“Bai gaa fo la!” My grandpa David muttered at the pair of aces I laid down on the table, glancing back and forth between his own hand and mine. He was wishing, I presumed, that he had something to beat me with because I had six cards left – and that was dangerous. A small smile escaped: My poker face had always been terrible.
I was about 13, and we were playing Big Two, my favorite of the many poker games that I’d been playing with my Chinese grandparents for as long as I could remember. In fact, some of my earliest memories are of playing cards with my grandparents and my two older brothers at the long wooden table with the flimsy off-white tablecloth, thinking about pairs and straights and full-houses and four of a kinds, and the odds of ever getting dealt a royal flush, because that would be euphoric! I remember sitting in awe as my grandpa described a time he was dealt a four-of-a-kind at the casino, winning a few hundred dollars. “He could have won way more if he wasn’t so risk-adverse!” my grandma had said.
Grandpa knew he couldn’t top the aces. “I pass,” he said with a sigh. Grandma Alice was next. The rule is that you play clockwise (I was never sure why the direction mattered that much, but I accepted it). She too shook her head, passing. “Oh, you’re sneaky,” she told me, equal parts frustrated and proud. My brothers knocked on the table, indicating that they were going to pass. I held my breath as I prepared my next move.
Even today, I associate cards with my grandparents and my Asian heritage – as well as with a growing sense of confidence. Growing up, the poker table was the only place where skill transcended age, where I was just as good as my older brothers, and sometimes even as good as my grandparents. And because I had only ever played cards with my Asian grandparents, and because it was the only activity we did together, I thought that poker was an Asian thing. Embarrassed as I was of my Chinese identity, I was glad to have one good thing come out of it: playing poker.
I exhaled. Casually, I played a deuce-high flush in spades before releasing my poorly-concealed smile. A flush was always a secret killer; when you preserved the right cards, you could almost always prey on your opponents when they least expected it. Because I was the only one with at least five cards left, I knew no one could top my play.
“You got it,” murmured my grandpa, pushing the mound of chips from the center of the table towards my own burgeoning stack. “Bai gaa fo la,” my grandma Alice repeated, before dealing another hand of Big Two. It’s funny how specific games come back to you upon reflection.
***
Several years ago, my grandma suffered a severe stroke. She no longer knew who I was. Actually, she didn’t recognize anyone but my grandpa, and she couldn’t really speak, either. But she remembered how to play poker. We tried going easy on her at first, but she’d sneak up on us and laugh (she didn’t forget how to laugh!) and she’d win. Last Christmas, when she won a hand of Big Two with a flush, I smiled, knowing her skills had become muscle memory. She still knew it was too risky to save a full-house ‘til the end, too pointless to save a straight – but saving a flush was the perfect way to win.
“Bai gaa fo la!” I blurted as she claimed her winning chips. She squealed in delight. It was the same squeal that now communicated a sense of accomplishment from a completed puzzle, an excitement in seeing her husband of 60 years, or a recognition of an old Christmas carol or custom.
Once I asked my grandparents what “Bai gaa fo la” meant. Though my brothers and I had already co-opted the phrase, we didn’t know what it meant. But it made grandma and grandpa smile whenever we said it, so we took that as positive reinforcement to continue. “Oh, I can’t tell you,” my grandpa said, despite my “come onnnnns!” Later, my grandma whispered to me: “It’s a swear word in Cantonese, so he feels comfortable saying it in front of you people.” Looking back now, I’m realizing it was probably the first swear word I ever learned.
I practiced saying “Bai gaa fo la” in my room many nights, replaying in my mind exactly how my grandparents said it, attempting to perfect the enunciations and delivery of the phrase. I wanted to impress them at the card table. I wanted in on their secret poker expressions. The thought prompted a cool rush of belonging.
***
My grandparents were first generation Chinese-Americans, hailing from tiny peasant villages in Guangdong Province, China. Grandpa’s father grew up in Shun Shui Village, or Village Along the Water, several hours by car from the city of Guangzhou, down rocky stone-filled roads with lots of ruts and grooves. He somehow was able to scavenge another man’s papers to travel to the Beautiful Country, as the United States is called. The Chinese Exclusion Act banned Chinese from immigrating to America from 1882 to 1943, so there were a variety of methods that clever and courageous Chinese peasants used to cross to America. One was to buy papers from Chinese already in America, so that it looked like you were just returning to the U.S. from a visit back home; Grandpa’s father did that. Grandma’s father took a different tack. He was from Mak Village, less than an hour away from Shun Shui Village, and he traveled to Macau and then to Canada, where he raised a family of seven children. My grandma was the youngest.
