Listen to the Squawking Chicken: When Mother Knows Best, What's a Daughter To Do? A Memoir (Sort Of) (4 page)

I come from a family of master mah-jong players. My grandmother ran a mah-jong den out of her apartment. As a teenager my mother was beating veterans of the game several decades older than her. The joke in my family is that I was delivered on a mah-jong table—Ma went into labor and just pushed me out in between hands. By the time I was four years old, I could accurately identify every mah-jong tile in a set. There are 144 of them.

Mah-jong is played by the winds: East, South, West and North. Each player is assigned a “wind” position at the beginning of every round. There are four cycles per round, one for each wind. The presence of the “winds,” an element of nature, gives mah-jong a certain mysticism that other card games don’t have. It is a game governed by luck. For Chinese people, luck is a spiritual property with a personality and its own set of mysterious laws. Sometimes playing mah-jong
feels like magic, especially when you’re on a roll. Sometimes no matter how thoroughly the tiles are shuffled, you’ll keep getting the same hands in the same order, like they’re following you, like they’re attached to you, telling you what decisions to make. And if you’re paying attention, you’re winning.

Once I was watching Ma play while sitting on her lap. She was on a hot streak and didn’t want me to move and disturb her luck. Ma is a beautiful mah-jong player. As a child, I was mesmerized watching her play. It was those nails. The way she’d reach out with them on the board to select a tile was super glamorous and sexy. She’d pause her forefinger and her third finger on the top of her designated tile, her beautifully glossy red tabs posed side by side like an ad for the perfect manicure, like miniature versions of the tiles themselves, before gently curving them around the block, lifting it so that her thumb could slide below, across the grooves that identified exactly which card she had chosen. Expert mah-jong players don’t have to look at a tile to know what it is. They can feel it from the markings against the pads of their thumbs. (While some people inherit recipes from their mothers, the Squawking Chicken passes on her mah-jong tips.)

That day, though, Ma didn’t have to even touch the tiles to know which ones they were. Before her turn, every time,
she’d tell me what was coming up. If she called for the eight of circles, the eight of circles would arrive. If she called for the six of sticks, it would be the six of sticks that appeared in her hand. This continued for hours, well after I fell asleep in her arms dreaming of my own future mah-jong-queen days, and being able to predict tiles, a veritable gambling Nostradamus.

Given the air of the supernatural that surrounds mah-jong, there are certain unofficial rules that accompany the game. Respected players abide by a mah-jong code of conduct, especially to eliminate suspicion that they’re cheating. Cheaters often use shady, dark-side behaviors to gain advantage. Some might intentionally wear a ripped piece of clothing, cleverly hidden, while they’re at the table to gain the favor of the benevolent (but often gullible) gambling gods who might mistakenly assume they’re poor and need the money. You never want to be the cheater gambling on the Squawking Chicken’s territory. Once Ma dropped a tile and when she bent over to pick it up, she noticed that the woman sitting beside her had a tear in her pant leg that looked deliberate. The woman was chased out of there immediately with a chicken feather duster (common in Chinese homes). Ma went door to door to every mah-jong den in town the next day telling everyone about the woman’s fraud.
She was made to feel so unwelcome, she ended up emigrating to Australia. Cheaters will be exiled!

Reading at the table is also a cheating technique, albeit an amateur one. This was an expensive lesson for me in college, where I used to play all-night mah-jong with the Chinese students in my dorm. One evening I was up large. The boy sitting across from me, Tommy, was down my share. It is customary to keep playing if the person who has lost the most insists on continuing. Tommy wanted to keep going but left to go up to his room in between rounds. When he came back he had a magazine with him. The word for “magazine” in Chinese is the same as the word for “book.” And the word for “book” sounds exactly like the word for “lose.” Tommy read his “book” while we played. And I started losing. I lost everything and more. I ended up losing my month’s rent.

