Grace Loh Prasad
Seasons of Scrabble and Mahjong
Every spring the city is full of flowering trees. I used to assume they were all cherry blossoms until I learned the differences between their delicate pink petals, the white or pink plum blossoms that cover the sidewalk in confetti, and the large, lotus-like magnolias with their creamy petals. Flowering trees remind me of my mom, who always loved flowers and plants and could always identify them no matter what landscape we were in—Princeton, Taipei, Berkeley, even Paris. We would be taking a walk and she would say, Look, Gracie, that’s a plum tree, and I would look and immediately forget because I was focused on something else—work I needed to do, where we were going to have dinner, other trivial things. Now of course, I wish I had paid attention. I wish I had taken the time to learn more from my mom, like how to identify trees or how to cook Taiwanese food or the best way to tie a silk scarf. Now these things matter to me because my mother is far away, and my mother is sick.
1. BAMBOO: Summer, 1998
One summer when I was in my late twenties, I spent three months living in Taipei with my parents. It was in the middle of a heat wave. Though we lived in a house on top of Yangmingshan mountain in a cool, green, relatively unpolluted part of the city, the air felt thick and greasy, like a hot kitchen. The humidity was so high that our bath towels never fully dried, giving off a faint sour smell. After the sun went down, it would still be over ninety degrees inside the house. “It’s like having a fever, you know,” my mom said, inviting me to sleep in their bedroom for the night because their air conditioner was the only one in the house that worked.
I remember lying on my stomach on a fold-out foam mattress on the floor in my parents’ bedroom, writing in my journal and watching my mom pack for her trip to Switzerland. She was one of Taiwan’s delegates to a conference of the World Council of Presbyterian Churches, and she would be gone for three and a half weeks. She selected several short-sleeved dresses from the closet—white with black roses, multicolored floral, a navy William Morris print—and carefully rolled them up, one by one, to pack into the hard-sided suitcase that lay open like a giant blue clam on the double bed. She folded an armful of white cotton briefs into neat squares and used wads of pantyhose to fill the odd-shaped cavities around her two pairs of pumps. She moved back and forth from the bed to the closet, energetic and purposeful in her batik nightgown and cloth slippers.
My dad sat hunched over a small desk on one side of the bedroom, squinting at handwritten notes on lined paper under the light of a fluorescent lamp. Like me, he prefers to write with ink and covers the page with messy cross-outs and marginalia when editing. His silver-white hair was damp; though he had just gotten out of the shower, I could tell from the way his undershirt stuck to him that he was already sweating again. He was revising a speech he was to give the next day for a meeting of the Taiwan Bible Society, the local branch of the international nonprofit where he had worked as a Bible translator for more than twenty-five years. In different ways, both of my parents carried on the Christian faith that their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents had learned from nineteenth-century Western missionaries.
I wrote in my journal: Mom is packing, and Dad is writing, all at the last minute. I come from a family of procrastinators . . . I’m glad she’s taking this trip, but why did it have to be in the middle of my trip? I’m spending three months here, which I’ve never done before, and she’ll be gone for a third of it.
My mom, a professor of feminist theology and Christian art at Taiwan Theological Seminary, complained about how she hadn’t finished grading papers from the spring semester and would have to do them after she finished packing. It was almost eleven o’clock.
“You shouldn’t stay up so late every night,” my dad said from the other side of the room.
“I can’t help it. I have no choice,” she snapped back, zipping up a small cosmetic bag.
“But you’ve known for a month that this trip was coming up.”
“Aiyah . . . Why are you blaming me? Don’t you know I have been working so hard?” My mom sighed and squeezed her eyes shut, sinking down onto the bamboo-patterned bedspread. She seemed more relaxed when she was in motion; sitting still on the edge of the bed, my mom looked tense and unhappy.
I stiffened on my makeshift bed. I wasn’t used to hearing my parents fight; when they did it was usually in Taiwanese, which I barely understand. I wondered if they were speaking English only because I was there. I felt sorry for my mom, knowing how hard she’d been working. Her career was in full bloom and her accomplishments multiplied, but I saw my dad’s side, too—her heavy workload was taking a toll on her health and she seemed increasingly delicate.
