All In (2 page)

In truth, she had little idea what was happening at the poker table. To decipher the action at the table, she had to wait to see who pumped their fists or jumped around. Later, I'd see that the television cameras had caught her raising her hands and shouting, “Hallelujah. Praise God!” a few times. For the Hmong, that is a pretty wild display of emotion.

After hugging her, I stepped over to greet my father. “Well,” I shouted, “this is it.” I couldn't wipe the smile off my face. I was so happy just to have him here with me.

When I was growing up, my father never allowed me or my brothers or sister to play cards or checkers or chess—or anything that might come close to a game of chance. I hadn't dared tell him I'd started playing poker when I'd entered my first tournament in 2005. And I sure hadn't told him I was going to Las Vegas—Sin City—for the 2007 World Series of Poker after I'd won my seat at one of the casinos near my home. If he'd objected to checkers when I was a boy, you can imagine how he felt about Las Vegas and the biggest poker tournament in the world.

Once I'd survived the tournament long enough to finish in the money, though, I'd called and told him where I was and what I was doing. As soon as he'd heard the words “Vegas” and “poker,” he'd handed the phone to my brother and refused to even talk to me.

A couple days later, I'd called him again. By this point, I had played my way into the final thirty-six, which meant I would take home no less than $350,000. This time he'd stayed on the line, but he hadn't believed me. My brother had to go online and show my father the tournament results on a poker website. Only then had Dad agreed to come to Las Vegas to support me.

Standing there looking at my father just moments before the final showdown, I couldn't help but think about all he'd brought me through. Many sons call their fathers heroes, but I have good reason to call my father my hero. He saved my life.

When I think of tens of thousands of my people executed throughout Laos, along with all those who died in Cambodia and Vietnam after the Americans evacuated for good in 1975, I cannot understand why my life was spared. Whatever the reason, it was my father who had made it happen.

We'd come to America, to the projects of Nashville and Kansas City. I'd watched my father work from early in the morning until late at night to support our family. Because he was a refugee who couldn't speak English, he'd had to take the kind of jobs no one else wanted. But he'd never complained. He'd done whatever he had to for his family to survive.

And now my father stood next to me as the crowd cheered
for his son, who was on the verge of taking poker's biggest prize. He seemed so out of place, but then again so did I.

At 5 feet 2 inches, I hardly look old enough to venture inside a casino. Without my dark glasses and the ball cap I keep pulled down low during every poker hand, I looked like some guy who'd wandered in by mistake. One poker magazine reported that after the World Series of Poker I looked like a lost and stunned Scooby-Doo when the villain is revealed. Believe me when I say that based on looks, no one ever mistakes me for a card shark, much less a poker champion.

I looked up at my father and grinned.

He reached out and embraced me, a very non-Hmong thing to do. In our home country, fathers don't hug their sons in public or anywhere else. But on this day, my father squeezed me tight.

I never asked him, but I believe he, too, was thinking about how far we'd come since that day we'd fled our village in Laos.

“Father, will you pray for me? Don't ask God to make me win. But please pray I'll have the wisdom and courage for what lies ahead.”

“Of course, Vaam,” my father said in Hmong. “I've prayed that same prayer for you every day of your life.”

An announcement came through the public address system. My twenty-minute break into reality was over. Pulling my cap low and putting my sunglasses back on, I walked to the table.

“Good luck,” I said to Tuan Lam.

“Yeah, you too, Jerry.” Tuan shook my hand.

The television lights came up, and the dozen cameras
moved into position.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the public address announcer said, “the final two competitors in the 2007 World Series of Poker are … from Canada, with 23 million in chips, Tuan Lam!”

The crowd behind Tuan erupted. Canadian flags popped up everywhere. I thought my eardrums might explode.

“And from the United States of America, with over 104 million in chips, the first man in the history of the World Series of Poker to accumulate more than a million in chips, Jerry Yang!”

