by Jerry Yang
The flop came, ten-eight-six, all of different suits. At least I now had a pair, albeit, the smallest pair possible based on the cards on the table. If Lee had made a big bet right then or possibly gone all in, I would have folded. An aggressive raise signals a large pocket pair. He didn’t make a bet. Instead, he tapped on his chips, signaling a check.
I should have pushed hard and forced him to fold. But no one ever pushes hard with a pair of sixes when two potentially larger pairs are staring you in the face. I checked.
We both got to see the turn card for free, without risking any more of our chips. The dealer burned a card, then dealt the turn card: a four.
Lee bet 800,000. While that sounds like a lot, it really wasn’t, not when you consider that it was less than half the pot size.
I stared at the cards on the table. If Lee has a ten or an eight, I’m sunk, I thought. All I have is a lowly pair of sixes. If my tournament life had been on the line, I would have folded. But I wasn’t playing the cards; I was playing Lee Childs, and something about him told me he had nothing. “I call.”
The pot was now slightly over 3 million.
The river came: an ace.
Lee was the first to act. “A million and a half.”
It was what I’d been waiting for. If he’d had an ace, he would have bet at least 3 million, which would have doubled the pot and crippled me. Instead, his bet was more of a probe bet, a kind of dare to see what kind of hand I really had. With nearly 18 million in chips in front of him when this hand had begun, he could afford to throw out a measly million and a half to find out if I was bluffing.
I looked at the table. If he paired any one of the cards, he would have me beat. I looked at him. Again, something told me he didn’t have an ace or a ten or an eight. I knew he didn’t have anything that could hurt me. “I call.”
I turned my lowly six-five.
Lee tossed his cards toward the dealer in disgust.
As soon as he did, I knew I would make the final table. I’d played a hand I probably should have folded, but my instincts had told me to keep going.
Texas Hold ’Em is a marathon, but it’s also a test of courage. From time to time, you have to play a hand you normally wouldn’t, and you have to stand your ground when inside you want to fold.
I had just proved to myself I could do both. I knew I would not only survive this day but make the final table.
Two hours later, at 4:15 a.m. on Monday, sixteen hours after play had begun, Raymond Rahme knocked out Steven Garfinkle. The final table was now set. Even though I was in eighth place with a chip stack barely over one-third the size of the chip leader Phil Hilm’s, I had a shot. And once the first card is dealt at the final table, anything can happen.
15
A Place Where People Went to Die
Once we finally made it across the Mekong and into Thailand, I knew we were safe, but that was all I knew. Where we would live or find food or water was still a mystery. To be honest, it didn’t matter to me at the time. Staying in Laos would’ve meant certain death or worse.
Many people in the West have heard of the killing fields in Cambodia, where the Communist Khmer Rouge tortured and killed over a million people. Similar crimes were committed in Laos by the Pathet Lao, albeit on a much smaller scale, only because the population was lower. The truth is that these atrocities continue today.7
The soldiers who found us on the shore of the Mekong escorted us to a makeshift camp just beyond the river. There, American Red Cross workers handed out blankets and Thai volunteers gave each of us a small bowl of rice and a piece of dried fish. Few meals in my life have ever tasted so good. I hadn’t eaten anything in a long time.
The instant I finished the meal, I asked, “Father, do you mind if I go see my friends from home?”
My father could hardly keep his eyes open. The fatigue of the past month appeared to hit him all at once. “No, Xao, go ahead, but don’t get too far away.”
I took off running to a group of people who looked familiar. “Bee,” I yelled to one of my buddies, “let’s play.”
I didn’t have to ask him twice.
The two of us rounded up the rest of our gang. I scratched out hopscotch lines in the dirt, and we played until we grew bored with it. Then we found a piece of rope and played tug-of-war. It felt so good to act like a child again.
On my way back to my family, I noticed all the adults in the camp wore the same weary, frightened looks. We may have been safe, but no one old enough to understand the situation could relax. Every person in the camp had left the only homes we’d ever known, the only lives we’d ever imagined.
Now we were strangers in an unfamiliar country. All around us, the landscape looked basically the same as it had on the Lao side of the Mekong, yet we didn’t have houses or farms or any way of making a life for ourselves. Adding to the sense of unease was the fact that most of us, unlike my father, didn’t speak Thai.
The river of people pouring into the temporary camp, both Hmong and Lao, slowed when the sun rose. It started up again the moment dusk fell. Whenever a new group arrived, questions started flying both directions.
“Have you seen my son?”
“Does anyone know where my father is?”
“I can’t find my aunt. Can you help me?”
Stories always followed questions.
A weeping woman cried out, “They shot my husband right in front of me as we crossed the river.”
Another told of watching friends drown in the Mekong.
Still another spoke of all the people from their village who’d died while trying to make it to the river.
The names and faces changed, but the stories were all very much the same.
New arrivals also brought news from home. Back when my village decided to flee for Thailand, one older man and his grown son had criticized my father’s plan. Their families had stayed behind to take their chances with the Pathet Lao.
