Read All In for Free Online Page B

confessed if they’d actually brought in the pot of oil, but I wasn’t going to allow anyone to force me to do something I knew I shouldn’t. I was innocent. More than that, I had to regain my father’s trust at any cost. I went all in, and Grandpa never called.
    Later that evening, after everyone had left our house, my father patted my head. “You did very well, Xao.” It was his way of telling me he was proud of me. You must understand, Hmong fathers don’t say such things to their sons. In our culture, male children are expected to act like men from birth. No father ever praises his son for doing what men are supposed to do. It’s not that they don’t love their sons, but they don’t express such feelings openly. My father actually praised me, telling me I was not merely expected to be a man; I was one.
    To survive in my world, I had to be.

3
“I Can Do This”
    For the first thirty-plus years of my life, I never played a hand of cards. Growing up, I didn’t play hearts or spades or go fish or even slapjack. Cards were strictly taboo in the Yang house. Not only had I never played cards, but I’d never played chess or checkers or backgammon or any other game that might become a gateway to gambling. My father didn’t allow it.
    â€œFor five generations, we Yangs have known gambling is for fools,” he’d say. “No one ever gambled their way into riches.”
    That’s not to say I didn’t bend my father’s rules a time or two. When I was a boy in Laos, I would hustle my friends out of their marbles, which were carved by scratching small river rocks against big rocks.
    The first time we did this, my buddies asked me how many they should make.
    â€œOnly two.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œMore than two is bad luck. Don’t you know anything? That’s why God gave you only two nuts.”
    Since most Hmong are very superstitious, my buddies believed me. I knew they would. That’s why when they weren’t around, I went to the river by myself and made as many marbles as I could carry.
    Our homemade marbles never lasted long. When my buddies’ marbles broke in half, I’d pull some out from my stash. “I have a few extra that I collected from the last time we played. Tell you what. I’ll give you two new ones in exchange for you doing my chores today.”
    My buddies had no choice but to make the trade. They could never hike all the way to the river, scratch out new marbles, and make it back to play before the sun set. No one ever caught on to the fact that I had rigged the game against them. I preferred to think of it as doing good business. I certainly didn’t think of it as gambling. With twenty extra marbles hidden away, my game was anything but a gamble.
    My hustling days would end when my family left for America. My father’s rules would not. If you were a Yang, you did not play cards or any game that might ultimately lead to gambling. End of discussion.
    Even after I grew up and moved out on my own, I never took up cards. To be honest, I never gave them a thought.
    One Saturday night in 2005, my wife and I collapsed on the sofa in front of the television. If this had been a normal Saturday night, Sue would’ve been at work in one of the local casinosand I would’ve been in the back bedroom reading a book after finally getting our six kids off to bed.
    But this particular Saturday came at the end of a tiring weekend. Some cousins from the Fresno area had come on Friday to spend the weekend with us in Temecula. My wife and I had taken time off work to spend the days with them.
    Everyone who lives in Southern California gets to play tour guide for family who come to visit from outside the area. Like traffic and earthquakes, it’s simply part of Southern California life. We’d been running around Coronado Beach and the rest of the region, and we were exhausted.
    My cousins planned to leave