At the time his parents came to this country, the Southeast Asian exodus also included Cambodians, Laotians and ethnic peoples such as the Hmong from Laos and Montagnards from Vietnam. These refugees might have spent months and sometimes years in refugee camps in Thailand or in other parts of the world before entering the United States. Although they left their countries for different reasons, their journeys were almost always fearful and perilous. The Vietnamese, many of them “boat people,” fled out of fear of reprisals from the North Vietnamese for siding with the Americans. As many as half the boat people may have died in the attempt. Cambodians fled virtual slavery under the bloody regime of the Khmer Rouge (the “red” Cambodians). Two million Cambodians died from starvation, disease and murder. Laotians and Hmong fled persecution following the communist overthrow of the Royal government of Laos. Montagnards fled years of persecution from both North and South Vietnamese. Each of these refugee groups encountered hardship, terror and death on their flight to freedom.

In the mid-1990s, I spent six and a half years working with Southeast Asian teenagers, most of whom were the children of Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian and Hmong refugees. My portrait of Billy Nguyen in Absolution is drawn from these experiences.

Not all Southeast Asians are alike, of course. There are distinct cultural differences between the ethnic and national groups. But those who fled their homelands with few or no possessions, like Billy’s parents, often landed in low income neighborhoods, blighted areas of America’s cities infected with crime, drugs, black versus Asian animosities and gangs. Billy’s parents would have spoken very little English when they first arrived, and Billy’s main exposure to English as a small child would most likely have come via the TV set found in just about every home no matter how poor. He probably started school with limited skills in English and might have been placed in an ESL class. One Cambodian teenager I worked with, an A student at his high school, wrote an essay describing how stupid he felt to be assigned to ESL in early elementary school away from the other students. Another teenager’s mother told me that her son cried every morning when he left for school in the first grade (he is today a college graduate).

Billy, like many of the teenagers I knew, would have grown up in a family conflicted by poverty, cultural clashes and the devastating emotional wounds of war and dislocation. His parents would have worked long hours at minimum wage jobs, leaving Billy to himself much of the day, home alone or in charge of younger siblings. He might not even have lived with his biological parents. Many families were broken by death and separation, lost spouses, lost parents, lost children, the consequences of war. One refugee family related last seeing their teenage son chasing desperately after the truck in which the Khmer Rouge were forcibly transferring them to a new work site. Billy’s mother says in Absolution “I think I have to give Anh away or he starve.” I knew one young man who had been “given away” to another mother to raise.

Even children whose families survived and achieved a measure of stability in their first years in America still struggled with cultural issues. Parents often tried to keep to the “old” ways of their country of origin, while their children readily embraced American culture, not all of it positive. Parents found it difficult to maintain their authority at home when their children became more proficient in English than they were.

Billy, like many refugee children, adopts an American name, and English is his true native language. Yet even as Billy seeks to fit in to American culture, he will experience, as other minorities, racial slurs and discrimination. One teenager I worked with, a college-bound honor student, was berated as a “stupid chink” by a Driver’s Ed instructor at his high school.

Billy will not have had an easy time growing up in America. But does that doom him to delinquency and anti-social behavior? Certainly I have known troubled kids among the Southeast Asian teenagers with whom I worked – kids who have joined gangs, committed crimes, even murder. But far more have grown into mature, productive American citizens. They have graduated from high school, attended college or received vocational training, joined the military, married, had children, found steady employment and own businesses.

So why does Billy get himself in such trouble? Do his actions relate directly to the difficulties of his troubled childhood? We might, of course, ask why any teenager gets into trouble? We all know children of privilege who make tragic errors of judgment – who drink too much, drive too fast, experiment with drugs and sex and violence. Scientific studies have shown that areas of an adolescent’s brain may continue to develop into the early twenties. This research is cited in discussions of whether adolescents who commit crimes should be tried as adults, particularly in capital cases.

Perhaps the more important question might be are there ways tragedies like the one that occurs in the opening pages of Absolution might be prevented?

Stay tuned.