Sang Le Massacre: Summary

Danny Vo’s family is hosting a homecoming party for his eighteen-year-old cousin Sang Le who was sentenced in a Re-education Camp, or prison, in Hong Kong for many years. At the party, Sang Le meets a beautiful girl named Hong (who Danny rescued from the Cobras) and immediately falls in love while Hong falls in love with Danny. Unfortunately for Hong, Danny already has a crush on an American girl named Tiffany Marie Schultz. When Sang Le goes to school, he realizes it’s hard for him to learn English, and he can't understand his teachers, so he flunks out of school and joins a Vietnamese street gang called the Cobras, whose leader Sang Le relates to since the leader is also from Vietnam and he too was in a re-education camp before. He repeatedly comes home really late, lying about where he is and coming home with several hundred dollars a night.

Tiffany eventually agrees to go on a date with Danny alone, but when Danny takes her to her door, Tiffany's brother, Frank and a skinhead gang viciously beat him. Ba who is the grandmother in the family, finds out about Sang Le's money and finds out it comes from the ‘jobs’ given to him by the gang. She makes Sang Le to promise to leave the gang and return the money. He agrees, and the next night he stays home with Danny after the leader of the Cobra gang tells Sang Le to meet him at the billiards hall, if he still wants to participate in the gang's activities. Sang Le resists going, but later Danny lets him go to the store a block down to buy cigarettes. When Sang Le doesn't return, Danny goes outside and finds Sang Le, beat up, at the foot of an oak tree outside their apartments. Sang Le tells Danny to tell Ba he did not go to the bida hall, and then he dies. The officer later tells Danny that Sang Le had been beaten to death by a baseball bat, which the skinhead gang threatened to use on