A part of Anne's said in an interview from  Telegraph "It’s a third-world country but I was pleasantly surprised; I felt very safe. It’s still a communist country but over the past couple of years they have really opened their doors and it has become a place for backpackers to go"

Read entire interview as the following:

For all their international travel, most young men and women on the international tennis circuit don’t seem particularly worldly. They may be able to tell you about their favourite sushi bars on the tour, but they don’t see much of the planet apart from airport lounges, hotel rooms and the practice and match courts. But sitting outside in the players’ area at the Sony Ericsson Open in Miami, surrounded by palm trees and rackets, Anne Keothavong is discussing Laos, "the forgotten country of the Vietnam War", as she describes it.

Between 1964 and 1973 the United States dropped two million tons of explosives on Laos in an attempt to smash the supply lines to the North Vietnamese communist units. The process was variously described as carpet-bombing, cluster-bombing and saturation-bombing but, whatever you called it, Laos became, per capita, the most bombed country in the history of warfare, with tens of thousands of Laotians killed.

You hear people talking about Vietnam and Cambodia, but Laos gets lost along the way," Keothavong says. "After the Vietnam War, Laos declined a lot of the help and the financial aid. You can understand that. Why would you want money from the Americans when they had just spent the last few years bombing your country?"

Keothavong, 25, who has lived in Hackney all her life, goes into Wimbledon the week after next as Britain’s leading female player, and earlier this year became the first British woman to break into the world’s top 50 since Jo Durie in 1993. She has never before talked publicly about why her father, Somsak, and her mother, Vathana, fled the country of their birth, each finding their way to Britain. "My dad was an orphan and my mum’s parents were both murdered," she says. She finds this part of her family life hard to discuss: "It’s even difficult to talk to my parents about it because they witnessed so much," Keothavong says. "There’s so much I want to know, but even now it’s a touchy subject, a sensitive subject."

Vathana escaped by making a treacherous border crossing into Thailand, settling in a refugee camp. "Lots of people made that crossing but many of them were killed," Keothavong says. The British government accepted a few hundred refugees, and Vathana knew people in England who offered to help her. "Most people didn’t have much choice over which country they ended up in," Keothavong says.

Somsak’s story is just as dramatic. "My dad’s parents died when he was very young. He was brought up by other relatives. His older sister was killed by a bomb that was dropped on Sepone, his home town. When he was eight he left Sepone to go to a Buddhist monastery in Vientiane with his brothers. Most of his childhood was spent in that monastery, where he was training to become a monk." Somsak was eventually awarded a scholarship to study economics at a university in Moscow. After five years in the Soviet Union (which had a good relationship with communist Laos), Somsak moved to Britain in 1971 to continue his studies. Vathana arrived eight years later.

"In England, someone showed my dad a photo of Mum and he was immediately attracted to her; they were introduced by a mutual friend and got married in Portsmouth in 1981."

Somsak, who now works at government offices in London (Vathana is a housewife), had never really been exposed to tennis in Laos, but once in Britain became gripped by television coverage of Wimbledon. In 1978 he bought a ticket to the All England Club and was captivated by an American player who carried herself like a prom queen: Chris Evert. He thought to himself that if he ever had a daughter, he would like her to try tennis.

"One of my earliest memories is of walking off the court, crying," Keothavong says. "Not because I had lost, but because I had a wooden racket. It was the only racket Dad could find in the house. The experience can’t have been too bad, though, as I obviously wanted to play again. After that, I got a Wilson kid’s racket from Argos. It was purple and white, nice girly colours."

We are walking through Clissold Park in Hackney where the young Keothavong used to practise, now a pretty park full of young professionals and mothers from nearby Stoke Newington pushing their buggies. The hard courts at Clissold Park have recently been repaired, but Keothavong remembers when there were holes in the nets and moss and grit all over the playing surface.

"I was about seven when I started playing tennis. I used to share lessons with my older brother James [now a professional umpire] once a week. My parents – who are both hopeless players – entered me in local tournaments as soon as I started playing, so I was competitive from a young age. I remember one of the first prizes I won was a trip to Disney World in Florida, a pretty good prize for a kid."

The usual accusation aimed at British tennis players is that they are a bunch of middle-class softies, that they have had it easy, born with silver spoons in their mouths. When she meets new people Keothavong doesn’t always tell them what she does for a living, "because there’s an immediate assumption that I’m loaded and spoilt".

She admits that she doesn’t come from typical British tennis stock, and says, "It’s good to show that people from my background can make it as professional tennis players"; though she is often saddled with a stereotype of her own: that she has fought her way out of the Hackney 'ghetto’. "I find it frustrating that people think that Hackney is like that," Keothavong, who still lives with her parents in the borough, says. "It’s almost as if people expect me to come out with some street slang, you know? I’m actually very fond of this area."

