David Thai was born Thái Thọ Hoàng on January 30, 1956, in Saigon, South Vietnam, where his family lived in a home on Tôn Đản street. As a young teenager on the streets of Saigon, when he wasn't in school, Hoàng often acted as a mediator between the American G.I.s stationed in Saigon who were in search of drugs, and the Bình Xuyên, an independent military group during the time of the Vietnam War that was also responsible for funding and orchestrating many illegal activities in Saigon during the war. When Saigon fell at the end of the Vietnam War, Hoàng's father Dieu was jailed by the triumphant communists and sent into a reeducation camp, but Dieu was still able to secure Hoàng's passage out of Saigon, where he thereafter arrived in the U.S three months later, going by the name David. Initially living in a small house for boys owned by a local Lutheran church in Indiana, in May 1976, David fled from the church house with $150 in his pocket and hopped onto a Greyhound bus destined for New York City.