My great grandfathers made the hazardous journey to America, determined to embrace a new identity that would grant greater opportunities and freedoms to them and their children. My grandparents rarely spoke of their past, of China, nor did they much speak in Chinese. Heck, even their names, David and Alice, were uncommonly American, and they chose American names for their children as well. They did not teach their kids Chinese. In their eyes, the key to succeeding in America was assimilation.
My mom decided in college to learn Chinese in an attempt to reclaim her roots – though she learned Mandarin. Mandarin is the official and arguably most useful Chinese language, historically the language of the refined and educated China. However, my grandparents spoke only Cantonese and Toisanese, a rural dialect. Thus, my mom could never even communicate with her own parents in Chinese.
Incidentally, my American dad also speaks Mandarin (with a bad accent, but it’s still impressive), as my parents lived in Beijing for five years. In fact, when my parents were living in Beijing and my grandparents visited them, there was a time they were all at a local Chinese shop and my dad was interpreting in Mandarin for my grandparents, while the Chinese shopkeepers were staring in disbelief.
My parents deemed Mandarin important, so they hauled me and my brothers to the local Chinese school every Saturday while we were growing up. As we reluctantly regurgitated foreign sounds and tones, I’d stare at the clock, waiting to be released. I resented having to miss playdates and soccer practice for what felt like a waste of time and energy.
Though my brothers and I resisted, we nonetheless grew up with Mandarin, and were thus considered particularly “Chinese” by our New York friends. I found myself constantly reminding my classmates that we were only half-Chinese, and that our live-in non-English-speaking Chinese babysitter was not my mom. Whenever she spoke to me in Mandarin in public, I responded in English just to make a point, to the benefit of nobody.
Besides, learning Mandarin always felt inauthentic – somehow more about the advantages of growing up bilingual and knowing one of the most powerful languages, rather than about sustaining our cultural identity. I was learning a language that my Chinese grandparents couldn’t speak a word of. I might as well have learned French.
This disconnect was exacerbated when I visited my ancestral villages a few hours outside of Guangdong, China, when I was eight. “You belong here,” an older woman told me through a translator. I frantically searched for any common ground I might have with these people, but even running water wasn’t one of them. I had never felt so out of place.
A crowd of villagers swaddled us, barking out anecdotes and offering us teas as our frenzied translator sought to keep up. I remember smiling a lot because I didn’t know what else to do. Finally, relief sunk in as we walked back to the car. Out of the corner of my eye I spied a few young kids playing cards on the dirt ground, shouting in Toisanese, the village’s dialect. I wondered what types of card games they played.
When I got into the car, I let my thoughts wander. Who would I be if my great-grandparents hadn’t acquired the papers to make it to the U.S. and Canada so they could start a new life brimming with opportunity, so that their grandchildren wouldn’t have to worry about going hungry and could maybe get an education that would open up new doors for future generations? (And yes, I realize I wouldn’t exist if my great-grandparents hadn’t left the village.)
As we drove away down the rural dirt roads, I asked my dad, “If I grew up there, would I also not have teeth?” My dad chuckled. Just like that, I had returned to my first-world worries.
***
About a year ago, Grandpa David passed, and about a month ago, Grandma Alice left us, too. Their goals in becoming true Americans were successful – each of their three children graduated with top university degrees and each married white people. They died proud parents and grandparents of the little Chinese-American family they had spawned.
And yet, I can’t help but feel some heavy chapter slammed shut, some crucial component of my Chinese identity erased. It terrifies me that there is no religion or language from them that lives on in us – not even a celebrated family dumpling recipe to carry on to my children.
But perhaps there is one thing.
A few weeks ago, my brothers and I opened a deck of cards with extra big font that had been gifted to us from our dead grandparents. I shrugged, “So… Big Two?” And then, suddenly, for the first time ever, we were playing just us – without our grandparents. And somehow it was even more fun than we’d remembered. We promised to play more together – on the few occasions we saw each other during the year – and to teach our parents and friends to play.
I was curious, though: “Why haven’t any of our friends heard of Big Two before?” My brothers shrugged and continued to organize their cards. But just then my heart leapt. I reached for my phone. Google confirmed my sudden epiphany: Big Two, along with many of the other card games we’d learned growing up, were distinctly Chinese games. Tears welled up in my eyes. Without realizing it, we were already sustaining part of our cultural identity that we feared had been erased by the departure of our grandparents.
On the last hand, my brother claimed victory. Just before I assured him I’d win next time, I exclaimed, proudly: “Bai gaa fo la!”
Caroline Kristof graduated from her computer in 2020 with a degree in History & Literature. She is now managing her family farm in Oregon, temporarily, or maybe even permanently, who knows. When the pandemic is over, she'd like to visit Vietnam, Madagascar, and Venezuela, among other places.