The next morning I called Ma, my mah-jong guru, to tell her that I got my ass kicked. Up to that point, in my short mah-jong career, I had never, ever lost that badly. Because I’m good. I’m so good at the game that even on days when luck is not with me, I can limit my losses with skill. After all, playing mah-jong is my family’s singular talent. So it was shameful that I had been beaten so badly.
What had happened?

Ma asked me to describe in detail the moment that my streak started shifting. She wanted to know about the patterns of the tiles I was getting and how I interpreted and played them. I had forgotten to mention Tommy’s “book” until she pressed me for more information about the person who took my money. When I finally told her about how he was reading during his comeback, she sucked on her teeth, let out an
“Aiya!”
(kind of like saying “Oh my God”), and informed me that I’d been had. Remember, the word for “book” sounds exactly like the word for “lose,” and “reading” and “watching” share the same character in Chinese. So when Tommy was reading his magazine he was also “watching me lose.” And lose I did. It’s a junior move, and it would have never worked on the Squawking Chicken, but it worked on me—just that one time!

Tommy’s trickery is considered mah-jong black magic. Mah-jong magic is like the Force in
Star Wars
—there’s a good side, the one that flows through the deserving player, and a dark side that can haunt the players who are tempted to use it.

Before I was allowed to play mah-jong with adults, I was trained on tables with my cousins, who were all around the same age. When I was ten years old, I was engrossed in a game after dinner one night. Ma was finishing up her meal and occasionally checking in on me to give me pointers.
Cousin Jin threw out the West tile. The West tile in a mah-jong set is the one that carries the most powerful dark mah-jong magic. Next was Cousin Wai. He threw out a West tile too. Cousin Ling also had a West tile, and she discarded hers. It was my turn. I happened to have a West tile in my hand. Given that the three other West tiles were already exposed, there was no need to keep mine since I’d no longer be able to make a pair. I reached for my West tile just as my ma came up behind me.

She shouted at me so loudly not to toss the West tile that everyone jumped and the tiles scattered all over the floor, the West tile still in my hand.

Why the drama?

Ma gathered the four of us around the kitchen table to explain the Curse of the West Tile. Four West tiles are never to be consecutively thrown out during a mah-jong game. It is mah-jong’s most important rule and it is strictly observed.

Ma told the legend of four people who played mah-jong together regularly. One of the players was particularly greedy. Three West tiles were already on the board, discarded in a row, when it came his turn. As luck would have it, he was in possession of the last West tile. The other players pleaded with him not to do it, to wait for the next cycle, for a break in the pattern. But if he kept the West tile, it would screw up his hand. And in getting rid of the West tile, he’d
be “calling.” “Calling” is the term for a hand that is ready to be won, a hand that is only one short of making a complete set. The man’s hand was big on points. It would win him a huge pot. He couldn’t wait.

He threw out the West tile. The pot was his. He went home that night the only winner.

A few mornings later, one of his fellow players left home to go to work. She pressed the button for the elevator. The elevator arrived. She stepped inside. As soon as the door closed the cable snapped. The elevator crashed to the bottom and she was killed instantly. It was called a freak accident.

About a month later, one of the other players went to a nightclub. She was on the dance floor when a fight broke out. Bottles were being thrown around so she went to hide behind the bar. The mirror behind the bar was shattered from the altercation. They later found her body when the authorities arrived, a triangular piece of glass sticking out of her neck. It was called a freak accident.

Two players remained.

They met up in a panic. They tried to reassure themselves that it was just coincidence. The player who threw out the fourth West tile tried to convince his sole surviving friend that there was no way the curse was true. He insisted that they would be fine.

That night, while his friend was walking home in the
rain, a burst of lightning struck a lamppost just as he was passing underneath it. The lightning severed the power lines, which then came swinging down. The third mah-jong player was electrocuted and died. It was called a freak accident.