I'd thought the Canadians were loud. The announcer could hardly be heard. As soon as he said, “the United States of America,” more than two-thirds of the crowd in the Amazon Room sprang up and screamed and cheered, the roar quickly evolving into three distinct, repeating sounds: “U.S.A.”

Even now, four years later, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up as I remember that moment. No one in the audience that day could have possibly known what those three letters meant to me.

No one, that is, except my family.

Since the day I crossed the Mekong River and escaped Laos, I have not had a country to call my own. Refugees surrender their citizenship the moment they leave their home country. For four and a half years, my family and I barely survived in a Thai refugee camp, hoping to someday find a home.

Even after arriving in America, I'd always felt like an outsider. When I'd come here, I hadn't known the language or any of the basic customs. Other children in the projects had teased
me because of the shape of my eyes and my thick accent.

But on this day, Tuesday, July 17, 2007, the country where I'd lived nearly thirty years finally embraced me as its own.

“U.S.A. U.S.A. U.S.A.” The crowd kept chanting.

I turned and waved to my new fans, sunglasses hiding the welling tears. Right then I knew, no matter what happened, I had already won more than I could have ever dreamed. For the first time since my early childhood, I was home. From the hills of Laos, across the Mekong River, through the refugee camps in Thailand, to the projects of America, to middle-class life in Southern California, oh, what a long journey I'd made to get here.

Yet this is not a journey I or my family took alone. I am merely one of over 100,000 Hmong who fled our homeland in the Laotian highlands to escape the atrocities the Lao Communists committed against us.

And we are the lucky ones. More than one-fourth of the Hmong population in Laos have been killed since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.

The war never ended for the Hmong. Because we fought so valiantly alongside the United States against both the North Vietnamese and the Pathet Lao Communist armies, the lives of Hmong in Laos are still in danger today. Human rights organizations have documented the suffering there today as well as the distress of the Hmong still trapped in limbo in refugee camps thirty-five years after the war. All this in addition to the 30,000 Hmong soldiers who died fighting in the secret war for Laos.

I cannot help but think about all of my people as I sit to
write my story. In a sense, this is all of our stories. The name of my people, Hmong, means “Those who must have their freedom and independence.” The Communist armies who overran our home in Laos took that freedom away. My story, and the story of all the other Hmong who risked their lives to come to this country, is one of overcoming every obstacle to win our independence once again.

Isn't that the real story of America, too?

1.
My parents named me Xao. The day I became a father, Vaam was added to my name as a show of respect in accordance with Hmong tradition.

Some people will tell you everything in your life was predestined. Those who believe in God say the Lord did the planning for you. Others blame fate or the gods or karma. The consensus is that your life is set, regardless of what you do or don't do.

My people, the Hmong, have a phrase for this:
dlaim ntawv,
which, loosely translated, means “It's just your luck.” Its literal translation carries a heavier meaning: “a piece of paper”; that is, a document on which all the events of your life have already been written out. That means everything has already been predestined, and there's nothing you can do about it. Your path has been set. For those born on a good path, a pleasant life; for those born on a hard road, a lifetime of difficulties until a predestined death.

I don't believe in
dlaim ntawv,
but if I did I might have been tempted to conclude that the paper written out for me contained nothing but bad news. I know that sounds funny
coming from a man who caught a lot of lucky cards to win the 2007 World Series of Poker, but it's the truth. I say this because I was born into a people whose history is filled with bad news and difficult paths.

Originally, my ancestors came from China, where we were derogatorily called the
Miao,
a word that basically means barbarian, or
Meo
, which implies slavery. Both words are offensive to my people.

Life was tough enough for the Hmong in China, but it was destined to become even worse. In the eighteenth century, the Chinese emperor slaughtered the Hmong royal family and enslaved most of our people. In time, many Hmong fled for their lives and escaped south to Vietnam, Thailand, and northeastern Laos.

