pham.”

That’s it, his one blip on the historical record.

(In case you’re curious about this kind of thing, the largest alligator gar ever caught on record in Galveston Bay was 186.19 lbs, 96.25”, by Mr. Billy Gilbert, on October 14, 1995. And yes, alligator gar are edible.)

It turns out the star player in the grand theater of viets in the Gulf, pushing everyone else off the stage, including Chiên, is a white dude named Louis Beam.

Louis Ray Beam, Jr. was the Grand Dragon of the Texas KKK and, at one point, on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List. More than a leader of a national white power movement, he was one of its visionaries, a central author of the new forms it would take in the decades to come–the shapes it takes now. To viets I met in the area, he was Loo-ee Beeem, which is funny, because–well, hold that thought. In pictures he’s medium-sized, mustachioed, a little weasel-y. In video clips he’s white rage in motion. Through a series of secret paramilitary boot camps near Houston, he helped shift the movement toward highly trained vigilante violence. Prefiguring the alt-right’s beloved 4chan was the online bulletin board LB pioneered for racist organizing all the way back in the mid ‘80s, Liberty Net. Most frightening of all: LB popularized the idea of Leaderless Resistance.

A headless, ever-shifting white supremacy that could never be pinned down.

Kill off one cell and it’ll be disavowed by the others, and the work continues on.

The central ethos of revolutionary–or terrorist, pick your label–groups worldwide.

Even now, decades later, sitting in a boba tea shop in SoCal, I get the chills.

LB is still alive today.

Or rather has a website with sporadically updated content.

At thirty-one,

pregnant with her eighth child,

she squatted on the kitchen

floor of the Hotel Galvez,

washed and shelled each day,

heaps of Gulf shrimps, brought

home with her on each sore

finger at the end of the day

the briny, ammonia stink,

the dried sweat of unclean

labor that required no English.

I watched her then as I do

now.

—from “What I Do,” by Bao-Long Chu

My cô Nhi first settled in southern Texas in the late 1970s. Retired now, she owned a chain of Asian mega-grocery stores in Houston and was living in a palatial home in a micro-development, a mansion horseshoe on the water, a little west of Galveston. I hadn’t seen her since I was a teenager. The aloof aunt of the family, she had been in a protracted cold war with my uncles taking the shape of never speaking to one another almost as far back as I could remember. She and my dad got along only fractionally better.

I showed up at her house without calling. Her mansion was a pretty big culture shock, what with its dozen plush bedrooms, theater-sized foyer, marble things that shouldn’t be marble, gold inlay where there shouldn’t be gold inlay. I have to admit I found the yard’s collection of stone Virgin Mary statues and assorted citrus and nhãn trees deeply comforting. Full disclosure, I also didn’t turn down any cappuccinos from cô Nhi’s wall-mounted marble and gold espresso machine.

The afternoon I arrived, she welcomed me inside but noted I’d come at a bad time, right when her daughter was about to get married. In three weeks. Oh god. She rolled her eyes, but not all that dramatically. She didn’t mention anything about me possibly attending, which I appreciated but also felt a little stung by, strangely. She was wearing a drapey, gauzy blouse and white jeans, bangle bracelets. None of the ghostface white makeup favored by my east coast aunties–deep tan instead. She had a late birthday party for herself coming up and needed to get fitted for 3 dresses.

3? I wondered.

“Con, I’m sixty-two. I do anything I want.”

I laughed. She didn’t. She was throwing a birthday party the scale of a wedding for herself, and she needed outfit changes. Well! Good for her, and I don’t mean that sarcastically. I should say cô Nhi’s not actually my blood aunt. We’re related by boat. My family and hers escaped Vietnam together.

Chiên the champion sport fisherman got to Galveston Bay in 1977, 1979, and 1981, I was told alternately by several of cô Nhi’s contacts who claimed they used to know him. He hadn’t been back to town since Hurricane Katrina. He hadn’t been back since a long time before Katrina. But they remembered him. He’d dated promiscuously. He was monastic and didn’t date at all. He was short. He was extremely short. He was average 1st gen viet height. Which is short.

