There are 361 points on a standard Go board – one wherever two lines meet in a 19 by 19 grid. Go is disarmingly simple in its rules and objectives, though this is compensated for in full by the sheer number of permutations of stones that 361 points will allow: A stone requires two adjacent orthogonal spaces to survive, and the winner of a match is the person who captures more points on the board.
My dad’s opening gambit never changes. He plays white and I play black (there are 181 black stones and 180 white, so black moves first). After I’ve staked my first claim, he places a white stone on a point in the middle of the side closest to him, three points from the edge. On his next turns, he places two more stones in the corners flanking the first. As I’ve grown older and more willing to listen, he has become an increasingly eloquent theorist of his own gameplay. This is the best gambit, he tells me, pointing at the sparsely-populated board, because it builds good bones.
In the first half of the match, we claim corners and sides. There is a discrete beauty to the way a game unfolds and, as my dad plays it, a respect for economy of style. We carve out neighborhoods of the board – a corridor along the north of it for him, the southwest corner for me – in the same way that a landscape painter might sketch the outlines of hills and valleys before thinking about the texture of the terrain. My dad recites an aphorism to remind me that certain parts of the board are more precious than others: Gold corners, silver sides, weeds in the center. In Chinese, the lines have a lilting rhythm, and the last two rhyme.
As the game wears on, the sketched-out shapes of our territories become detailed. The scope of our skirmishes narrows to single points in the center of the board. My dad turns guru and savant. I’ve yet to develop a sense for when a point is better than its neighbors, so I ask him, at every turn, why I should place a stone on this point and not another. Each time, he patiently extrapolates the incorrect move a dozen turns into the future, when my misstep will result in the loss of a handful of points and possibly the entire game. I’m inspired by the confidence with which he renders these projections, which assume that both parties are capable of perfectly rational gameplay. I stare at the board as he holds forth, willing some insight to manifest itself in the pattern of stones.
By the last quarter of the match, my dad is practically playing himself. I move to place a stone in disputed territory and watch his face for the weather – a knit brow means trouble, and I skim my hand over the grid like a dowsing rod until he nods in approval. He has guided me, by now, to a near-draw, if not an outright win. I used to protest these faux victories but have since realized that every request for advice is another opportunity to extract a new Go-adjacent anecdote from my dad.
Typically cagey about his own autobiographical details, he becomes more talkative with Go as his vehicle. Across half a dozen games, I have learned about the hours he spent playing Go during his undergraduate years in Shanghai, when he convened matches with other students; they played half-day-long matches in their cold water flats, over twice-brewed tea and five-spice sunflower seeds.
Later, as he was preparing applications to doctoral programs in the US, he sought out Go as a respite from studying for the GRE. The exam’s critical reading sections were particularly daunting. He bought a Chinese-English dictionary and read it, cover to cover, in eight months. The dictionary accompanied him from Shanghai to Columbus, Ohio, and on to Maryland, where it still occupies a place of honor on a bookshelf alongside Roget’s thesaurus and a pamphlet called “How to Go.”
The dictionary’s cover has long since detached from its spine, and its scritta pages have gone brittle and yellow. I used to flip through them, thinking that I’d find some obscure slice of the English language that had escaped his notice, but all 1643 pages are carefully underlined and circled in blue ink. His notes indicate an appreciation for shades of meaning – “deign” is written next to the entry for “patronize,” “intuition” next to “subconscious,” “gist” next to “pith” – and musicality – “jape” and “zest” noted above “jest,” “spunk” near “stink,” “heinous” near “hideous.”
“Did it work, though?” I asked him once. “Rote memorization?”
“No,” he said, without hesitation. “I could tell you if a word existed, but I probably couldn’t tell you what it meant.”
In between sprints through the dictionary, he played Go. The clean logic of stones and points was a refuge after long hours spent wading through the idioms and imprecisions of an unfamiliar language. At the end of eight months, he took the GRE. He didn’t do well, or as well as he’d hoped. At this point in his telling, my dad is careful to remind me that Go is a waste of time. Instead, he should’ve been reading English books.
I disagree and tell him so. There is something rare and hopeful about a project so quixotic. Even if he’d remembered nothing, he’d seen the words – all of them – and held their meanings and sounds in his mind, however briefly. I reassure myself that standardized tests reveal little about a test taker’s true mettle; as a working biologist, my dad deals daily in language far more arcane than anything the GRE might probe.
Of course, there is no replacement for a mother tongue. Most of our games are conducted in Chinese or Chinglish: family language. It feels only right, somehow. Go is an old game, older than chess, and some of its first players were wine-drunk poets and generals plotting out battlefield strategy. When there is a lull in the game, we can lean on its history – we can talk about it or behind it or through it.
The history of a game like Go must be an accumulation of individual matches like the ones we play. At the rate of one game every three months, I don’t expect to become a good player, or even an adequate one, but I do think my matches with my dad still qualify for inclusion in the imaginary guestbook of the oldest strategy game in the world: Tang poets, toasting the moon; shoguns, cosseted in their Heian courts; Lee Sedol, facing down AlphaGo; and, somewhere down the line, my dad, waxing poetic about black and white stones and letting me win.