My people settled in Laos, where they carved farms out of the sides of the mountains. When I came along, my father farmed the same way his ancestors always had. With a machete, he cleared all the trees on a hillside. He then piled up the brush in the center of the field and set it on fire. Once the field was cleared, he carved rows onto the hillside, where he planted rice. After a few years, the soil wore out and the field stopped producing a crop, which meant he had to move on to another hillside and start the process all over again.

Dad never owned a tractor or chain saw or any sort of modern tool. Everything had to be done by hand, with machetes or crude axes. The Hmong had farmed like this for generations, and if the world had simply left us alone, we would have farmed like this for generations to come.

But the world would not leave us alone.

My father came into the world at the beginning of the end of the Hmong way of life. During World War II, the Japanese had invaded all of Indochina, including Laos. Hmong warriors fought alongside the French against the Japanese, even though they were not part of the regular army. As the war drew to a close, a new threat emerged. The Vietminh, a group of Communist revolutionaries from North Vietnam led by Ho Chi Minh, invaded. The Vietminh organized a Communist insurgency in Laos called the Pathet Lao. A few Hmong joined the Communists, but most fought alongside the French against the Vietminh and the Pathet Lao. Even though the French pulled out after their defeat to the North Vietnamese in 1954, the Hmong continued defending their homelands on their own.

When the United States took up the fight where the French had left off, the Hmong were right there beside them as well. No one, not the Royal Lao family or the South Vietnamese or anyone in the region, were as loyal to the United States as were the Hmong. As my people say,
dlaim ntawv
: it was just our luck that we chose to ally ourselves with the world's greatest superpower in the one war they were destined to lose.

In 1962, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China, along with the North and South Vietnamese countries and the Royal Lao family all signed an agreement in Geneva that declared Laos a neutral country. Any foreign army in Laos was supposed to immediately exit and allow us to govern ourselves. The North Vietnamese refused to leave. Rather than end the war, the truce actually escalated the fighting. Soon nearly
every Hmong man was drafted to join forces against the Communists of the Pathet Lao and North Vietnam.

My father, Yang Lo,
²
was drafted into the Royal Lao Army in 1962. He was seventeen years old. His older brother, Yang La Zang, had been drafted a year or so earlier and was already a lieutenant. After La Zang had joined the army, my father had taken over the family farm for his mother. His father, my grandfather, had died a few years earlier.

No family wants to have two sons fighting in the army at the same time. When my father was drafted, his mother was in a difficult position. With young children still at home, she didn't know how she would keep the farm going. Without it, the family wouldn't survive. The Lao Army was so desperate for soldiers that they drafted the two brothers anyway.

After coming from his small village, my father felt overwhelmed when he arrived at the military base in Phuxe for basic training. You must remember that life for the Hmong had changed little over the centuries. We didn't have running water or electricity, automobiles, or any kind of machinery. Most of us lived in the jungle in bamboo houses with thatched roofs and sustained ourselves by farming and hunting. When my father showed up at the army base with the rest of the new recruits for basic training, he'd never ridden in a truck or seen an airplane up close.

The base consisted of several wooden buildings with tin roofs, dirt roads, and several large fields. A Lao officer herded my father's group into one of the buildings, where another officer handed him a uniform and asked, “What's your shoe size?”

My father didn't know what to say. He'd never worn shoes.

The officer glanced at him, made some sort of sarcastic comment, then shoved a pair of boots at him.

Almost all of the Hmong recruits had the same conversation with the supply officer. Because we lived such remote, primitive lives, the Lao people from the lowlands looked down on the Hmong as nothing but a bunch of dumb hillbillies. Something as small as my father not knowing his shoe size confirmed the lowlanders' suspicions, at least in their minds.

Nevertheless, the Hmong had always been strong warriors, and our jungle survival skills made my people the perfect guerrilla fighters. The Lao royal family desperately needed us in the war effort to survive the onslaught of the Communist armies.