When the fourth West-tile player heard about the accident, he knew he was in deep shit. He went to the temple to pray for guidance, shaking fortune sticks, hoping for a positive message. Every stick that fell to the ground portended calamity. He visited a feng shui master who took one look at him and shut the door in his face. Other feng shui masters refused to see him at all until, finally, a feng shui master from the old village agreed to let him inside. The player begged and begged for advice, for any suggestion, a protective charm or spell that would absolve him of his mistake.

The feng shui master shook his head. “You must account for your avarice. Three lives have been taken because you chose a temporary win over camaraderie and peace. This debt must be paid. It cannot be avoided. You would be wise to embrace your fate so that you can start your next life even, all square.”

The player was angry. He refused to accept his judgment. Days passed, then weeks. Nothing happened. The player grew more confident. He even started sleeping again. And when months went by, he believed he was in the clear. He found a new group of people to play mah-jong with.
He continued to win. He won so much he decided to buy himself a new car. It had been half a year since the night he threw out the fourth West tile. On his way home, he decided to drive his new car over a bridge at top speed. When he came off the ramp, he lost control and slammed into a pillar, dead. When they pulled him from the wreckage, there wasn’t a bruise on his body, and no blood. But his hand was missing. It was the hand that had thrown the fourth West tile.

Ma’s story has prejudiced me against the West tile for life. I even feel weird winning on the West tile and sometimes go out of my way to engineer my cards so that it will never have to work out that way.

When we were driving home that night, I asked Ma why the West tile was so bad.

“It’s not the West tile that’s bad. It’s the people who abuse it who are bad.”

Through the West tile story, Ma was teaching me about greed and selfishness. The player who discarded the West tile jeopardized the lives of his friends for the pleasure of a temporary victory. He put his own interests before others. He allowed greed to dominate his decisions. In doing so, he not only affected his own fate, but altered the destiny of his friends. Ma explained that the choices we make are like circles that grow wider, engulfing the people who share our spaces. Greed and selfishness are the attributes of those who
believe that life is singular and not inclusive. Ma had seen the effects of greed and selfishness when she was growing up. She’d suffered for the greed and selfishness of her parents, heavy gamblers who consistently put their needs and compulsions over the interests of their children, even willing to risk sacrificing their first daughter for self-preservation.

This is why Ma has always been able to manage her own gambling. Not that she didn’t play mah-jong when I was growing up. She was at mah-jong—a lot. But mah-jong never became an obstacle to my education or my well-being. Somehow the Chinese Squawking Chicken managed to turn mah-jong, a game that had had a negative impact on her childhood, into an instructional tool for her own parental philosophy. “You want to screw up your life, that’s fine,” Ma always said. “The problem is that when you screw up, more often than not, you take other people down with you.”

In Western society, a hospital is for healing. It’s where you are taken care of, fixed, protected. A hospital is where life begins. A hospital is also where many lives end. And this is why many Chinese believe hospitals are haunted.

Ma is very familiar with hospitals—too familiar. She’s never had the strongest constitution. And when Ma is in the hospital, she has very strict conditions about when I can visit her. No matter how sick she is, she doesn’t want me there during certain phases of the moon, when my luck is either too low or too high. She also prefers that I visit her when the sun is still up. And when there are extenuating circumstances that require me to be there in the evening, she insists that I leave before dark. That way I won’t be susceptible to the ghosts that linger in the hospital, wandering the halls in the darkness, looking to either latch on to new opportunities or punish those who are still breathing when they can’t. Ma worries that the spirits will affect my luck. If I’m on a bad luck streak, she doesn’t want to expose me to a situation that could make it worse. If I’m on a good luck streak, she doesn’t want to expose me to a situation that could throw off my good run.

