This is how you play the game:
- Always play for something. Everyone should have some skin in the matter. My family plays for mooncakes even though they are traditionally eaten during the Mid-Autumn Festival.
- The game is played with cards. Anything that is cheap and portable will always endure.
- The name of this game translates to Pigs Rooting for Truffles.1
- There are two types of games in the world. One where you accumulate cards, and another where you give them away. This is one where you give them away.
The game takes place after dinner, as often as we can work up the energy to play it. I call out, Let’s play cards,and regardless of what has happened that day, we make our way to the table. My parents eat breakfast here every morning. It’s just the right size for two people unlike the rest of this house, which is too big for a couple with an only daughter who doesn’t come home often enough.
Right now, I am living at home as a kind of Temporary Adult Child, sleeping in my childhood bed. We recognize this for what it is: a situation brought about by a pandemic, a moment in time that cannot last forever. For now, my work can be done from a laptop. It is all in the Cloud, disembodied, so pure that engaging with it feels like religion.
My mother is fond of wiping the countertops with vinegar and the smell lingers. It hits my nose like an accusation. We are reminded of who has done the cleaning. My father is complaining about how many days it’s been since we’ve had red meat on the table. This is not happenstance. This is how my mother protects him, but in marriage a partner doesn’t always seek protection.
He rebels, stomping outdoors and stir-frying meat in a wok over an open flame, the smell of fat and char so strong it pushes its way into the house where my mother sits, fighting off a headache.
In America, mooncakes sell for fifty dollars a box. Each one is embossed like an art object, something that should be behind archival glass, not things that go into mouths. In China, mooncakes are sold by the pound from carts parked next to puddles of rainwater. They are plain, ordinary things. My father showed me the last time we visited China together, sixteen years ago. We ate them for breakfast because they were cheap and there was nothing better at home.
My parents were born in the final year of the Cultural Revolution. I would try and explain it to you, but I would just mess it up. The Chairman died when my mother was in kindergarten. The teacher walked around and checked that every child was crying.
The moral education they were given was hazy and strange, a kind of fairytale logic. Let me tell you about the animals. Cats were good because they were diligent, practiced pouncing for hours and caught mice. Sparrows were evil because of their taste for grain. The world existed only as a binary; goodness could only define itself in relation to evil. The state was good. Parents were not necessarily good. Sometimes, in order to serve the state, you had to turn your parents in.
They both attended the Tiananmen protests, though my mother tells me they were just poorly organized student gatherings, clusters of young people sweating in tents. If she had written its history, maybe that’s all it would have been: flimsy cloth walls, body odor, heat like oil shimmering in a pan, everybody so dehydrated the days could have been one continuous hallucination.
They were just college students, sleeping six to a room, eating nothing but pickled vegetables and rice, each eyeing the others, guessing which rung of the ladder they occupied. In their minds, this ladder stretched to infinity. You had to keep climbing. The ladder was always swallowing itself. Climbing the ladder was good. It was better than waking up hungry, catching sight of your parents peeling the bark off of trees, chewing, pretending the thing in their mouths was something better.
They found each other sitting together in cafeterias playing card games with their friends. They met in the same way everyone else did: looking up from their schoolwork, dazed by the passing years, realizing that they knew nothing of love. How did a person have children? Even my mother, studying to be a doctor, didn’t understand. In her dreams, children unzipped their mothers’ stomachs, climbed out fully formed, already uttering their first sentences.
A story from my father: the most beautiful girl in his high school class is crying. Everyone is concerned. What’s wrong? She’s pregnant. She’s pregnant, and now she will never go to college because only the person who gets the best score on the Exam gets to go, and everyone else is just out of luck, will have to go back to the village and dream about the single day all year when they’re allowed to eat sugar.
How did it happen? She walked into the classroom after everyone was gone and found a love letter on her desk. She opened it and read it and her face got so hot—later they would learn the only thing it said was that a certain boy admired the luster of her hair. She is ruined. She’s certain of it. After all, isn’t this how people get pregnant, by opening love letters?
My father shuffles the deck. Soon their corners are lined up, signaling a beginning. We are all careful to pay attention, knowing that one day I’ll leave, and we won’t be able to sit together, flipping cards. Before we begin, a final note on stakes:
- The mooncake is cut into quarters to make the game last longer, and
- First place gets a quarter of a mooncake, while
- Second place gets to select the piece of the pastry that first place eats and shuffles the deck, while
- Third place roots for truffles.
My father taps on the table and that quiver in his leg has returned. His unemployment benefits are set to run out this week. Soon, I will be the only working adult under this roof, though there are bills to be paid, cavities to be filled, bone loss to be slowed.
My father used to sell radios in China. He has spent his life climbing the ladder, each of its rungs a new sum of money. The energy has nowhere to go if he stops climbing. Money can pay for heart surgery for grandparents a continent away, insulin shots, college tuition.
Before he got laid off, he was working as an accountant. My father has never thought of a job as something you are meant to enjoy. Labor is something to be endured; it is your way out. I once called him from a parking lot during an internship, telling him I couldn’t go on for another day. Don’t worry about it, he told me. Just go one day at a time and before you know it, forty years will have gone by.
His English isn’t good. When you find yourself lost in one grammar, you search for others. Accounting is kinder than English. It is a communication in numbers, every element, something that can be trust-tested. Sometimes I think that accounting might be its own story: narrative of Company X making Y million dollars, the rise and fall, the vanquishing of dragons of financial ruin, living to tell the tale for another quarter. So really, we’re not so different, my father with his proficiency for numbers and me with my love of stories.
