My family: as American as baseball, apple pie, and hot-dog fried rice.My Great Uncle Harry died years ago. When and where remains a mystery––but if I had to guess, I’d say Las Vegas, circa 1980.
You see, my Uncle Harry was a gambler.
He came to live with us one summer, back when I was ten years old. He was my dad’s favorite uncle and quickly became mine as well. He had a sweet smile that matched his wry sense of humor, and a shock of white hair that made him look impossibly young. He fit in famously, helping out around the house––cleaning, doing laundry, and making his famous “hot-dog fried-rice.”
If having elder relatives sort of
move in seems odd, it was fairly normal in my Chinese American family. For my dad, the Confucian ideal of filial piety was more of a cultural, than religious relic, but it was still pretty much ingrained into his DNA.
Eventually though, I learned the
real story behind my Prodigal Uncle. My dad confided that, “Uncle Harry owes some bad men some money and needs to hide out for a while.” I remember having a vague and somewhat poeticized idea of what that meant. I’d watched the
Rockford Files enough times to grasp the concept of a loan shark and understood that baseball bats were occasionally used for things other than hitting a hot grounder to the shortstop. Still, we lived in a funky hippie town and the notion of thugs rolling up in a used Cadillac like the mobsters in
A History of Violence never crossed my mind.
Even now, the thought of Uncle Harry being a degenerate gambler seems strangely normal––almost okay.
Almost. Eventually his habit became something we talked––even joked about. Heck, we gave him the Parker Brothers boardgame
Gambler for Christmas one year. Uncle Harry took it in stride. He wasn’t a hypocrite like
William J. Bennett, who wrote
The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories, while gambling away millions. Harry wasn’t addicted, per se. It went much deeper than addiction––it’s who he was––a gambler. He was a farmer whose crops had failed year after year. And those crops were dice, cards, and horses.
He was a genuinely happy man, who had led a ruinous life. In my heart of hearts, I thought he’d always be there. I thought he’d never leave. Which is why––and you knew this was coming––he ultimately went back. He left a note and headed off to Vegas, a week before the Super Bowl. I never saw him again. None of us did.
Did he end up buried out in the desert? Maybe. Though it’s just as likely that he passed away as a John Doe, in a city built on the lives of broken, nameless people.
I wish I knew what happened to him. The best I could do was to fictionalize his story a few years ago. I gave him a happier ending. He didn’t win the big one, in fact, he still lost everything. But he didn’t die alone.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008 
