“Don’t go to places you don’t know about, danger is always around the corner,” were the last words I heard before meeting up with my friend. Several years ago in Vietnam, on a hot sunny afternoon, my friend invited me to meet up at a convenience store. Our crew consisted of about three other kids, of which I knew only one. His name was Thinh and, he was a trouble- making, disobedient, messy kid who we all knew but wished we didn’t know. He was the only friend I remember before leaving for the sStates, so when I came back for vacation and wanted to relive some of my childhood memories, I came back in contact with him when I got there,. Thinh didn’t bother introducing me to his new friends or them, to me, so I just went with the flow and followed them. As we stepped out of the small -sized grocery store, we walked to Thinh’s friend’s house in another neighborhood. This other place had a whole different atmosphere from where I had been staying while on vacation at my grandma's house.

As I walked through the neighborhood, I saw people deeply staring into my eyes, from inside their homes. A fearful feeling of what might come next pervaded my nerves, making it scarier every step I took, making me hope that nothing would go wrong.

We eventually met up with another group of teenagers, in my wild estimate of about 20twenty or so. As we gathered and discussed this place called the Solution Road, I felt out of place, as if they were speaking another language. Then, in a flash, before I could get answers for my questions, we begin headinged out. My curiosity overcame my fear of the unknown, and I followed them within a heartbeat. As we inched closer to our destination, the atmosphere around us seemed to be calm, like before thea storm.

When we got there we saw another group of teenagers with weapons in their hands, ranging from tree branches to baseball bats to machetes, and from the look of it, things wasere about to escalate quickly out of control. In a moment of realization, I instinctively pulled out of the group with Thinh, and we quickly fiound cover, and watchinged from a distant. As soon as both groups came in each other’s field of view, weapons were drawn instantly,. tThey ran at each other as if they were a pack of wolves seeking prey for the first time in months. We instantly ran home, going our separate ways and never looked back for even a split second. When I got home to ask my uncle why they were fighting and what iwas “Solution Road,” he answersed hesitantly, “Solution rRoad is a very well-known place where gangs schedule to meet with each other and resolve the problem.”

That night while in bed, I couldn’t sleep, as I was thinking, how my life had almost passed by. I kept thinking of those words had I not taken that my mother had told me before I had left the house: “Danger is always around the corner.” Had I not taken this statement with a 2 grain of salt, if I had done what I had been told and listened to my mother’s my teaching, I wouldn’t have come close to dying or potentially being put in jail for doing gang -related activity. From that night on, every time I do something about which I have no idea of the outcome, I keep in the back of my head the idea that “danger is always just around the corner.”