CHICAGO, Ill. – It’s a Wednesday morning in Chicago and grain traders are more frenzied than usual, reacting to the latest U.S. crop data released by the government.
In the midst of the flurry -traders screaming at the top of their lungs and waving frantically at one another – stands one man whose background is unlike anyone else’s on the Chicago Board of Trade floor.
Seamhout Tang, now a successful soymeal trader, was driven from his home in Cambodia by the communist Khmer Rouge in 1975 when he was a teenager, sent with his family to harsh work camps and then survived a flight through the country’s minefields to Thailand in 1979.
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His stories parallel those in the movie The Killing Fields. He saw his parents, two sisters and a brother starve to death as they worked day and night in government-run farms. He witnessed his uncle blown apart by a mine as he and his family travelled across the war-torn country.
An estimated two million out of eight million Cambodians died during one of the bloodiest holocausts in history from 1975-1979, when the Khmer Rouge took control and forced city dwellers like Tang and his family to labour in work camps.
But Tang, now 43, was a survivor.
After he came to the United States as a refugee in 1979, a combination of good luck and trading abilities helped him stage a successful career as a futures trader, a high-stress, ultra-competitive occupation that defeats many hopefuls.
Wearing a bright purple trader’s jacket, Tang, who stands just over five feet tall, perches on the second step of the Chicago Board of Trade soymeal pit, squeezed between traders more than a head taller. He trades futures contracts worth thousands of dollars, one of the hottest commodity markets in Chicago this fall as prices have soared in the face of a world shortage.
“It’s really been risky lately. A lot of paper is coming into the pit. But it’s very volatile. By the time you write down an order the market has changed,” said Tang, speaking in clipped, measured sentences.
“I’m doing OK. I’m staying alive.”
For Tang, success has enabled him to own a home in a middle-class Chicago suburb. He never married but is surrounded by family including nieces and nephews.
Like most Chicago traders, Tang started as a runner taking paper orders from one pit to the next. The first time he walked on the trading floor he was awed by the frenzy of thousands of people yelling to make a living in the midst of flashing electronic price boards and massive phone banks.
“Young Tang was an oddity on the floor … (and) still is by most standards,” said Kevin Ward, an exchange member who has worked with him from the beginning.
“He couldn’t speak any English. I can’t recall any other time we had a Cambodian refugee here on the floor,” said Ward, who has traded grains for more than 20 years. “But it didn’t take long for people to notice he was special.”
Trading was a natural fit for Tang, whose first job in Cambodia at 15 was bartering rubies outside the mines of Pailin near the Cambodia-Thailand border before the communists took control.
Like many refugees who fled Cambodia, Tang and three surviving brothers and three sisters had an American sponsor. For them it was the Northfield Community Church in a Chicago suburb. Among the members was a longtime Chicago trader, the late Dan Kelly, who hired Tang as a runner not long after he stepped off a plane from southeast Asia.
“Tang was always upbeat, very intelligent, and developed a great feel for the market,” said Jim Donaldson, a grain trader and former partner of Kelly. “He may be a short man in the physical sense but a very tall man in other ways. He’s seen a lot more than we could ever imagine.”
His final days in Cambodia were the most horrific. Tang and his family fled to Thailand after the Vietnamese liberated their homeland. But hopes of freedom evaporated shortly after he arrived at a Thai refugee camp. There wasn’t enough to feed the thousands living there, so Tang, his family and about 1,000 others were forced out.
Pushed down the side of a mountain into a valley at gunpoint by Thai soldiers, Tang and the others spent the next 26 days in the forest with no shelter and eating only potatoes they found growing wild.
“It rained every day. We slept in the rain,” he said.
But a couple of families paid Thai guards to deliver notes to their relatives in Bangkok that described their suffering and starvation. Soon afterward the Red Cross came.
“We saw the buses come for us. That was my happiest day. It was a second life,” Tang said softly.
