All In (28 page)

This seemed like the perfect spot to turn the tables.
Come on, pocket eights, don't fail me now.
I swept my hand above my chips and announced, “I'm all in.”

Alex didn't look at me. He stared at his chip stack for a moment, thinking. Many players will look at their cards or stand up and walk around the room nervously while trying to decide whether or not to put their tournament on the line. Not Alex. He sat there, thinking, then said calmly, “I call.”

The crowd in the Amazon Room came alive. Raymond
Rahme jumped up and said something like, “Why'd he call? Why'd he call?”

Alex showed the same steely discipline he had throughout the tournament. He stood up and turned his cards. Ace-king off suit. Ace-king, aka, a big slick, is the fifth strongest hand you can draw in No Limit Texas Hold 'Em. My pocket eights are only the thirteenth strongest. He'd made a very good call. I had come to expect no less from Alex Kravchenko.

Now everything came down to the luck of the draw. I felt confident. In Asian culture, eight is the luckiest number of all. Two eights are even better.

The moment the flop hit the table, I knew I had him. Queen, nine, and … you guessed it. An eight.

The only way he could beat me now would be to hit a straight. He needed a jack and a ten on the turn and river, which was a long shot.

I raised my arms and cheered. Unable to stay in one place, I turned around and ran to my cheering section, my family. My brother-in-law happened to be the first person I saw, so I hugged him.

I quickly regained my composure and walked back to the table. “Come on,” I said under my breath. “Come on, nothing funny.”

The turn card was a four of clubs. The river card didn't matter.

Finally, after thirteen hours, I'd knocked out the most tenacious player in the World Series of Poker.
In hand 169, Raymond Rahme busted out when my ace-five beat his pair of kings.

Now it was down to two, Tuan Lam and me.

The day before the final table, Vegas oddsmakers had made Tuan Lam the odds-on favorite to win the title, while I was the longest of long shots. However, those odds were the exact opposite now.

With 23 million, Tuan had slightly more chips than he'd had at the start of the day. I was leading with over 104 million and had become the first person in the history of the main event to hit the 100 million mark.

However, if I've learned one thing in poker, it's that no lead is ever safe.

Ever.

My father approached me with a simple request when I was in ninth grade. We'd moved from the projects of Nashville to the projects of Kansas City a couple years earlier. “Xao, please, I ask one thing of you.” He looked extremely tired after having spent a long day making tool belts at a leather factory on the other side of the state line in Kansas City, Missouri.

Looking into his eyes that day, I could see that the years of backbreaking work had taken their toll on him, and I felt fortunate that we lived in America. Few men lived to my father's age in our homeland in the hills of Laos.

“What is it, Father?”

“Please finish your education. Graduate from high school. Then you will make your father very proud and happy.”

My heart sank.

It wasn't that I thought he'd asked too much of me. No, deep in my heart I knew my father had asked too little.
Have I
shown you I'm capable of so little?
I did not dare say it.

Even though his request saddened me, I knew my father had not disrespected me. Over the first fourteen years of my life, I had disrespected myself. It wasn't that I'd struggled academically. From my earliest days in school in Thailand, academics had always come easily to me. Unfortunately, I hadn't yet learned to apply myself. I still wanted to be that Hmong Tom Sawyer and constantly found ways to get into mischief.

I knew hard work and determination alone could lift me out of poverty, but I had to prove my Tom Sawyer days were past.

In Nashville, my full Tom Sawyer had come roaring out one day. One of my cousins owned a bicycle that I absolutely loved, even though it was a girl's. It had the long banana seat, small front tire, and sloping lines like a motorcycle's. My father couldn't afford anything like it, and I didn't have any way to earn money to buy one.

One afternoon, I walked to my cousin's apartment and borrowed the bike, but I'm not sure her family knew that. If we hadn't been related, someone might have accused me of stealing it. I didn't think of it as stealing, though, since I planned to bring it back as good as new.

