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New York City is home to thousands of restaurants, delis and food trucks, a veritable buffet for a hungry 19-year-old. What'll it be, Emmanuel Mudiay? "There's a Subway down the street," he says. Well, O.K. It's mid-May, and the 6'5", 200-pound Mudiay is stuffed into a second-row seat in a silver van crawling through Midtown traffic. He doesn't mind the congestion—in Guangdong, the province in southern China where he played last season, it's far worse. There, he rarely traveled by car. He biked for a while, until he saw the body of another rider who had been killed in a hit-and-run. "After that," he says, "I was walking." Mudiay is in Manhattan for the NBA's draft lottery, a drawing of Ping-Pong balls that has turned into a widely watched and irresistibly suspenseful event.

Behind Emmanuel sits his oldest brother, Stephane, 26, the family patriarch. Their father, Jean-Paul, died in 1998, in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire). One afternoon, before he headed to a barbecue, he told Stephane, then eight, to mind his mother and two brothers. "Same thing he said every time he went out," says Stephane. Only this time he wouldn't come back. Hours later Jean-Paul collapsed, and his head struck a table. He died on the way to the hospital. The official cause of death, the family says, was a heart attack. Suddenly Stephane was the man of the house. "I don't think it's something he tried to be," says Emmanuel, "but he was who we looked up to."

Up front in the van is Jean-Michel, 23, the middle child. Basketball runs in the Mudiay family. Stephane was a 6'7" small forward at Trinity Valley Community College in Athens, Texas, then at Texas Wesleyan in Fort Worth. Jean-Michel played two years at Western Texas College in Snyder before transferring to SMU in 2013. He knew why the Mustangs wanted him: for an edge in recruiting Emmanuel. Jean-Michel didn't care. A 6'3" guard, he rode the bench for two years and, last month, graduated with a degree in sports management.

In the late 1990s, the Mudiays' homeland was a battleground in a bloody African war. Rwanda, a small country on its eastern border, invaded Zaire in '97, sparking a conflagration that would involve 10 nations. The country's rich natural resources—minerals and timber—were looted. Reports of rape, dismemberment and murder were widespread. Over the next nine years an estimated 5.4 million people died in the conflict and its fallout, according to the International Rescue Committee.

Kinshasa, Congo's capital and largest city, was a flashpoint. Stephane and Jean-Michel remember the charred, rotting corpses of people who had been girded by tires and burned alive. They remember the bullet-riddled bodies. They remember the pop of rifles and the rat-a-tat-tat of automatic weapons at night. Once a stray bullet tore through one of their windows, clipping a relative in the shoulder. "I try not to think about it," says Jean-Michel, his voice trailing off. "Those images are hard to forget."
Therese Kabeya was born in Kinshasa. She met Jean-Paul Mudiay in Canada while he was at the University of Montreal and she was attending a nursing school nearby. In 1987 they moved back to Zaire, married and started a family. Jean-Paul worked as director of marketing at a publicly owned transportation company; Therese stayed home and raised their three boys.

After Jean-Paul's death Therese faced big decisions. Kinshasa was not safe. Because of the violence, schools were closed for days, even weeks, at a time. In 2001 she decided they would move to America. "We couldn't go on like that," Therese says. "We needed a better life."

The logistics were tricky. Therese could go to the U.S. and request asylum; her sister Christine lived in the Dallas area. Therese's sons, though, would have to stay behind. Once in the U.S. she could petition to bring them over, but the process could take two years. "I talked to [the kids]," she says. "They understood a little. I told them I am going to America. I am going to make a better life."

The boys moved in with their paternal grandparents. Therese, unable to get a nursing license in the U.S.—"I didn't speak English," she says—took a job as a nurse's aide at an assisted living center in Arlington, Texas. Later she took a similar position at a hospital. She called Kinshasa every day. Some days she got through. A little over a year after she immigrated, the paperwork came through: Her sons could join her in the U.S.

ongo's national sport is soccer, but Stephane gravitated toward basketball—and his brothers followed suit. In the U.S., Stephane and Jean-Michel played daily. Stephane was strong and physical in the mold of a power forward; Jean-Michel was smoother, more athletic. Emmanuel desperately wanted to join them. He believed he could excel; in second grade he wrote a letter to his mother in which every line read, I am going to play in the NBA. "He would cry when we wouldn't let him play," says Stephane. When they did, they were merciless. In the back of the family's apartment building was a half-court surrounded by a chain-link fence. The Cage, the boys called it, where basketball mixed with MMA. Elbows flew. Every foul bordered on flagrant. Many times Emmanuel would chase a loose ball only to be body-checked into the fence. "You know how in wrestling they have Hell in the Cell?" he says. "This was kind of like that."

This post was edited on 6/25/15 at 10:45 am