Eliza activating the button on her Rainbow Dash.
Disclaimer: This is entirely from my own point of view.
Today I met a little girl, let’s call her Eliza, at a go meetup. Her dad was in a large group of go players discussing a professional game, and Eliza was running around the table bugging her dad to pay attention to her. I tried to be interested in the discussion at hand, but the table was long, I was sitting at a distance, the level of discussion was way over my head, and I was getting more and more bored.
“Ni yao wan ma?” I asked her, do you want to play? Eliza reminded me of me. Her parents seem like recent immigrants, and she would switch back and forth from english to chinese. For the first game I did my best to speak chinese, she had difficulties understanding me and as it became clearer that she spoke english perfectly fine, our conversations shifted towards the English spectrum. Truth be told I am very self conscious of my mandarin. Talking to strangers in chinese will usually result in me feeling ashamed, judged, or both. I’d imagine they’re thinking her chinese sucks for someone who’s Chinese. It doesn’t help that I’m constantly translating my cantonese into mandarin. Sometimes there are phrases that feel so wrong translated that I just get stuck mid-sentence unable to continue. Eliza speaks better mandarin than me, Eliza is four.
Eliza was also unsurprisingly good at go. You could see that she played purely by instinct. She took less than no time to respond to my moves, and I had to concentrate hard to not get caught up in her pace. Give her a few more years and I feel like she would easily surpass the players on the table next to us. I say she’s unsurprisingly good because I could imagine (my hypothesis gathered from evidence between the three of our interactions) her and her dad at home playing hours and hours of games, quiet except for his stern lecturing on her mistakes. On one hand that’s probably why she’s so good, on the other it feels kind of crushing. I’m no child prodigy but I feel like the pressure that comes from the heavy expectations of your parents easily smushes the fun out of anything. It reminds me of going to piano classes when I was younger. I don’t remember any of the details but I do remember hating practising, hating the piano, and quitting before I got anywhere near good. My socialization tells me I should condemn this sort of parenting, but part of me believes that this is how the 0.01% is created.
Genius aside, she is still just four, during my turns (her breaks), she would take the broken stones (she called them “the bad guys”) out of the container and quarantined them to the side of the board. During one turn she wanted to show me her Rainbow Dash’s song (which was activated by a button in her chest). It was hilarious... for the next two minutes it looked like she was strangling her plushie trying to activate this button. I was impressed by how much play she incorporated into what people usually consider *scrunches up face* a serious game. However you could feel the playful mood change whenever the adults decided to look over. It went from our whimsical nonsensical chatter to a quiet silence punctured only by their commentary. And of course I can’t help but feel bad too. Here I am playing with a four year old that’s almost as good as me, and all I can feel is silent judgement from her dad about how terrible I am at go and how shitty my chinese is.
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