BINGHAMTON, N.Y. — Two days after horror struck their adopted home, shaken Vietnamese immigrants gathered Sunday in a crumbling brick house that served as a Buddhist temple to send peace to the suffering.
The chief monk of Quan Am temple pulled a brown robe over his gray sweat shirt and black slacks and tapped a gong, signaling that it was time to sit. Facing an altar, he began to hum melodic incantations.
"Today, we chant for those who died on Friday," said the monk, Tuu Van Nguyen, as 12 people sat cross-legged on small yellow cushions. "We hope that the people in the hospital recover. We hope the suffering find peace."
He cradled yellow joss sticks in his hands and lowered them to a flame. Smoke swirled around his bowed head, the scene of peace contrasting with the terror that beset Binghamton on Friday when a gunman attacked an immigrant services center and killed 13 people before taking his own life.
With reports that the gunman, Jiverly Wong, 41, was an immigrant from Vietnam, this small community that had lived anonymously found itself thrust into the spotlight.
As details emerged about Wong's life -- recently laid off, troubled by poor language skills, unable to find a toehold in the United States -- many Vietnamese here saw their own struggles in his travails. It was a reminder, as if they needed one, that their transition from war-torn Vietnam to Binghamton has not always been easy.
The first Vietnamese immigrants in Binghamton came after the Vietnam War ended in 1975, but the city saw its biggest influx in the early 1990s, residents said. Local resettlement agencies sponsored hundreds of families of former South Vietnamese soldiers and political prisoners, as well as Amerasian children and their caretakers.
At the population's height in the mid-1990s, about 600 Vietnamese families lived here, according to Nguyen, the monk. But many moved away for better jobs or warmer weather, he said, estimating that about 200 families remain.
The Wongs came under these programs, as did Be Nguyen -- no relation to the monk -- who prays at the Quan Am temple every Sunday. When she arrived in 1990, Nguyen said, she knew no English, so she fell into assembly line work, as did many other Vietnamese.
Over the years, she has been laid off from various factories. Nguyen said the slumping economy had reduced her prospects. Despite being in a similar situation as Wong, Nguyen said she could not fathom how it would push an individual to commit such horrific acts.
