ANGIE LEVINE/Daily Bruin Students sing during a
commemoration ceremony of UCLA alumnus Thien Minh Ly. Ly was
stabbed to death while rollerblading in 1996.
By Jessica Chung
Daily Bruin Contributor
About 150 students commemorated the death of former Vietnamese
Student Union president and hate crime victim Thien Minh Ly with a
candlelight march and vigil Wednesday night.
Ly, a first-generation college student, was stabbed more than 50
times while rollerblading at Tustin High School in Orange County in
1996 by a man who mistook him for Japanese.
Even six years after Ly’s murder, his family and friends
say they are still not over the shock.
“I always thought things like this wouldn’t happen
to me,” said his brother, Thai Ly, who was a sophomore at
UCLA at the time of the murder. “But it happened to me, and I
wish it hadn’t.”
Current VSU co-president Kim Le Pham was a junior at Tustin High
when Ly was murdered.
“Even though I was there, it was still shocking and
surreal,” she said. “It wasn’t until I got to
UCLA that I realized it was a hate crime.”
Wednesday, students marched from Kerckhoff Grand Salon to Bruin
Plaza to commemorate Ly’s contributions to the Vietnamese
community, said John T. Vu, a second-year economics and art history
student who co-coordinated the event.
“Everyone here feels the same,” said second-year
business student Linda Phan. “It’s sad and it’s
something that shouldn’t have happened.”
Vu said his organization is addressing the issue of hate crimes
toward other groups outside the Asian communities.
Hate crimes arise from the need to prove one group is superior
to another, said Ronni Sanlo, director of the Lesbian, Gay,
Bisexual and Transgender Campus Resource Center. She cited as an
example Matthew Shepard, a young homosexual student who was tied to
a fence and beaten to death because of his sexual orientation.
Though many people see America as multi-cultural, Mari Nakano, a
fourth-year student and speaker for the Asian Pacific American
Legal Center, said she sees a lot of cultural intolerance in hate
crimes, adding that the number of hate crimes has increased since
Sept. 11.
“I don’t want to have to be here to educate people
on hate crimes,” Nakano said.
The evening included a documentary titled “Letters to
Thien,” in which his family and friends spoke about their
memories of Ly’s life and their pain and anger from his
death.
“Everything is still the same, but without him, we feel
very weak,” Ly’s mother said in the documentary.
“Living without him is hell.”
The video served to put a face to the statistical numbers of
hate crimes and to highlight their seriousness, said Thao N. Tran,
a second-year political science and philosophy student who
co-coordinated the event.
“We can or cannot forgive, but we cannot forget,”
Tran said. “We will not forget his death. We will not forget
Thien Minh Ly.”