There was one problem: I could barely ride. I took off on the bike, but I had trouble keeping it upright. Before I knew it—
crash
—I fell on the sidewalk.

I jumped right up and took off again. I got a little farther this time before—
crash
—over I went once again.

After a little while, I managed to keep from falling, which
made me so happy that I pedaled harder. Only then did I discover another difficult part of riding: turning. Instead of falling, this time I crashed right into a tree, the impact throwing me to one side.

Thankfully, I didn't land on anything vital. Maybe on my head, but I wasn't really using it right then, so it didn't matter.

I picked myself up, walked to the bike next to the tree, and planned to take off once again. Whenever I set my mind to learn something, I don't let up until I master it; I still had a lot of work to do with the bicycle.

My life as the Hmong Tom Sawyer always landed me in trouble. And this day was no exception. I picked up my cousin's beautiful new bike only to discover the front wheel looked more like a pretzel.

Oh no!
I started to panic but calmed myself.
Just fix it, Xao, and no one will know.

I looked around until I found two large rocks. After laying the bike sideways, I hammered away at the wheel. Once I'd made it as straight as I could, I snuck the bicycle back to my cousin's apartment and placed it where I'd found it; then I slipped away and hoped no one would notice.

I got caught, of course, but my uncle was very kind, and I didn't get into trouble. Perhaps my uncle had once been a little Tom Sawyer himself.

We may have moved from Nashville to Kansas City, but the Tom Sawyer in me was just as strong as ever. Here I was at the beginning of my freshman year of high school, still
trying to squeeze all the fun out of life without ever taking it seriously, and my father was pleading with me, tears in his eyes, to meet such a small goal: to finish high school.

Oh, Father, I am capable of so much more
, I thought.
And before I'm finished, I will prove that to you.

My inner Tom Sawyer died that day, put to death by me. I had no choice. My father saw great potential in me. All he really wanted was for me to have a better life than the one he, an immigrant who couldn't speak English, could give us.

I knew how hard he worked. Every night when he came home, I removed his shoes to show my gratitude for all he'd done for me. “Yes, Father,” I said. “I will not let you down. I will finish high school. You'll see.”

After my sophomore year, our family moved once again. By this point I had a new sister, Shirley, the first American citizen in my family. Not long after we'd moved to California, my mother had also given birth to another son, Reagan, named after President Ronald Reagan. My parents wanted to move our whole family away from the violence of the projects, and more than that my father wanted to farm again.

I had visions of the slash-and-burn farming we'd done in Laos, performing every task by hand. When we ended up moving near Fresno, though, I quickly discovered that farming in the California's Central Valley is very different.

My father rented a piece of ground, where he grew cherry tomatoes. My brothers and I worked the farm with my father in the afternoons after school and all through the summer.
Even though we didn't have to chop trees by hand and clear a spot on a side of a mountain, as we had in Laos, raising cherry tomatoes was labor intensive. Once they were on the vine, we had to pick them every day.

Did I mention how hot it is in Fresno in the summertime? The temperature climbs into triple digits almost as soon as the sun comes up over the mountains. I thought I might dry up and blow away picking those tomatoes.

When my father later rented his own farm, we also grew green beans, cucumbers, jalapeño peppers, and strawberries. I learned that if you can get water to the plant, anything will grow in California's Central Valley.

I took my promise to my father seriously.

During my freshman year of high school in Kansas City, I had brought home only one B on my report card; the rest were A's.

My sophomore year, I went to Hoover High School in Fresno, where I excelled in everything except English. I tested out of math classes all the way up to trigonometry. The math teacher, Haig Shekerjian, even let me grade papers for his algebra classes. Soon I worked as a tutor with his struggling students. Not only was I excelling in school, but I actually began to enjoy it.

At the end of my sophomore year, I brought home a perfect 4.0 grade point average.

My father noticed. He encouraged me, pushing me to work even harder.