She enjoyed school and did well academically, and still keeps in touch with a few old classmates, though she admits that 'there were not too many kids who wanted to learn, so classes could be pretty disruptive. What I have gone on to do is very different from what most of the kids at my school have gone on to do but it shows that the image of tennis is changing, improving. If you dedicate yourself to something, there are things that can be achieved, and I’m kind of proof of that.’

At the age of 25, Keothavong is now into middle age for a professional female tennis player. She has been a late-bloomer, and it was only last season that she first got her WTA ranking down into double digits. Her breakthrough came last May when she won an ITF (International Tennis Federation, the second tier of women’s tennis) tournament in the Lebanese resort of Jounieh, which gave her a place in the top 100 and meant she could now compete in the world’s top-tier tournaments.

She says she has benefited from the support of the National Tennis Centre in Roehampton, which opened in 2007, and says there’s now "more professionalism all round" in the British game. Although Keothavong has been helped by coaches Claire Curran and Nigel Sears, the head coach for women’s tennis at the Lawn Tennis Association, she likes to spend as much time as possible on her own; she knows her own mind, knows her own game, and likes her independence.

Last summer Keothavong entered Wimbledon without needing a wild card, as her ranking was high enough for her to be part of the main draw. She won her first match, and in the second round produced a competitive performance against Venus Williams, who would go on to win her fifth Wimbledon title. "It was my first experience out on Centre Court," Keothavong says. "As a kid it’s something you dream about, you want to feel it. I think a lot of people expected me to fold and lose very quickly, but I managed to put in a half-decent fight and challenge her." Williams won 7-5, 6-2, but her sister Serena later told Keothavong just how hard she had made Venus work for her victory – and had even bashed her on the ear with the ball. "And I thought you seemed like a nice girl," Serena said.

This year has so far had its ups and downs for Keothavong. She reached the semi-finals of the Warsaw Open, becoming the first British woman since 1983 to reach the penultimate stage of a WTA clay court tournament. She was then drawn against world No 1, Dinara Safina, in the first round of last month’s French Open, and lost 6-0, 6-0. ("You just have to find ways to laugh about it," Keothavong said afterwards. "I’m sure there will be a few jokes but I can take it.")

She is confident that her career is going in the right direction and believes she can rise in the rankings, "though there’s no need to put a number on it. If I can win a few rounds at Wimbledon and make it to the second week, that’s good."

With an increased public profile these days, she is winning plenty of new admirers, not all of them interested in her backhand. "I’ve been told that I get rude letters, which I’d love to see, but unfortunately I only get shown the censored ones."

However well Keothavong does in SW19, she will be keeping a close eye on the progress of the leading British male, Andy Murray. "What he is doing is great for British tennis," she says. "He’s also a nice guy and we always stop and say hello if we see each other. His sense of humour is quite dry. When he is on court he is quite emotional, which I can relate to. My mum doesn’t like it if I grunt too loudly or behave badly on court because it’s not ladylike. Off court, though, I couldn’t be more different."

Five years ago a knee injury meant Keothavong was unable to compete for several months, but the extended break enabled her to visit Laos for the first time, with her parents. It was also the first time that Somsak had returned since the Vietnam War. "My mum had been back a few times, but my dad was more reluctant to return," Keothavong says. "It was an emotional trip for him, but very special to be able to do it with his family."

Somsak’s brothers still live in Laos, and Vathana has relatives elsewhere in the country. "We travelled all over," Keothavong says. "We visited where my mum grew up in the south, and where my dad lived, in the middle of the country. I’ve travelled quite a bit through tennis, but I didn’t know what to expect from Laos. It’s a third-world country but I was pleasantly surprised; I felt very safe. It’s still a communist country but over the past couple of years they have really opened their doors and it has become a place for backpackers to go. I guess it helped that I can speak the language." (Growing up, she learnt to read, write and speak Laotian at the insistence of her parents.)

Keothavong saw firsthand the unexploded ordnance that devastated the landscape of Laos. The Americans left some 80 million unexploded devices there, and about 13,000 people have been killed or injured by them in the years since. Thirty-seven per cent of agricultural land in Laos is still unsafe because of unexploded munitions.

"There were ditches where bombs had gone off, shells that had been left behind. We went on a few road trips and when we stopped we were told not to wander off too far. But I definitely want to go back. It’s just finding the time to do it properly."

If she does well at Wimbledon, she will be delighted not only for herself, but also for her parents. "If it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t be a tennis player. They’re the ones who got me into the game, and they gave up so much of their time when I was a kid, taking me to training and tournaments," she says. "They made financial sacrifices for me because they didn’t want their children to experience the hardship they suffered. I wonder whether, if I had a child who wanted to play tennis, I would be able to do half of that stuff."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/tennis/wimbledon/5487413/Wimbledon-2009-Anne-Keothavongs-dream-ticket.html