His English isn’t good, but he writes excellent work emails with the word economy and elegance of haiku. Accounts payable. Double-entry bookkeeping. Depreciation. But he has a distaste for words, is constantly confounded by them. He often calls my mother over to his computer to review an email with him. What does primary mean here? Which is the former and which is the latter? What does compound mean? He repeats a joke one of his coworkers told, asking her to explain why it is funny. By the time she is able to make him understand, the joke is a tough piece of gum in her mouth, so hardened all that’s left to do is to spit it out.
He is frustrated by vowels, never knows how the O should sound depending on its position in a word. Hole. Hole. Hole. He says over and over at the dinner table, practicing the feeling, the precise way the tip of his tongue should strike the top of his mouth, as if speaking is like doing sit-ups. How do you say the O in stole? How do you say the o in broke? How do you say the o color? He takes long walks in the evenings, lifting a dumbbell as he walks to keep his arms strong. Hole. Hole. Hole. He says over and over, practicing the way his tongue should curl back. He has given up on understanding his coworkers’ jokes, mostly just tries to observe their body language, laughing at what feels like the right time.
A few years back, he was visiting his parents in northern China when my mother asked him to stop by a bookstore. She wanted to read her favorite novels in Chinese; our local library didn’t have them. They talked prices. She kept asking him Are you sure? How much is this book? How much is that book? Everything cost the equivalent of a little over fifty cents. Finally, annoyed, he snapped that the pricing isn’t per book, it is per kilo. Expensive. How many kitchen knives could we have for that money? She wouldn’t stop talking about it for weeks: the bookstore where what you paid for is the weight of paper and ink.
My father shuffles the deck, but my mother is the one to cut it. Has she always been so small? She has reached the age where she has begun to shrink rather than expand. There was a period of time where every week, she would wake up half a pound lighter. I would hear the numbers over the phone, imagine all the calcium evaporating from her bones.
She’s fallen out of the habit of wearing sunscreen. She’s been plagued by migraines ever since the day she turned thirty. I wonder if this is a bad day, if all day she’s been carrying around her frustration, hands itching to set it down. But I can’t set it down now! she must be thinking as she descales fish, fingers bleeding, too busy for Band-Aids. She develops instant attachments to cookware, referring to the handles on a clay pot as its “ears.” “Come have some lunch,” she’ll call out, carrying a clay pot of rice and eel by its ears. “You need to take breaks while you work.”
She used to be the type of person who wanted to go to Italy, sit on the Spanish steps like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday and make a pistachio gelato last as long as possible. These days, she sits around with a hot water bottle on her knees.
She was a doctor in China. She tells stories about how the clinic she worked for never had money left at the end of the year. Instead of a cash bonus, everyone got a pound of fresh beltfish. You’d always know it was winter by the smell of fish frying throughout the neighborhood.
Being a doctor was just another normal job. You didn’t get special treatment because you were sewing up torn skin or staunching a stab wound. When all the new immigrants met up to talk about job prospects, they said, Even a doctor could learn to do that. Surely, you can do it too. In America, there is a doctor for every ailment. A hospital for your spleen, for your liver, for your bones. A specialist who will look at your platelets under a microscope. A man who will stitch your heart back together.
She used to write poetry about dragonflies. She used to write short stories about a family of chickens. To this day, she will spend two hours crying her eyes out at the sight of a dying wild rabbit. She is terrified of rodents but gave birth to a daughter in the year of the rat. The sight of a houseplant withering makes her heart hurt. She is defined by tenderness, terrified of it. A daughter is a sweater hugging the contours of her heart. A daughter is a piece of meat that has fallen away from her body.
My father takes the first card, my mother the next, and then me. We will continue until the cards run out. I am the worst at the game and we all know it. Whoever draws the first three, the least valuable card in the game, always goes first.
Like with any game, it gets boring after a while. To keep it interesting, we introduce new mechanics, specifically the concepts of “mosquitoes” and “bombs.” This is how bombs work: essentially three or more of any card. Something beautiful happens to your threes with the activation of the bomb mechanic; they can be what helps you win.
Bombs introduce an element of brinksmanship into the game, but at a more fundamental level, it’s very fun to look someone dead in the eyes and proclaim that you’re going to “bomb them.” My parents are especially fond of this kind of back-and-forth, slamming their cards on the table. My mother shouts, “I’m going to bomb you!” and flings her cards down, voice quaking a little as she looks at my father. I picture them, young and in love, so uncertain, life hanging on a turning point.
I don’t have much Chinese left in me. Maybe this is why all we can talk about is going to the grocery store and cooking dinner, an interminable cycle of procuring, washing, and eating vegetables.
When I talk to my parents, I feel that I am building a bridge with insufficient materials, hammering down planks and laying rope, and then suddenly realizing that I’ve only made it halfway across the ravine and there’s nothing left to build with, just empty air.
The same is true for my parents. This is why my mother carries a clay pot by the ears over to my desk and my father sits in the living room with me, cracking sunflower seeds and staring at nothing in particular. We talk about grocery shopping, housework, how nice the weather is, how poor the weather is. My father asks me to explain a joke. My mother tells me that I should take a break. And then, we run out of words.
So how does a game of Pigs Rooting for Truffles end? We sit there, counting each other’s cards until we realize someone is down to three cards, two cards, one card. We goad each other with bomb threats and jokes about mosquitoes. We throw old rules out, make new ones, modify our modifications, not realizing that we’ve been doing the careful work of constructing our own secret language all along.
1At the end of the game, the deck is restacked and placed in front of the loser. The loser uses their nose to nudge the deck open, spilling the cards across the table. This motion is repeated until they find a joker. I’m told it looks something like a pig rooting for truffles.
***
Graphics courtesy of Public Works by Cosmos
