All In (20 page)

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 have 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.

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.

But I'd heard the stories of what America must be like. One of my uncles had once lived in the Lao capital, Vientiane. He used to tell the boys in the camp about life in the big city: the fancy buildings, the cars and trucks rushing up the roads, and the food. Oh, the city had lots and lots of food. “America has to be like Vientiane, but with much, much more of everything,” he told us.

Before we arrived in Ban Vinai, I'd never even heard the word “America,” but for the past four years it was all I could think about.
In America no one ever goes hungry or poops worms or wears beat-up old T-shirts with unknown cartoon characters on them. They all have new clothes and a chance to go to the finest schools in the world.
That's where I wanted to be: America, paradise.

When my family had first arrived in Ban Vinai in late 1975, tents had covered the entire complex, just as they had in Nam Phong. After a few weeks, trucks loaded with building materials had rumbled into the camp.

My father was especially glad to see those trucks because they meant work for him and a new home for his family. He and the other men immediately started building permanent housing for all of us.

Unlike the grand house we'd left in the mountains of Laos, this home was a small apartment. Apartment seven, room ten, to be exact.

The buildings sat on stilts on the side of a hill. To get to our apartment, we had to climb a tall stairway and walk on a balcony with no handrail. At first, I was afraid. I've never liked heights, and here there was nothing to keep me from falling.

Though I hated the height, this apartment was the nicest place I'd ever seen. It may have been smaller than our Laos home, but it was made of wood. Never before had I lived in a house made of wood. The apartment had only one room, which was about 20 by 15 feet, perhaps a little smaller.

My brother and I slept on mats in one corner, while my parents slept on the opposite side with my other brothers' and sister's mats between us. A curtain separated my parents' area from the rest of the house.

We'd lived in Ban Vinai about three months when we moved into the apartment. At the time, we didn't have anything except some blankets, a handful of pots, and a set of clothes for each family member.

The second I heard my family's name over the camp intercom, I ran as fast as I could up the dirt path to this apartment.

A couple of my buddies waved. They'd heard my name as well and knew exactly what it meant. For me, this was the happiest day. For my buddies, it was not. I knew because I'd been in their place.

About six months after we'd arrived in Ban Vinai, word had spread that France and the United States had opened their doors to Hmong refugees. People said all you had to do was submit your name and they would let you in.

It wasn't quite that simple for us. To get into the United States, you had to pass an intense interview process.

One of my uncles, who'd once lived in Vientiane, had tried to talk my father into moving to France. “That's where I'm going no matter what,” he'd said. “The interview process is much easier, and French is simpler to learn than English.”

My father wasn't persuaded. “I don't know anything about France, but I do know this: for thirteen years, I fought for America. They trained me and put a gun in my hand. I shed a lot of blood fighting against the North Vietnamese, and I watched many of my friends die. We all made huge sacrifices for America. No, you can go to France if you like, but I'm going to the United States of America. There is no discussion about that.”

Representatives from both France and the United States had set up shop in the camp. True to his word, my father had filled out all the required paperwork for political asylum in America, not France.

He'd had to prove we'd fled Laos because our lives were in danger due to his serving in General Vang Pao's army. “America will honor the word they gave me,” he'd said time and again.

When he'd first filled out the paperwork, I was excited.
We won't be here much longer
. More than three years had now passed, which meant we'd lived in refugee camps well over four. In that time, I'd heard the voice of God call over the intercom many, many names.

My uncle's name was called, and he and his family moved to France. Friends' names were called. Those days were very hard. I had to say good-bye to some of my buddies I'd known since we'd climbed trees in our village.

The most challenging day came when the intercom crackled and the voice called my father's younger brother's name. Not only did my uncle's family get to leave the camp and fly to America, but my grandmother would go with them.

The day the buses came for them, I could hardly control myself. After my birth mother had died, my grandmother had cared for me. I loved and admired her so. Now I had to say good-bye. I couldn't do it.

Our entire Yang clan escorted my uncle and his family and my grandmother to the buses. Right before she boarded, my grandmother hugged me and said good-bye. My father had to pry my arms from her neck. Even after she took her seat on the bus, I reached up as high as I could toward her window.