TX Observer: “California-based journalist Kirk Wallace Johnson was driving through the Sierra Nevadas in December 2018 to fish in a river when that “Springsteen song came on about a white shrimper planning to kill a Vietnamese refugee in Galveston Bay over turf. It was such a strange premise for a song that it stuck with me,” he writes in an author’s note to his resulting book.
Johnson knew he had a book when he learned the story was true. It’s called The Fishermen and the Dragon and will be released in August. He made trip after trip to Texas before and after the pandemic to persuade players in the conflict to share their secrets.
His book opens with an episode that played out along Kemah’s busy boardwalk. Anyone standing there back in 1981 would have seen the white fishermen and their allies cruising by in the shrimp boat that Johnson describes.
“There was a cannon on the stern. Something was hanging from one of the outriggers,” he writes. The men aboard, all toting rifles, wore the white robes of the Ku Klux Klan. The hanging man was only a dummy, but the boat parade in Kemah was part of a sustained campaign of threats against Vietnamese fishermen that featured firebombs, windows shot out of houses, and cross burnings in backyards.
The underlying themes in Johnson’s book are disturbingly familiar: Fishermen in Texas—then and now—were deeply worried about industrial pollution and about the steep decline of their catch in contaminated waters like Galveston Bay and Lavaca Bay. They distrusted people with different racial and ethnic roots. All feared that there were too many shrimpers and crabbers, white, Vietnamese, and Hispanic, on too many boats, all competing for dwindling resources.”