58 SMITHSONIAN.COM | November 2019
combinations of colors. Black and white for
Hoang, 46, who is wiry, heavily tattooed and
wearing dark-rimmed glasses. Black with or-
ange for Robin, 44, the younger and more se-
rious Wong. Sky blue for Terry, also 46, who is
big and genial, with a sleepy expression exac-
erbated by the prosthetic he wears after losing
his right eye to a mysterious infection a little
over a year ago. The hat complements the de-
sign on Terry’s shirt, an oil derrick made up of
the letters FYHA, short for “ F--- You, Hous-
ton’s Awesome.”
The car sails down the Westpark Tollway,
rumbling like a single-engine plane. Soon
a water tower painted with the name Alief
comes into view. “All this was still fi elds when
we were kids,” says Terry.
The story of Alief is in many ways the story
of modern Houston. Founded in 1895, Alief
remained a sleepy town of rice farms, gravel
roads and largely German immigrants deep
into the 20th century. That changed in a hurry
starting in the early 1970s, as Houston’s pop-
ulation began to spread beyond the city lim-
its. By the 1980s, the population of Alief had
swelled to over 130,000. It had also been trans-
formed from majority white to a kaleidoscope
of black, Hispanic and Asian communities.
The physical manifestation of all that
growth awaits as we pull off the highway: a
sprawling high school campus as large as
many community colleges. There are, in fact,
two high schools across the street from each
other, each large enough to include several dif-
ferent wings. They share a stadium that looks
newer and fl ashier than some professional
arenas. “You’re in Texas, man,” says Terry. “We
take football serious.”
Hoang and the Wongs attended Elsik High,
rather than its cross-street rival, Hastings, but
eff ectively the two schools formed one massive
crucible of youthful energy. “You can imagine
what it was like at 3:30 p.m. every afternoon
when the bell rang and 8,000 kids spilled out
onto the street,” Hoang says.
The Blood Bros met in the midst of that
scrum. Hoang was born in Vietnam and came
with his parents to the States at 18 months
old, making stops in Louisiana and Mary-
land before settling in Texas. The Wongs are
third-generation Chinese-Americans whose
grandfather immigrated from Guangzhou
in 1926, stopping in Birmingham, Alabama,
and Knoxville, Tennessee, where he opened a
laundry, before making his way to Houston in
the early 1960s. As boys, the Bros bonded over
skateboards and bikes, hip-hop and a shared