Starting in May 2014, I began FaceTiming with Hong every day. I convinced myself that my son deserved to know his mother and that everything would work out “just perfect” if I could only get her away from her toxic family and the Triads pulling her strings in Asia. After a month of talking several times a day, I had what I thought was a great idea: if I went to Vietnam in person, I could speed up the process with the State Department to get Hong a visa. So, I bought tickets for my son and me, left the dogs at a kennel, and set off for Vietnam on July 11th, 2014, with no return date in mind.

The trip was a mess from the start. I missed our first flight and had to fork over an extra $1,000 for a new one. Worst of all, I’d assumed I had a 5-year business visa for Vietnam, but it turned out to be a 3-year visa, something the airline didn’t catch when I checked in. When we landed in HCMC, we were denied entry. There was no internet in the airport, and my SIM card didn’t work. I had to ask the guy next to me on the plane to find Hong at the curb and let her know we had a problem. Forty-five minutes later, Hong showed up with an airport cop. The authorities wanted to send me back to Hong Kong until I could get a new visa, but Hong managed to talk them into letting us stay at a government-owned, guarded hotel while we waited. A $500 bribe did the trick; better than being forced to bounce back and forth between countries for two days. Two days later, I had my visa and we were free to leave the government hotel and enter Vietnam.

The first five weeks were surprisingly uneventful; no drama, just living in a hotel in District 6 near Hong’s sister and her husband, working on getting Hong a visa. But by the sixth week, things took a turn. Hong started pushing to get “ice” (meth), and I kept refusing, reminding her that we didn’t have the luxury of two nannies and a big house like in 2011. But she was persistent, insisting her sister could watch our son for a few hours each day. Eventually, I gave in. I never touched ice in the U.S. and never will, but Vietnam was so dull and miserable for me that it was easy to say yes, knowing how quickly time would pass while high. The picture below was taken around the time she started asking.

About a week before that, the trouble started. I noticed I was being hacked; network settings I’d manually configured kept changing, with Hong’s subtle assistance. I bought a new laptop, making sure to choose one from the display to avoid getting a pre-hacked unit from the back. But when I got it back to the hotel, the battery didn’t work; it had to stay plugged in at all times. That was a red flag, since I already knew they could compromise machines through the power supply. I had to return it, and from then on, I was at their mercy regarding whether I’d get a clean device.

Even with the new laptop, I couldn’t get it to run securely; strange processes kept popping up, even when I booted from a live Linux CD. So I stopped using it, but noticed Hong kept plugging it in, even with the lid closed and unused. Here we go again: Sleeping with the Enemy, Round 2.

A couple of days after the store replaced my laptop, things took a familiar, sinister turn. I started hearing random banging on the hotel walls between 1 and 2 AM; sometimes from above, sometimes from the rooms to my right or left. It was clear: the Triad trash was back on my trail.

While fighting their hacks, I had an epiphany and changed the subnet mask on my devices from 255.255.255.0 to 255.255.255.255. I didn’t fully understand the technical significance at the time, but as soon as I applied the change on each device, I’d hear a door slam or a chair scrape in one of the three rooms within two seconds. It felt like I’d just “closed the door” on their access and they were reacting in frustration. I realized later that this setting isolated my device from the rest of the network, blocking broadcast messages from the 254 other addresses on the subnet. They were somewhere in those addresses, serving messages and commands to my devices, and I’d just cut them off.

The next night, at 3 AM, they banged on all three walls for five minutes straight. The following day, I saw a girl waiting in one of their rooms while the maid cleaned. I confronted her, told her to send her Triad boyfriend out to face me; he stayed hidden in the bathroom, of course. Typical Triad: let the woman take the risk while the men hide.

Hong’s sister then invited us to stay at her place, so we moved out of the hotel. The first couple of weeks there seemed okay, but I started noticing odd network activity. I set up OpenDNS and checked the logs after a few hours; thousands of connections to just one domain: http://meterserver.vn. That was a huge red flag.