Explaining without explaining what I was after was an odd exercise. A man hiding in the past. A man I’m trying to track down because–. Luckily cô Nhi wasn’t curious at all, and neither for the most part were the friends and business associates she passed to me.

Did he ever teach khí công in town? Did you know he was a nhập xác, a spirit medium…?

Yes. No. I don’t know. We played Vietnamese billiards together once a month, usually after paydays. That’s it.

Was he tied up in the fishing squabbles, the KKK stuff, here or down in Seadrift?

Yes. I don’t know. No. I went drinking and fishing with him a few times. I remember he told good jokes about white women. None of us had ever seen a white woman naked before other than in porno magazines, so his jokes were hilarious and sort of like, um, anthropology.

Was he any good at volleyball?

Very.

Do you have any idea where he might be now?

None.

What was going on with Louis Beam at the time:

In February 1981, LB led a Klan rally of over 250 near Galveston Bay, burning a shrimp boat labeled “USS Vietcong.” The first of many Klan rallies along the coast.

In March of that year, Beam piloted a boat filled with armed and hooded Klansmen, displaying a hanging human effigy, firing blanks from a cannon, around the waters of Galveston Bay.

(We see this moment reproduced at about 1:03:49 of Alamo Bay, with Shang helming the Klan boat, one hand on his belt buckle, the other holding a rifle.)

In May, charged in an intimidation suit brought by a group of viet fisherfolk backed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, LB appeared at a hearing in his Klan robes.

Loo-ee Beeem, cô Nhi’s friends called him. Why that’s funny: in viet, the word “bim,” pronounced beeem, is how you say vagina. Or more like hoo-ha, the kid version of “lady parts.” Loo-ee Hoo-ha running around terrorizing us.

Meanwhile Chiên was busy fishing. He fished all the time. No one knew what his refugee exodus was like or when exactly he left VN. His famous alligator gar should hold the record, it was actually bigger than 186 lbs, way bigger, the Americans just didn’t want a viet with the record, insisted an uncle who said he and Chiên were once close friends. Though in all honesty that uncle himself once caught a gar even bigger, he should hold the record, but unfortunately he’d eaten it and never got a good picture of the monster on a scale—Like this big, he showed me with his hands, grinning. I mock-coughed into my arm to hide my eye-roll. Everything in the world is a penis to measure.

According to a different uncle: when the Seadrift killing happened in ‘79, viet boats started getting firebombed, viet homes got firebombed, 100 of the 160 or so viets in Seadrift living in a trailer park next to a crab-packing plant fled town, and Chiên got on the phone and helped arrange emergency lodging all around Galveston. Or maybe ‘79 was before he settled in Galveston, and he was one of the ones running, on the other end of the calls, according to someone else. Big sigh. It’s all speculative history.

Said one older aunty: He was a nhập xác, yes, a spirit medium, but not called that, we say nhà ngoại cảm, clairvoyant, here.

I do remember, a skinny uncle told me, Chiên talking with ghosts. I watched it. It was always on the coast.

Chiên was always on the coast.

He loved the water.

***

She was dating now. Cô Nhi had gotten divorced a few years ago. Her ex-husband, like many, many viet husbands, hit her. Leaving for this reason is fairly rare among 1st gens, even though domestic violence is an open secret across the viet diaspora. I was proud of my aunt for leaving. Her ex was somebody she met after getting to Houston, and someone I only met a few times, which saved me the trouble of feeling conflicted at all about her divorcing him. Though I probably wouldn’t have anyway. I don’t talk to my uncles who hit my aunts, which is to say I don’t talk to most of my uncles.

“You dating?” cô Nhi asked me one morning. Over watery phở mostly redeemed by a glorious raft of rau. No, not in a while, I told her. I’d had a girlfriend for a long time. “But–basically, she dump–we broke up.”

She shook her head. “Stay away from the white girls.”

“Huh. Where was that warning when I was in college?” I said with a smirk.

