IT’S PERSONAL
Redwood Writing Project
Summer 2021
Young Writers Camps on Zoom Powerful Poetry w/ Dan
for 3rd-8th graders July 12th-16th from 1pm-4pm
Multiple Genres Mega Fun w/ Crystal for 3rd-8th graders July 26th-30th from 9am-12pm
Exploring Shakespeare w/ Natalie for 9th-12th graders August 2nd-6th from 1pm-4pm
Camps $50 each Register by July 1st More information and registration at
rwp.humboldt.edu
Feeling tipsy? If you have a news tip, story idea or something you’d like to see covered, we’d love to hear from you! 707-442-1400, ext. 321 editor@northcoastjournal.com
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David’s Out By T.William Wallin-Sato views@northcoastjournal.com
T
he first time I walked inside Pelican Bay State Prison I met David Nguyen. He was one of the first two graduates (along with Larry Vickers) to earn their Associate Degrees for Transfer from College of the Redwoods’ Pelican Bay Scholars Program. A monumental achievement. At the time, I was in my second semester at Humboldt State University’s journalism program and still trying to find my place. A few years older than most of the students, I had certain life experiences that separated me from my peers. How I even got into journalism was sheer luck and it probably saved my life a few times. After getting kicked out of high school and arrested, I eventually enrolled in a continuation school and earned my diploma. Being a wild teenager without parental guidance, I needed quick money, so I enrolled in American River College at an age I couldn’t legally buy cigarettes. I failed all my classes because I spent most of my time doing and selling drugs in San Francisco. But that first semester I met a professor who asked what I wanted to do with my life — sort of an unfair question for a mixed-raced, single-parent-raised 17-year-old with a criminal record and identity issues. What a koan! My reply was simple: to write poetry. The professor laughed at me. Literally. Out loud. He told me there was no money in poetry but I could choose journalism as a career and still write what I wanted on the side. He became my first journalism professor. My first attempt at college was unsuccessful, though. I was rearrested and spent the next half decade in and out of incarceration, the streets and rehab, while trying to keep my foot in the door of community colleges throughout the Sacramento area. A month before I turned 24, I was released from my last incarcerated experience at Rio Cosumnes Correctional Facility. While living in a halfway house, I read an article from the San Francisco Chronicle about a program at San Quentin State Prison. The reporter, although writing about positive impacts on programs, was referring to the incarcerated as other, and even detailing their crimes without context. What I mean by context is the history and backstory of the individual who committed the crime. Crimes don’t happen
NORTH COAST JOURNAL • Thursday, June 24, 2021 • northcoastjournal.com
T.William Wallin-Sato with David Nguyen. Photo by Tory Eagles
in vacuums. Life is a continuous flow of causes and conditions, and the majority of us who have been incarcerated carry trauma, are impoverished, have had high rates of adverse childhood experiences, while lacking resources, trying to survive or simply operating with the only tools we learned. Needless to say, the article changed me. I subbed in my name while reading the sources and wondered if this is what society thought of me — labeled as just a conviction record and nothing more. It was at that moment I decided to seriously pursue journalism and write stories from the point of view of the currently and formerly incarcerated. I wanted to do something that Nguyen and his circle were already actively pursuing while still inside — change the narrative. Fast forward to 2019 in a prison classroom on B yard at Pelican Bay. I was not what the students in CR’s Pelican Bay Scholars Program were expecting after they were told a journalist was coming to visit. (I know this because they all told me.) I was young and Asian American, with tattoos on my face and hands. I gave them a longer monologue of the paragraph above and told them I felt more comfortable in this classroom setting than I currently did at HSU. I kept hearing the name David Nguyen in conversation and how impactful he was inside the prison. He was mentoring younger guys, encouraging programming
and education, participating in Buddhist sangha, and had even started a journalistic newsletter with two other students, Kunlyna Tauch and Brian Yang, called The Pelican (I’m still impressed by the material in those first issues). I could relate to all of these things and we hit it off quick. He had a glowing smile that spanned from one ear to the other and a contagiously positive energy. I distinctly remember his laugh and the way he used his hands to get his point across. He was involved with nearly every program under the sun and I deeply admired that about him. He didn’t allow the prison setting to affect his behavior, but instead used it to influence his drive to spread positivity. I interviewed him for nearly two hours and learned his life story — immigrant parents fleeing the traumatic effects of the Vietnam War, isolated and bullied in school for being Asian and the luring effects of finding one’s place in a gang. The first question he asked me was how could we get him the same voice recorder I was using in our interview so he could record interviews with guys on the yard and in classrooms. We were instant kin. You can read the story I wrote (“The Graduate,” July 11, 2019) for all the details, but we stayed in contact and corresponded well after publication. David was soon transferred from the level 4 B yard to the level 2 D yard, where there was more mobility, programming