He also worked harder on the farm to try to save money
to put toward college for me. No one can save money like my father can. Even though he worked mainly minimum wage jobs, he'd saved enough to pay cash for a car of his own. Now he had a bigger goal in mind, both for himself and for me.

My father now knew that merely finishing high school was not nearly a lofty enough goal for his second son.

In school, I ran into one problem: my name. No one could pronounce it. When the teachers called roll the first day, they'd come to my name near the end of the list and not know what to say. Sometimes teachers pronounced my first name as “Cho” or “Zo” or “Zou.” Even after I corrected them, it took weeks for them to get it right.

My brother had the same problem, so we both decided we needed American names.

For Xay, the choice was easy. He loved Jackie Chan movies even more than I did. The moment he decided to Americanize his name, he became Jackie. (Later, when he would become an American citizen in 1999, he would once again change his name, this time to Jonah. I guess he outgrew his inner Jackie Chan just as I outgrew my inner Tom Sawyer.)

For me, the choice was not so easy.

I wanted to pick a good, strong name. I thought about the name Charlie, but I didn't want to be called Chuck. I also considered the name Michael, like the archangel, but it didn't seem to fit me. I really liked the name John and almost settled on it, till one day while reading the Bible, I found myself staring at the fourth book of the New Testament, John, and
thought,
I could never live up to a name like this.

I also pondered the name Tom. I liked it because I liked Thomas Jefferson. How much more American could you get than that? But I was hesitant to pick it, too, because I of the whole Hmong Tom Sawyer thing.

Tom didn't feel right any more than Charlie or Michael or John did.

All of a sudden, it hit me. I knew the perfect name.

When I first came to America and couldn't speak English, I still liked to watch television, especially cartoons. I didn't need to understand English to enjoy my favorite cartoon,
Tom and Jerry
. I especially liked Jerry the mouse; he reminded me of me. He was so small that everyone always underestimated him. And, like me, he had to scramble for food just to survive. But no matter what challenges he faced, he always came out on top. That big old cat Tom did everything he could to catch him, but nothing worked. Jerry was too smart for him.

That's me
, I thought.
Struggle, struggle, struggle. But in the end, Jerry always wins by the sheer force of his determination. I want to be a winner. My name is Jerry.

I thought no one could possibly come up with a way to make fun of my new name. I was wrong.

One wise guy at my high school called me “Jerry Coke,” like Cherry Coke.

I let it get under my skin until an idea hit me.

The next time I saw him, he said, “How's it going, Jerry Coke?”

“Just great, Johnny Pepsi.”

He laughed.

We would call each other by these names through high school.

I'd begun attending a Bible study at an Asian Seventh-Day Adventist church after we'd moved to Fresno. Some weeks I also attended church there on Saturdays, in addition to attending church with my family on Sundays. The church sponsored a Christian high school.

After my sophomore year at Hoover, the pastor, Chris Ishii, said, “Jerry, how would you like to go to our Adventist Academy?”

I liked the idea of spending my day in a Christian environment. The school was also much smaller than Hoover High. Like everything else in my life, though, one big obstacle stood in my way: money. My parents couldn't afford to send me to a private school.

“I will pray about it,” I told Pastor Ishii.

I did pray, but it seemed impossible. At the public school, I qualified for the low-income lunch program and could ride the bus. With a private school, in addition to the $460 monthly tuition, I had to pay for my own books, field trips, lunch, and transportation.

I called Pastor Ishii. “As much as I would like to go to your school, I simply don't have the money.”

“Jerry, if you really want to come, we can find a way. Let's pray about it.” Then he said, “Would you be willing to work to help pay your way?”

“Of course.” I have never been afraid of hard work.

Pastor Ishii also asked about my grades. When I told him I was a 4.0 student, he said he would get back with me soon.

Two weeks later, he called. “A lady in our church, Mrs. Einhart, owns a nursing home in downtown Fresno and has agreed to help you pay your tuition. However, you'll have to pay for your own books and transportation.”