I wrote: Maybe I’m part of the problem since I’ve taken over my mom’s old office, and since Mom and Dad are taking me out all the time, playing Scrabble with me, and helping me with the documentary. This is the first time I’ve lived with them since high school, and even though I know they’re happy I’m here, it’s an adjustment to have me around.
My dad had taken me aside a few days before, saying he was worried because my mom was having trouble getting things done. She often stayed up until two in the morning grading papers, and when he asked her why it was taking so long, she said she had a hard time concentrating.
“Mom, can I help you?” I asked from the floor.
“No,” she said softly, “just go to bed.”
It was late, but I was wide awake so I kept writing. Last night we stayed up late and I videotaped and took notes while Mom went over the whole family tree with me. She took me through all the kinship names—the way I’m supposed to address my relatives depending on how we’re related. Jī-peh means Number Two Uncle Older Than Dad; Gō͘-chím means Wife of Number Five Uncle Younger Than Dad. It’s an amazing system—compact and efficient. But then again, you can go through your whole life never knowing your elder relatives’ given names.
Dad was hunched over the desk again marking up his papers, since there was nothing he could do to help her get ready. Mom counted out Taiwan dollars, U.S. dollars and traveler’s checks, which she kept in separate billfolds. I wrote until my eyelids got droopy and my handwriting morphed into an illegible scrawl. I tucked the journal under my pillow, pulled the sheet up to my chin, and fell asleep to the whirring of the air conditioner.
2. PLUM BLOSSOM: Winter, 2000
At eight o’clock in the morning on day three of long nian, the Year of the Dragon, I emerged from the airport into the chilly, smoggy Taipei air. It was overcast and colder than I expected; I’d never visited before in February. My parents were bundled up in knee-length overcoats, wool scarves and gloves. I hardly recognized them in winter clothes. Even with their bulky garments, my parents seemed smaller than I remembered; their footsteps were slower and lighter, their presence less solid.
They no longer lived at Yangmingshan, having bought an apartment in San Hsia, a town south of Taipei near the airport where Tōa-ko͘ (Number One Aunt), my dad’s eldest sister, lived. We went back to the apartment for an hour or so—enough time to unload my luggage, brush my teeth and change my clothes—before we took a taxi to meet San-kū (Third Uncle) and his family in Tien Mu, a suburb north of Taipei. San-kū is my mom’s youngest brother. He was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident in the 1980s and is paralyzed from the neck down. Though physically incapacitated, he is mentally sharp—he’s the most talkative and opinionated of my mom’s three brothers, and he loves to laugh and debate. His wife, whom I call Aunt Emi, is sturdy and cheerful; she takes care of my uncle and is the only one strong enough to lift him into and out of his wheelchair. Soon after we got to their apartment, we loaded into Aunt Emi’s old Toyota for the drive up to Keelung, where we would meet Jī-kū (Second Uncle) and his family to celebrate Jī-kū’s birthday.
I sat between my mom and dad in the backseat and looked out the window at the mountainous landscape. The outskirts of Taipei are lush with vegetation in the summer, but all that was visible then were naked trees, sprawling cemeteries with tombstones like scattered tiles, and clusters of gray cement buildings that looked like dirty teeth lining the highway.
Jī-kū and his family were already at the restaurant, a multi-floor establishment across from the harbor that specialized in seafood banquets. We sat around a large round table in a private room and toasted Jī-kū’s sixtieth birthday with glasses of guava juice and whiskey. He’s aged since the last time I saw him a few years ago; his hair was mostly gray and his dark skin was deeply creased from his cigarette habit, though he was still handsome. His wife, whose pale unlined face contrasted with her husband’s, was a quiet, smiling presence by his side. Jī-kū told us that their son had just finished his military service and would come home in a few days, and we raised our glasses again.