An acquaintance from a nearby village gave us an update. As soon as we had left, the criticizing man and his son had raided the cave vault under the waterfall. They had claimed all of our treasures, cattle, pigs, and fields. Within a matter of days, however, the Communist soldiers had executed every single member of their family.
Though these men had opposed my father so strongly, the news of their death made me very sad.
I knew if we’d stayed in Laos, none of us would have lived.
Within a day or two, the Thai government bussed us from the temporary camp to a large refugee camp at Nam Phong. Nam Phong had once been a secret Thai–United States commando training center for Hmong and Lao guerrilla fighters. At the end of the Vietnam War, a United States Marine Aircraft Wing fighter squadron had flown missions from there.8 The barracks were converted to refugee housing when the first wave of Hmong and Lao fled across the Mekong. By the time we arrived, those buildings had long since been filled.
Our bus pulled into Nam Phong about midnight. Tall poles with floodlights sprang up from every corner of the camp, illuminating the entire area.
“What is this?” I asked as we pulled up to the gate. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Green tents stretched across the entire former military base. Between them, little children ran and played and adults milled about. “Doesn’t anyone sleep here?”
“Don’t worry about that, Xao,” my father said. “Stick close to your mother and me.”
The bus stopped, a door opened, and a Thai soldier entered, speaking words I couldn’t understand.
My father had to translate for us. If I remember correctly, the soldier told us to follow him and not to touch any of the light poles because they weren’t completely grounded and several people had been electrocuted when they’d accidentally run into them. “And be watchful for wild dogs,” my father translated. “They roam the outskirts of the camp during the day and try to get inside at night. They carry disease and are very dangerous.”
With its killer light poles and packs of wild dogs, this didn’t sound like a
safe place. I was scared.
My family stood in a long line to pick up more blankets and a few pieces of clothing from volunteers. An official-looking man also handed my father an oversized bundle of dark green cloth, a long pole, and some stakes and rope. I hadn’t seen anything like these items before, but my father knew what to do with them.
From the supply line, we made our way to the space assigned us within the Hmong section of the camp. My father and several other men worked for over an hour putting up a 30-by-20-foot tent in which five families, including ours, would spend the night.
Little did I know this tent would be our home for the next six months.
As soon as the sun came up, I took off to explore the camp with a couple of my buddies. We didn’t stray far from our families, but we walked enough to get a good feel for life in our new community, which dwarfed our village in Laos. People, tens of thousands, filled every square foot of space. Like clock-work, every few hours more buses and trucks pulled in and new tents sprang up.
A walking path went straight between the endless rows of tents. Everywhere we went, we saw people walking, conversing. Some laughed; others cried. We heard people talking about lost relatives and those who had died trying to escape Laos. We couldn’t escape the reality of what we’d just been through.
Around one corner, my buddies and I came upon some boys playing marbles with real marbles—not the rounded rocks we used but honest-to-goodness glass ball marbles.
“Take a look at that.” I nudged one of my buddies.
“Wow. What I wouldn’t give for one of those.”
“Yeah, me too.”
We could have bought some. Vendors prowled around the camp and sold anything anyone could want, including genuine glass marbles. However, since they didn’t hand out free samples and neither my buddies nor I had any money, that didn’t do my buddies and me much good.
For a while we watched the kids play marbles; then we went off exploring again. In another part of the camp, we saw boys playing with rubber bands, crouching on the ground, and drawing a line in the dirt. The first player flicked the inside top of his rubber band with his fingers and sent it past the line. The next player then flicked his toward the first player’s. If the second band landed on top of the first, he took both. If he missed, the first player tried to land his on the other’s. A couple of guys had a lot of rubber bands on their wrists, which looked so cool to me. I wanted to get some of my own.
My buddies and I covered quite a bit of the camp during our first few days in Nam Phong. We saw almost everything in the world there but never a school. The children in the camp had nothing to do except play games in the dirt.
The adults, too, had nothing to do except to cook the food the relief workers gave us. Each family was given a pot and some firewood or charcoal. Everyone cooked on top of a three-legged metal stand over a campfire.
While the women cooked, the men stood and talked or played checkers using Pepsi bottle caps. For men who’d always farmed and hunted and provided for their families, doing nothing was a difficult way of life.
For all of us, every day was exactly like the day before. We could only count the passing of the days waiting for no one knew what.
My father didn’t want to see his children standing around doing nothing, so he made me and my older brother responsible for taking a large jar to the stream and filling it with water.
The stream was our only water supply. Everyone also did their wash and took baths there. That meant we had to boil the water before drinking it; otherwise, it made us sick.
In the camp, there was a lot of sickness—and death.
To this day, I am grateful to the Thai government for taking us in, but the magnitude of the number of refugees was more than any government could manage. Tens of thousands had fled Laos while masses of people had escaped Cambodia and even Vietnam.
With so many refugee camps and multitudes of people crammed into such small spaces, sickness and death were inevitable. Every sort of disease spread quickly through Nam Phong. We had to sleep under mosquito nets to try to protect ourselves from malaria. People got it anyway. Others came down with measles or polio or any other disease you can imagine.