Without looking up: “You should've know that your whole life.”

Smart-ass. Cô Nhi didn’t really believe in khí công. That was a little surprising. I feel like there should be classes everywhere. Not “should” as in I wish there were so much as why did I never see them before, floating right in front of me? But she didn’t, and wasn’t alone. Ghosts, yes, but khí công, no. I Googled it the other day, and there are a ton of khí công studios up in Houston, many of them viet, even more of them Chinese (qi gong!), a sizable number white (groan). A week later cô Nhi would try to set me up with her good friend’s queer daughter, a doctor. Actually the good doctor identifies as nonbinary, I would find out. I’m still not sure whether to read this matchmaking as progressive or class aspirational or an indication of cô Nhi’s low valuation of my dating currency as a jobless 30-something on a mysterious but uninteresting wild goose chase. I am reasonably good-looking. But then so was the doc.

cầu cho chân cứng đá mềm

pray these feet would be strong

pray the stones will be soft*

—from “Song for a Lost Home,” by Anh Thang Dao

Chiên regularly taught khí công in Galveston was the report I heard more than once, including, eventually, from cô Nhi. She admitted she thought khí công sort of worked but was a business hazard as a backwards, superstitious practice—in terms of how Americans and even more and more young viets looked at it. It wasn’t a class he offered, more like an informal gathering. With a little more digging, I deduced that what really happened was Chiên practiced khí công by himself at a secluded beach and people noticed and started watching him. “Teaching” more or less took the form of him not chasing people away and, after getting tired of seeing them imitating him badly, correcting them impatiently.

The place of ghosts: Ghosts were always thick on the coast. Ghosts are still thick on the coast, I was told. You younger generation just can’t see them because you’re blind and stupid to the world.

I wonder why Chiên ultimately left Galveston. I wonder why he stayed in the area so long. What was he doing here? I feel sure he was trying to figure something out. People like Chiên are never somewhere just because they ended up there. They are there to be there, to do something, find something.

He loved the water, elders told me. He asked a lot of questions about people’s exodus stories. Not their time in refugee camps, or their escapes.

Their time at sea.

***

Look, Alamo Bay isn’t the worst movie ever. Yes, it has white leads, a white writer, a white French director. It also has real viet people playing real viet people. It has real, uncaptioned viet language burbling up and over its baseline English: at 09:34, a family around a dinner table, parents, teens and preteens, toddlers and grandparents, talking to and over and around each other, raucous and uncontainable.

Why I’m fascinated by the movie: not just because it takes up some of the same geography and narrative tracery as Chiên’s story—

Where the fuck is Beam??

There is in fact a KKK organizer in Alamo Bay, introduced as “Mac,” played by actor William Frankfather. Nondescript-ly sinister, a little in the creepy uncle category, he never coalesces into a full character. We see him three times, each brief.

He first appears at a town bar in a suit, stetson, and bolo tie, saying to the locals, “Sure like to get you ol’ boys organized, workin with us…”

Next appearance is over breakfast at a diner, same group, drawling, “Let’s get ourselves orientated…”

Last appearance is roadside, on the main drag of Port Alamo, watching viet families flee town by school bus; he gladhands locals and exclaims, “Y’all remember now, nobody from the Third World can hold a candle to us.”

This cartoon is no LB.

There was no trace of cô Nhi’s ex-husband left in the house that I could see. One of her younger friends was living in the guest suite in exchange for doing all the cooking and cleaning. Every day chị Linh offered to make me lunch, a gesture I appreciated but declined. I was perfectly happy just grabbing mì gói from one of the towers of boxes of packs in the garage. Deliveries of flowers and alcohol and plates and sternos and warming trays for the wedding, or the other party, were starting to show up every day. Had my dad ever hit my mom?

