Two teens were sitting at the counter inside Vietfive, a West Loop coffee shop that was bustling with weekend customers. They watched as owner Tuan Huynh made drip-brewed Vietnamese coffee. Then, they sampled new flavors.
Darius Townsel, 16, was enthusiastic about the purple latte-flavored with ube.
“It’s delicious,” said Townsel, who lives in West Garfield Park.
Last year, he and Justyn Warren, 17, took part in a summer program with the youth organization Hood Heroes. The program offers teenagers from the West and the South side activities such as field trips to workplaces.
A big part of it is learning from listening to other people’s stories. Hood Heroes founder Jarvis Buchanan, a former Chicago Public Schools counselor, organizes additional trips throughout the year like the one the two teenagers made to Vietfive.
Huynh, 46, paused to show Townsel and Warren the back of his denim jacket. It’s embroidered with the numbers 64215 and “Life Means Life.”
Huynh talked about how he “got into a problem with gangs and drugs,” growing up in Wichita, Kansas. When he was 18, he shot and killed a man and was sentenced to life in prison.
Raised in the penal system
“I was raised in the penal system in the U.S.,” he said. “I spent 15 years in prison for first-degree murder. I came in as a teenager and came out as an adult.”
People told him: “Life means life. You ain’t never getting out.”
“Never in a million years did I imagine myself speaking to you here today,” Huynh said to the teens behind the counter of the bright cafe. “I don’t wish a day of prison on anybody. It will be the longest day of your life and the saddest day of your life.”
The name Vietfive refers to his five family members who fled war-torn Vietnam in 1981, when Huynh was 3. The coffee shop is a way to share his family’s story and build community, he said, embodying a path of “creating better habits, making better decisions.”
Buchanan, seated at the counter with the two young men, asked what Huynh’s family thinks looking back at his own troubled teenage years.
“It’s not what they wanted when they escaped Vietnam,” Huynh said. “Now, they’re really proud.”
After the coffee demonstration, the teens lingered outside the shop on West Madison Street.
“Most people don’t come out with criminal records and do a good thing,” Townsel said. “They keep doing bad things. Instead of leaving it [inmate number] in his holding cell, he’s showing people what he went through. Now, he’s making money, living life and telling a story.”
Most people serving life sentences don’t get paroled on the first try the way Huynh did more than 10 years ago. Nor is it common for them to get hired by a company like the global ad agency Leo Burnett a few years later, as happened with Huynh.
He left his job as a creative director at Burnett’s Chicago office in March 2022 to open Vietfive.
The COVID-19 pandemic was a bad time to open a cafe, but Huynh said he “believed the world was going to come back. I wanted to provide a space where people can come together. And I wanted to do it through Vietnamese coffee.”
The opening also came amid a rise in anti-Asian violence, racism that Huynh said he thinks stemmed from “people not really understanding and celebrating our culture.” He thought Vietfive could help dispel those sentiments.
“If you had knowledge and education about our culture, you wouldn’t treat it so badly,” he said.
The cafe specializes in robusta coffee grown and harvested in Vietnam. Huynh said it’s thriving, its beans also sold in stores throughout Chicago, New York and Wichita, Kansas, and that he’s looking for a second location.
He does outreach programs at high schools on the South and West sides, does community events and works with youth mentoring programs like Hood Heroes. And he often hires former felons and people from under-resourced neighborhoods.
He doesn’t mention the challenges small business owners face, such as inflation, labor shortages or public safety.
If Vietfive “goes tank tomorrow, it’s all right,” he said. “If you’ve been in the darkest of places before and the lowest of places, any glimmer of light is like the sun. There’s no stress on this side of freedom that can compare with anything I’ve been through.”
Explaining a life sentence
Huynh was a toddler when his family fled Vietnam by boat. After a harrowing five-day journey at sea with his parents and siblings, they arrived at a refugee camp in Malaysia. Five months later, they were in Arlington, Virginia, then they moved to Kansas, where his family had relatives, and lived in government housing in Wichita.
Huynh’s early memories of leaving Vietnam are of conflict, and that extended to his experience in the United States.
He was expelled from school for the first time in kindergarten, then again in second grade. He ran away from home when he was 12, stealing a Honda with a screwdriver and driving it to Dallas before he was brought back to Kansas.
Since elementary school, fighting was a routine, he said, and then he got involved in gangs and selling drugs.
“My group of peers faced similar issues I had to face,” said Huynh, who said his “crew” was made up of kids from Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam as well as Black kids.
By 14, he carried a gun with him every day.
“Gun violence became a thing,” he said. “It was a way of life. I didn’t even think it was wrong.”
In 1996, he went to a party, and there was a fight. People dispersed outside. Huynh, in the passenger seat of his friend’s car, said he fired shots into the air. He was 18.
When he got home after midnight, his mother was still up and cooked him thit kho, one of his favorite Vietnamese dishes, with braised pork and eggs. Without knowing what happened, she said, “This will probably be the last meal you and I have for a long time.”
“She just sensed it,” Huynh said. “Knowing the lifestyle I had, she knew I had no longevity.”
He said he awoke the next morning to police officers pointing guns at his face. He said he hadn’t realized it, but the shots he fired hit 20-year-old Charles J. Smith in the head and killed him.
“I initially denied it,” Huynh said. “I didn’t know I shot someone. It was hard to explain to my mother in Vietnamese what a life sentence is.”
A path to freedom
Huynh was convicted and sent to Lansing Correctional Facility in Kansas. For nearly a decade, he still hustled selling drugs from inside, racking up a disciplinary record. One night, high on ecstasy, he said he realized he had no purpose.
“I didn’t recognize myself,” he said. “I just [didn’t] want this anymore. So I stopped hustling.”
He joined a Christian program in prison after it initially rejected him because of his disciplinary record. A counselor gave him another chance.
Over the next five years, Huynh said he got an associate’s degree, started a mentoring program and helped write a Bible curriculum. His English improved. He reconnected with his family. And he started painting. He had always loved art — that passion showed in his tattoos — and it gave him another lifeline.
Then, the unexpected happened: He was granted parole. Inmates doing life rarely get paroled at their first hearing.
“Praise God — I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I was shook because I didn’t have a parole plan.”
He went to live with a mentor in Hays, Kansas, and enrolled in a graphic design program at Fort Hays State University, where a professor, Chaiwat Thumsujarit, recognized Huynh’s talents and encouraged him.
Leo Burnett recruited from Fort Hays State. Kerri Soukup, a Burnett executive vice president, spotted Huynh’s talent, and the agency offered him a job. He answered that he wouldn’t pass the criminal background check. After conferring with management, though, the agency offered him a job, and he moved to Chicago in 2014. He’s married now, and he and his wife have two young daughters.
He left the agency in January 2021, tapping savings and borrowing from friends to open Vietfive.
“It wasn’t a hard decision to leave,” Huynh said. “It was, for sure, a risk financially. But I felt like I needed to do this: living with purpose, community building, elevating Vietnamese coffee and our family’s journey and story, and giving people a different perspective of the Vietnamese diaspora.”
He designed Vietfive’s logo — a boat moving forward — that he said encapsulates his journey. But there’s someone who was left behind.
“He had a twin and a son,” Huyhn said of the man he killed. “When I get to hold my kids, I know he will never have a chance to. I had no right to do that. I did that to a whole family. Someone lost their dad, brother, cousin. It’s not a good feeling at all.”