My mom was happy to see her brothers, though she could no longer drink beer with them since she had been diagnosed with diabetes. They laughed and gossiped and asked for her advice on everything. She seemed more at ease, more accustomed to being the center of attention, than when she was with my dad’s relatives. In my dad’s family she is simply Wife of Third Uncle, which has no special status, though she’s treated well because my dad is the favorite brother and uncle. But in her family, she’s Eldest Sister and Number One Aunt, so she is treated with deference. Her teacup never sits empty for long, and she’s invited to help herself first whenever a new dish arrives.
As usual, at a table full of Taiwanese relatives, most of the conversation carried on without me. None of my relatives speak more than a few words of English, and my Taiwanese is limited to domestic phrases like Let’s go and I’m hungry. I smiled a lot and said very little. Sometimes, when there was a big burst of laughter, I would ask my mom or dad to translate. That time they were laughing about a bizarre translation of a foreign concept. San-kū explained that my cousin was enrolled in correspondence school, but that in Mandarin the literal translation is “air college.”
After lunch, Aunt Emi drove us back to Tien Mu and invited us to play mahjong. She brought out the card table and handed me a small box of pushpins to attach a thin blanket so we wouldn’t make too much noise. We dumped out the heavy plastic tiles and mixed them up by spreading them out in a circular motion called “swimming on the table.” Then we constructed four walls with the tiles face-down, each wall eighteen tiles across and two tiles high. We rolled the dice to see who would be East wind, or the dealer for the first round. I knew that East came first, but after that I tended to lose track. When I played mahjong with my parents and brother, my mom was the one who kept track of all the complicated rules: which wind it was, whose turn it was to roll the dice, whether to play clockwise or counter-clockwise, and how to score a winning hand. She was the only one who knew how.
Through years of playing mahjong, my family members all developed distinct game playing personalities. My mom is a clever strategist. She never gives away what she’s going to do. My older brother, Ted, is an excellent player too, but unlike my mom, he can’t keep a poker face. He’s the gambler in the family, the one most likely to take big risks for a bigger score. My dad is the least competitive among us—he’s willing to play but unambitious, since my mom and my brother are so good. I love it when my dad wins because he never expects it and he becomes giddy as a child. I mostly take after my mom. I try to play quietly and conceal my advantages.
I’m a reasonably good player, but what I’m most proud of is this: Mahjong is the only social activity in which I can get by entirely in Taiwanese. Within those four walls, I’m as fluent as everyone else in the vocabulary of suits and numbers, winds and dragons. Worries about the language barrier and cultural differences dissolve as I lose myself in the game. In mahjong, I’m just another player like everyone else, and I know exactly what to do. My parents and I rarely play mahjong at home anymore because a full game takes several hours, and our fourth player, my brother, lives in Thailand. Instead we play Scrabble, our other favorite game.
The four of us took our places around the mahjong table—me, my mom, my dad, and Aunt Emi. My mom was the dealer for the East round, so she rolled the dice again to determine where to break the wall and begin picking up tiles. Aunt Emi got three flowers, or wild cards, on the first hand: chrysanthemum, orchid, and plum blossom. Along with bamboo, these plants correspond to the seasons, along with the Confucian values of uprightness, purity, longevity, and perseverance. The plum blossom is the national flower of Taiwan, representing beauty and resilience.
“Khui hoe-tiàm (open a flower shop),” Aunt Emi joked. The game went quickly, and we each called out the names of the tiles we discarded: la̍k bān (six characters); san tâng (three dots); sai (West wind); pe̍h (white dragon); káu soh (nine bamboo). Just as my hand was coming together, my mom said “kàu,” meaning she’d won. Her winning tile was it chiáu or one bamboo, represented by a bird.
“Chiáu-á!” she sang, smiling at me, because “little bird” used to be one of her nicknames for me.
We played two more hands before San-kū pointed out that we were proceeding in the wrong direction, clockwise instead of counter-clockwise.
“Are you sure?” my mom asked, looking confused. My dad and Aunt Emi shrugged.
“Bô-iàu-kín,” San-kū said, laughing. Never mind.