I grabbed Hong’s Android phone and began ending background processes while using it as a hotspot. Suddenly, her screen froze, but the hotspot kept working. Within two minutes, Hong burst into the room, demanding her phone back to “play some games.” I refused and told her to use the iPad. She got increasingly angry and wouldn’t let it go. That’s when I knew: I’d broken their hack and escaped their sandbox, and they were desperate to regain control in case I was sending a distress message or leaking information.

I knew it was time to get out. I called United Airlines and found the next flight out in two days. I told Hong we were moving to a hotel near the airport in the morning; it was already 10 PM and I didn’t want to risk leaving her sister’s remote apartment at night. Two hours later, Hong claimed her cousin Mi suddenly needed a ride to the bus station at 1 AM, even though she’d been staying there for a month. I refused; she kept pushing, but I stood firm.

The next day, we took a cab to the Park Royal Hotel near the airport, and the following day, I left Vietnam with my son, returning to America on November 28th, 2014, after nearly five months of living through the same old cycle of surveillance, manipulation, and danger.

I spent the rest of 2014 arguing with Hong over FaceTime, trying to get her to admit to scamming me. True to form, she denied everything, over and over. For reasons I’ll explain later in the story, I made the decision to go back to Vietnam yet again. Hong insisted we could stay in the expat section of District 1, promising it would be safe because of all the Westerners around.

On February 12th, 2015, my son and I returned to Vietnam, just in time for Valentine’s Day, for what would be the final time.

The second week there, we were riding a motorcycle to a restaurant when a Vietnamese guy started tailing us. Every time I slowed down, he slowed down. Finally, I stopped and forced him to go around. As he passed, he kicked me. I told Hong to hold our son, dropped the bike, and chased after the guy. He darted into a restaurant, ran through to the kitchen, and grabbed a large knife. I picked up a chair, ready to defend myself, but several Westerners intervened and helped diffuse the situation. I let the guy leave.

Not long after, the hacking started again. I was back to erasing and reinstalling operating systems daily to try to stay ahead of the attacks. A few days later, Hong asked if she and her cousin could take my son to visit her mother, since he might not see them again for years. I agreed. The day before, her father had come by the hotel, supposedly on his way to central Vietnam, and Hong asked if he could borrow my luggage lock. I refused, sensing something was off. In hindsight, it was likely a setup to plant drugs in my suitcase, which I always kept locked.

Hong left with my son and came back the next afternoon. The following day, she said she was going to the store but was gone for 40 minutes, even though it was right next to the hotel. When she returned, I checked her phone with a security app I’d just run two hours earlier; this time, it flagged spoofed certificates that could impersonate legitimate sites like Google. I confronted her, and she grabbed a knife and tried to stab me. I caught her arm, and my son ran to me and hugged me. Hong screamed, “You chose him!”; completely losing control.

I immediately called Delta and asked for the next available flight out. The first agent said it would be eight days; the call dropped before booking. When I called back, a different agent found a flight for the very next morning. I was so grateful for the dropped call; it meant I could escape sooner. Hong spent the rest of the day crying and begging me not to leave, but I knew I had to get out.

At 5 AM, I was waiting for a taxi when Hong claimed she didn’t have enough money to pay the hotel bill and needed cash to live. I started to get her $500 from the ATM, but changed my mind at the last second and told her to F off.

The taxi ride to the airport was surreal. I was seething with anger, just desperate to get out for good. When we arrived, my son ran to the curb without saying goodbye to his mother, and she didn’t try to say goodbye to him. It was strange, but I just gave her a cold look and walked into the airport, finally heading back to the United States.

Goodbye, Vietnam. Goodbye.

After returning to Pennsylvania, I took a short trip to visit my friend Johnny in Las Vegas. He and his wife kept encouraging me to move there and start fresh; rebuild my business and my life. After everything that had happened, the idea of a clean slate was appealing. So, on December 6th, 2015, I packed up, moved to Vegas with my son and my two dogs, and started over.

Get ready, because what happened next is a serious plot twist.