It was not only disease that ended lives. People died when the wild dogs raided their tents, while those who survived the attacks died of rabies. Others died when they accidentally touched the light poles. People died every day: old men, babies, strangers, my cousins.
With death came the cry that still chills me. Every single day in the camp, from the first till the last, the air was filled with the loud, sorrowful cry as families carried bodies through the camp on their way to the cemetery. Every day was funeral day.
Death didn’t always come because of sickness or accidents, either. One day relief workers passed out a bread called, in Thai, qhob noom qhaij, which is similar to a muffin or cinnamon roll. I got excited. Treats like this were rare.
However, before the bread made it as far as our little corner of Nam Phong, a warning soon spread. Part of the shipment of qhob noom qhaij had been poisoned. By the time the alert had gone out, a lot of people had already died.
No one ever discovered who’d poisoned the bread. I wished they had. From that day on, I remained wary of the food. It didn’t stop me from eating it, though.
With so many refugees and more arriving every day, the camp always had a short supply of food. Some weeks we had plenty, relatively speaking; others we had next to none. The trucks were supposed to arrive every three days, but sometimes they didn’t show up for four or five. By then their cargo was often rotten, but we had to eat it or starve.
One day, a truck filled with bananas came through Nam Phong. It didn’t stop but drove along one of the camp roads while someone threw the fruit out the back to people chasing behind.
I loved bananas. I had to have one. I took off after the truck, but I could never get close enough to catch one. Stronger men ran faster than I could. When I’d almost gotten near enough to grab the prize, a man pushed me out of the way and sent me sprawling. The hard ground scraped the skin off my knee, a wound so deep that I still have the scar today. By the time I picked myself up, the truck was out of sight.
Dejected, I turned around and started back toward my tent. All of a sudden, I spotted a discarded banana on the ground. One end had been stepped on, but I didn’t care. I broke the smashed part off and took the rest back to our tent, where I mixed it with my bowl of rice. It tasted so good.
The bathrooms of Nam Phong consisted of a hole in the ground covered by a board with an opening cut out of it. When you did your business, you stood or squatted and took aim.
One afternoon I went to the bathroom. My stomach hurt. Something didn’t feel normal. I wiped and felt something hanging out of me. I tried to grab it but couldn’t. Scared, I called for my brother. “Xay, help me. Something’s wrong.”
I knew what that something was.
My brother came running. When he saw me crouching there, tears running down my face, a worm dangling out of me, he said, “What can I do?”
Crying hard, I said, “Go grab a stick and break it in half, like chopsticks, and use it to pull the worm out.”
My brother left for a moment and came back with a stick.
My idea worked. However, this would not be the last time I’d pass worms.
Such was life in the refugee camp.
After six months, buses moved my family from Nam Phong to Ban Vinai. Although it was certainly an upgrade, the same hopelessness and desperation hovered. Every day was like the day before: disease, desperation, boredom, death. Always death.
To my young mind this was where people went to die, and I wondered when it would be my turn.
7. Amnesty International reported specific incidents of innocent Hmong being massacred by the Lao Communist government as recently as 2006, thirty years after my family fled Laos (http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/ASA26/002/2006/en/73e1366a-d434-11dd-8743-d305bea2b2c7/asa260022006en.html). They h
ave also documented other acts of oppression up to the date of the writing of this book (http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/ASA39/002/2009/en/5655ee8b-e6ee-11dd-a371-adcd1d2c1b57/asa390022009en.html).
8. Jane Hamilton-Merritt, Tragic Mountains, the Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992, p. 348.
16
The Happiest Day
I remember it as if it’s happening at this very moment. When I close my eyes, I see everything again.
There is the wood and thatched roof apartment on the dirty hills of Ban Vinai where I’ve lived four years with my family. Below and to one side is the pond where my buddies and I swim, beyond that a field where we play. The refugee camp administration buildings stand on the edge of the field.
The sun is hot, the air humid, just as they are every day in Ban Vinai. I’m wearing my only pants: cut off a couple of times because of the holes I’ve worn into them, striped. I’m also wearing a Donald Duck shirt, though I have no idea who that is.
It’s my turn to fill our jars with water from the community well. I’ve lowered the five-gallon bucket when the camp public address system crackles.
Then comes the voice. The voice of God? The only voice that can give us hope of escape. “Attention: we have an announcement regarding the next group of people who will have interviews with the American consulate for an opportunity to go to America.”
I stop to listen.
“Would the following people please report for interviews? Mr. Youa Lo Yang, district one, region one, apartment seven, room ten …”
The moment I hear my father’s name, I jump up and take off running toward my house, forgetting all about the bucket. I guess it’s at the bottom of the well, but I don’t care.
Since coming to Ban Vinai, I’ve lived with only one hope: to hear my father’s name over the camp intercom.
I’d never seen America, and I didn’t know anyone who had besides the tall, strong-looking aid workers who handed out food and Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse T-shirts.