“Aiyah . . . I am starting to forget things,” my mom said, shaking her head. We mixed the tiles again and continued playing, this time in the right direction.
3. CHRYSANTHEMUM: Autumn, 2000
At the end of the year I visited Taiwan again. I sat with my parents around the long, low coffee table in their cramped living room, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling bookcases. A large-screen TV blared Taiwanese news, flanked by two wide cabinets displaying my dad’s collection of water buffalo sculptures and framed photos of Jenny, Shelly, and Billy—my brother’s kids. The old newspapers, drink coasters, remote controls, prescription and vitamin bottles, and my dad’s blood pressure monitor were pushed to one side of the coffee table to make room for the Scrabble board.
My parents had been looking forward to my visit. Among other things, it meant they had a new opponent. I started playing Scrabble when I was around twelve, but my parents had been playing a lot longer. They had a set that was almost as old as I was. The letter tiles were smooth and nicely rounded from two and a half decades of play.
Halfway through the game, I spelled the word QUINCE on a triple letter score. Forty points, not bad. I was relieved to get rid of the Q. “Quince? What’s that?” my mom asked, passing me the tiles. “Um . . . I think it’s a kind of fruit,” I said sheepishly. I wasn’t really sure, I just knew it was a word.
My dad nodded. He had seen the word before, but he didn’t know what it was either.
“Whose turn?” she asked.
“My turn,” Dad said, sighing over his letters. “I have all vowels!”
About ten minutes later my mom asked again, as if she had just noticed the word on the board. “What’s quince?”
I acted as though I didn’t just tell her.
This was my first visit since my mom had come down with an acute kidney infection two months before, which kept her in bed for a couple of weeks. She had more or less recovered and was back on her feet, but her appearance worried me. Her once-round cheeks seemed hollowed out, and her dresses and skirts hung loosely on her hips. She seemed not just thinner but shrunken overall, unexpectedly fragile. She didn’t carry herself the way she used to, with the confidence of a former track and field athlete. Our silhouettes were no longer identical; her shadow was smaller now, making me feel self-conscious about having put on a few pounds. For the first time in my life, I weighed more than she did.
“How are you feeling?” I asked her, more than once.
“I’m fine. I was sick for a while . . . hmmm . . . maybe last year? But I feel much better now.” She smiled reassuringly.
My dad shot me a look that said, See what I mean? He had told me several times that her memory was getting worse.
The next day, we went to Taipei to do some shopping and visit my ninety-one-year-old grandmother, who had spent the past dozen years in a private nursing home. A-má was so delicate, her skin meltingly soft, her once-sturdy arms now weightless and brittle, her smile toothless and innocent. Yet she was incredibly strong. She had borne ten children and raised them mostly on her own, when my grandfather’s missionary work took him away from home for months at a time. Though A-má’s health had been poor for many years, her heartbeat remained strong and steady. With nine living children and more than sixty grandchildren and great-grandchildren visiting on a regular basis, she was the envy of other residents of the nursing home.
We arrived at three o’clock, took our shoes off outside, and put on slippers before entering the visiting room. A-má was sitting in her wheelchair in her customary place, nodding off.
Dad knelt in front of her, while I stood to one side. A nurse brought over a plastic stool for my dad to sit on.
Pointing to me, he said “A-bú! Look who’s here—your granddaughter. Remember her name? Gu . . . Gu . . .” He coached her to say my name. “Gu-lace-uh!” Ever since I was little, my relatives had called me by my English name instead of my Taiwanese one.
I tried to make eye contact with A-má; she aimed a blank stare in my direction. We all knew she was past the point of remembering names, but her children visited every week and they asked her the same questions over and over. If given enough hints she would say the right thing, but I don’t know if this is the same as remembering. It was more of a reflex, a word association game.
“Who am I?” my dad asked. “Which chiàng am I?” He said one syllable of the nickname A-má used to call him. She stared back without answering, but he was not discouraged. He took both of her hands and asked her again, “Which chiàng am I?”