A couple of years ago, we were together one afternoon when she complained about not being able to see properly. Her arm was also tingling. This had been going on for a few days. I had to go to a meeting so I urged her to go to the hospital. She was still waiting in the emergency room when my meeting was over. By this time the sun had set. Ma knew I wanted to rush over to be with her but she also remembered that I was leaving the next day on an important work
trip. She said I should stay back, at least until the doctors had seen her. An hour passed and I hadn’t heard from her, so I rang her cell phone. There was no answer and I started to panic. Finally, my dad called to tell me that they’d determined that Ma had had a mini-stroke. Crying, I started getting my things together, ready to get in the car to go to the hospital. I could hear Dad telling her that I was on my way. It was almost midnight.

She squawked.

And suddenly that voice was shouting me down over the phone. She wouldn’t let me come. She refused to listen to my pleas. She was concerned about my career and how it would be affected should I come into some kind of contact with negative spirits at the hospital. The way she was raging at me on the other end of the line, adamant that I stay away, you wouldn’t know she’d just had a mini-stroke. No matter how I begged, she would not be swayed. She’d rather not see me than risk me having my luck stolen by spirits.

Ma had had her own experience with hospital spirits.

Once, after a long illness that affected her muscles, she was a patient for several weeks at a rehabilitation hospital. With daily baths and regular wear and tear, her patient wristband had become frayed. Ma kept harassing the staff to give her a new one. Even in the hospital, Ma cared about appearances. She didn’t want to have something tattered on her
arm. She wanted something new and shiny. Understandably, the nurses were busy, too tied up to make her a fresh wristband and told her to be patient, that she should continue wearing her old one until they could provide her with a replacement. Ma ripped it off and threw it out. She didn’t think anyone would have a problem identifying her anyway.

Late that night she felt something pinching her toes on both feet. The pinching became pulling. It didn’t hurt, but it was annoying. And persistent. As soon as she started dozing off, the pinching sensation would wake her up again. She slept terribly that night. It happened for three nights in a row and each night, the pinching grew more and more intense, and more annoying. Ma called for the neurologists to come to see her. They ran some tests but could find no medical reason for the toe-pinching sensation that was happening in the middle of the night. In fact, as far as they could tell, her health was improving and her nerves were regenerating.

Ma was puzzled. She was relieved to hear she was getting better but she still needed to know why her feet were getting pinched. She needed an explanation for the feeling she couldn’t shake. That she was . . . unwelcome. And she was starting to dread bedtime. Rest was critical to the steady progress she was making and she desperately wanted to get well enough to go home. Ma was still worrying about it
when the nurse came into her room for the final vitals check of the day. And she came with a gift.

They’d finally gotten around to printing off a new wristband for her. She put it on and slept uninterrupted that night. Ma realized the next morning that she’d made a mistake by ripping off her original wristband. She was convinced that it was ghosts who had bothered her at night, pinching her feet. The Chinese believe that ghosts are territorial. These particular ghosts must have thought her an intruder because she wasn’t wearing a wristband to identify that she belonged at the hospital. Ma determined that the ghosts, zealous about guarding their own turf, had decided she was trespassing until she replaced the wristband, which signified that she was a proper resident of the facility.

Ma had been taught a lesson. She had not only flouted the hospital’s policies and procedures, she had done so out of vanity. It was a learning experience for her because Ma had always been kind of . . . shall we say,
selective
about which customs and conventions she’d observe.

For Ma, department stores and flea markets are interchangeable. If you can bargain at a flea market, you should be able to bargain at the mall. “No tax?” is her favorite question. And she will try it anywhere. “Under the table” is her preferred method of payment. Ma also doesn’t believe in
queuing for anything. On weekends Dad and I, for years now, will find an excuse to not arrive with her at a dim sum restaurant if there’s a waiting list because Ma just sits down wherever there’s an open table. She does it so authoritatively she never gets questioned. By the time Dad and I get there a few minutes later, the teapot will already be on the table and she’ll have ordered.

Ma usually gets away with this behavior. Except for the time when the ghosts called her out for not adhering to patient identification policy. And it made her re-evaluate her approach to order. At least at the hospital. But to this day, her favorite question is, “No tax?”