Judy Young, executive director of Southeast Asian Development Center in San Francisco, speaks out about two attacks in recent weeks of elderly Asian women in the Tenderloin District.

Judy Young, executive director of Southeast Asian Development Center in San Francisco, speaks out about two attacks in recent weeks of elderly Asian women in the Tenderloin District.

Tony Nguyen’s documentary “Enforcing the Silence” chronicles the life and violent death of a young community organizer. Lam Trong Duong was 23 when he founded The Vietnamese Youth Development Center in the Tenderloin district in 1978.

The Tenderloin is slowly embracing a healthier marketplace—the corner stores where residents shop for snacks and many for meals.

Sokly Ny was a troubled Cambodian American teenager trying to survive in the projects and flunking out of high school when filmmaker Spencer Nakasako gave him a camcorder. “Shoot your senior year in high school,” Nakasako told Sokly.

The journalists were assassinated on American soil, one after another. Duong Trong Lam was the first. He was 27 years old and ran a Vietnamese-language publication called Cai Dinh Lang, which he mailed to immigrants around the country. A gunman found him as he walked out of his San Francisco apartment building one morning and shot him, a single bullet piercing his pulmonary artery, just above the heart.

In 1979, when he was 5, Sokly Ny escaped on foot through the Cambodian jungle with his mother, grandmother and six siblings. It was the era of the deadly Khmer Rouge, and Ny’s father, who had stayed behind for his family’s safety, was later killed by Pol Pot’s army.