We expected her to say “Jín-chiàng,” but instead she replied, “the cute one,” which was also correct. My dad was the third of six sons, and as a boy his distinguishing feature was his unusually big eyes, which made him cuter than his brothers. We were impressed by A-má’s improvisation.
The quiz continued. Dad asked, “Who’s older, you or me?”
“You,” she said.
We laughed. We’d learned not to expect too much, to be happy when A-má gave stock answers like a mechanical doll. But the occasional witty comeback reminded us that her personality was intact though rarely visible, like a flower blooming amidst the decay.
Dad picked up a small diary that the family used to record our visits to A-má. December 8. Jin came with Tian-hiong and Grace. A-bú is in good spirits today. He moved to one of the side chairs and my mom took his place on the stool. She took A-má’s hands and started singing Christian hymns with her. A-má wasn’t lucid enough to have a conversation, but she could remember the words to a few songs, so singing was always a part of our visit.
“Iâ-so͘ thiàn góa . . .” My mom began singing the Taiwanese version of “Jesus Loves Me,” and paused to make sure A-má could follow along. I didn’t know the Taiwanese words, so I sang quietly in English. Next, my mom sang a children’s nursery rhyme, called “Ten Little Chicken Eggs.” She moved in close so A-má could see her, and counted down with her fingers: ten eggs, nine eggs, eight eggs. . . . I was happy to see her taking care of A-má, that her instinct hadn’t changed or diminished at all. My mom sang slightly out of tune, but in perfect tempo. I hummed along.
My dad looked lost in thought. He still had the diary open on his lap. I wondered if he was thinking, Here are all the women in my life, and I have to take care of them all.
Later that night at home, my mom said, “Let’s play Scrabble!” so the three of us again gathered around the coffee table. Dad and Mom both got seven-letter words, while I struggled through the game with nothing but low-point letters. I took my time adding up the final score: Mom–188, Me–142, Dad–209.
“You won,” I said to my dad.
“Haha!” He let out a little yell. My dad was genuinely surprised; he’s used to losing to my mom. My mom wasn’t winning as much as she used to, but that didn’t dampen her enthusiasm, and she proposed another match. We dumped the letters into the box and mixed them up, then turned the tiles over one by one until they were all face-down. We turned ourselves over to another game, another contest to see how skill and concentration could overcome accidents and chance. In Scrabble, there are no unfair advantages or disadvantages. The only difference between players is seven letters.
4. ORCHID: Spring, 2002
Two years later, I was back in Taiwan for spring break. But it wasn’t a leisure trip—I was there to attend A-má’s funeral. My cousin Leng and I arrived on Friday night, and after picking us up from the airport, my parents took us out for a late dinner of chúi-kiáu dumplings. On Saturday, Leng’s parents, Uncle To and Auntie Hui-chin, arrived in San Hsia and we all convened at Tōa-ko͘’s house.
We gathered in their cramped sitting room and the elder relatives talked while Leng and I munched on green tea-flavored roasted watermelon seeds. Mom asked me, “Where’s dad?” and I reminded her that he was picking up my brother Ted from the airport. Uncle To opened his briefcase to give Leng and me the neatly typed English translation of the program for A-má’s memorial service.
Tōa-ko͘ got up every few minutes to refill our ceramic cups with freshly brewed oolong tea. Mom asked me again, “Where’s dad? What time is Teddy coming?” The others pretended not to notice that she was repeating herself. I told her gently that we wouldn’t see them until dinnertime.
My dad told me that my mom had gotten lost in Taipei a couple of times—a city she had lived in for 20 years. She forgot where she was going and didn’t recognize the street she was on, and had to take a taxi home. Ever since she started having memory problems, my mom had been increasingly dependent on my dad and would fret whenever he wasn’t around. The more fragile she became, the more she leaned on him. Though it was unspoken, I knew it was my responsibility to keep an eye on my mom while he was away.