Chiên’s khí công “class” started near sunset each evening on a gray shell-fragment beach near a dilapidated wharf outside Galveston. Per a new, more reliable source who was actually a student. Most days it was just Chiên. Some days 2 people showed up, other days 5 or 6. It was martial, by which I mean regimented and vigorous. His movements were at once fluid and crisp. He did not like to talk to anyone before, during, or after sessions. He made corrections with hand gestures and an air of immense disapproval. Sometimes he would just stop and walk away and fish off one of the ruined docks. Students interpreted this as a sign they’d screwed things up irreparably for the day. Some would slink away. Others redoubled their practice until he went home.

LB’s paramilitary camp started with a charged lecture that was part eugenics faux history lesson, part civilizational fantasia, part genocidal lunacy, with the Lord’s Prayer tossed in for good measure. The camp’s rotational curricula included some combination of arson, small arms work, rifle work, Aryan race theory, hand to hand combat, white supremacist theology, and explosives. The camp was routinely packed. Women took part. Children as young as eight took part. Commando-style killing was a clear-cut horizon. I can’t confirm this from research, but I feel certain Beam must have regaled campers with stories of his service during the VN War, where he was a helicopter door gunner preoccupied with racking up, or in his words, from his website, “wracking up,” 50 kills before shipping out.

In 1980, Beam told the press, “We do not mean to train anyone to promote racial warfare,” adding, however, that “It is realistic to assume it could happen.”

The year before, LB was arrested for trying to assault visiting Chinese Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping at an upscale Houston hotel.

“Actually, Vice Premier Deng assaulted me,” he told reporters afterwards. “He came to America. That was his assault…Unfortunately for the 100,000 dead GI’s, I was not able to get through the Secret Service or the police officers to him. I had every intention of avenging their deaths.”

There is video, entered as evidence at the 1981 trial, of Beam at a camp dressed in military fatigues yelling, “Utterly destroy everybody. Maximum damage, maximum violence in the shortest period of time. They can only do one thing—die.”

In 1983, Morris Dees, head of the South Poverty Law Center, received a letter from LB on Aryan Nations stationery with the following message:

I challenge you to a dual [sic] to the death...You against me. No federal judges, no federal marshals, no FBI agents, not anyone except yourself and I. We go to the woods (your state or mine) and settle once and for all the enmity that exists between us. Two go in—one comes out.

You can’t make this shit up.

Shang is made up: a ruggedly handsome avatar of the disenfranchised white Gulf fisherman made to be loveable. It is damn hard to maintain moral revulsion toward one half of a starred-crossed lovers-pair, a racist you watch slow dance in a lingering, close-up shot with his never-could-make-it-work-but-never-stopped-longing-for-each-other high school love interest, who by the way is likable herself (and blonde , and actually Ed Harris’ wife in real life), a kiss almost just happening for nearly 2 and a half minutes of screen time. Which is cinematic eternity. You can’t not root for that kiss. It’s the scene of the movie that sticks with you, more than the KKK boats in the Bay, more than the concluding eruptions of violence, more than the few scattered items of viet human scenery. I found a 1985 NY Times review that pans the movie but singles out the almost-kiss scene as its only moment of real, vibrating life. Also Shang getting his boat repossessed—the slow shot of it being driven away from the marina: no one living in a capitalist country doesn’t feel for someone getting their boat repossessed. Plus Shang’s a former high school football star! It’s too much. Here’s the true magic of the movie: transmuting Beam right out of the story, reincarnating small, safe flickers of him in Shang.

Where is Beam today? No one knows. Maybe Texas, maybe Costa Rica, maybe Idaho, where he hoped to birth a new white ethnostate. He hovers just offscreen throughout Alamo Bay, always threatening to erupt onscreen. He hovered just offscreen throughout my time in Galveston. He’s always almost arriving.

Chiên was always already gone. He felt so far away the whole time I was in Galveston Bay. But I remember feeling, very palpably, that everything I was learning about him, the backdrop of shrimping wars and the KKK and Loo-ee Beeem and burning boats and trailer homes, confirmed the need to keep looking. Here was a story worth chasing.

What I realize, now, that I’ve figured out about Chiên–

What he was doing there, all that time in Galveston Bay.

Listening, along the water, for the ghosts of refugee dead.