Ko-tiūn (Tōa-ko’s husband) invited us to see the bonsai garden that my cousin Êng-iāu had carefully cultivated in the back of the family compound where several generations of Tōa-ko’s family lived. Êng-iāu was their youngest son and the most financially successful member of the extended Loh clan. He owned San Hsia’s largest and most modern dental clinic, which occupied half of the first floor of the family compound. We went through the sliding doors of the dental clinic—walking around hygienists with paper masks, bent over silent patients— and followed Ko͘-tiūn past Êng-iāu’s office to get to the back door that led to the garage and terraced garden.
Just outside the door, Êng-iāu’s gardener, a dark-skinned, soft-spoken man, patiently tended to a hundred-year-old bonsai on a waist-high platform. The tree was about two feet tall with a C-shaped trunk and twenty-odd branches spread out in an umbrella shape. Each branch was wrapped with bark-colored aluminum wire, thicker at the trunk and finer near the ends, training the branches to grow a certain way. The newest shoots stuck out at ninety-degree angles; once trimmed and wrapped with wire, the gardener would gently press them into place. I hadn’t known trees could be shaped so deliberately. That explained why all the bonsai in Êng-iāu’s garden had branches that extended horizontally rather than upward, evenly spaced to achieve balance and proportion. Each one was a living specimen of endless refinement, a monument to the perfection of old age. “You can tell I’m ready to retire because I find these things interesting now,” Uncle To joked as the gardener demonstrated the finer points of bonsai maintenance. Just then, I realized I didn’t know where my mom was.
“Have you seen my mom?” I asked, scanning the garden. Both aunties shook their heads. Uncle To shrugged. Leng said no. I tried to remember: We all walked out together, right? Was my mom standing here a minute ago? Before coming out, we had paused to admire some of the antiques in Êng-iāu’s office in the clinic. Did she get separated from us? Turn down a different hallway? I walked inside and retraced my steps to the courtyard, checking the clinic’s restroom on the way. Empty.
The compound has two main entrances: the front gate that opens onto a big street, and the back door just below the bonsai garden. Several small streets abut the property, leading in many possible directions—to the temple, to the market, to my parents’ apartment a few blocks away, to the next town. With so many people coming and going at any given time, it would be easy for my mom to slip out unnoticed.
I saw Ko͘-tiūn in the courtyard and asked, “Have you seen my mom?” He doesn’t speak English, but I knew he understood what I was saying. He said no. I tried to think of where else she might be inside the compound. Maybe she’s in the sitting room watching TV. Maybe I misremembered and she never came out in the first place. I opened the screen door, strode through the dining room with the lacquered round dining table, and opened another door to look in the sitting room. She wasn’t there. Did she think we were going home when we got up to see the garden? Did she go outside? I rushed back to the courtyard and stood in the front entryway, looking left and right down the street for a woman in a flowered dress and navy blazer, carrying a black purse in one hand and a dark green umbrella in the other. How far can she walk in ten minutes? Does she have her keys? I needed to tell everyone that I was going to look for her, so I walked back through the clinic to the garden, where Leng and the others had spread out to look at the different bonsai specimens.
“I can’t find my mom,” I announced as I came through the door, my voice edged with panic. I looked left and right, quickly scanning the area to see if she was nearby.
“She’s right there,” Uncle To said, pointing up to the top of the sloped, curving driveway, which was partially obscured by the collection of bonsai. She had walked ahead of us and had been up there inspecting the trees and flowers while we chatted with the gardener. I walked up the driveway, my heart still pounding. My mom was examining a slender fruit tree in a terracotta flowerpot next to one of Êng-iāu’s cars.
“See that tree? What’s the name in English?” She smiled at me.
“I was looking for you! I didn’t know where you were.” I sounded like a mother scolding her child.
“I was right here,” she said, ignoring the worry in my voice. She pointed to the tree again. “It has a small orange fruit, but not citrus. It has a pit, like an apricot.”
“I don’t know. Kumquat?”
Just like that, the world shifted back to its natural order. I forgot that I was trying to change the script; I forgot my fear that I didn’t know how. She was my mother again, the one who knew things, the one who was helping me find my way.
“No, it’s something else. I’ll think of it later,” she said, looping her arm through mine.