checkers, fire drills, and toast

Another cherished myth of mine was proved false today. Chinese checkers aren't Chinese after all.



In my Cantonese class this morning, we discussed the names of various board games. Chinese chess is called jeung kei, or "board game [that uses] elephants". Go is called wai kei, or "board game of surrounding". Chess is called sai yeung kei, or "Western board game". Then my instructor asked me about a game she'd seen in a trip to the USA. "This game uses marbles of different colors. The board was shaped like a star, with lots of holes in the board. The Cantonese name is bo ji kei, glass marble board game. All these Americans kept asking me to play this game with them, but I don't remember the English name. Do you know the English name?" When I mentioned it was called Chinese checkers, she started laughing. "What? Isn't it a Chinese game?", I asked her. "No, it came to Hong Kong from America." was her reply.

Certainly, this should not have surprised me. Plenty of items, in both America and Hong Kong, have false nationalities given to them. "Chinese fire drills" - where, at a traffic light, all the occupants of a car get out and change seats -- are clearly not Chinese. One doesn't need to fly to Paris to realize that French toast isn't French. Nor does one need to fly to the USA to realize American spaghetti comes with marinara sauce, not sweet-and-sour sauce. So why the surprise?

Chinese checkers is more important to my past than, say, a Chinese fire drill. I remember how, when I was a young boy, I would play Chinese checkers with my non-Chinese grandparents and cousins. It was a fun way for my non-Chinese relatives to acknowledge I was indeed part Chinese. So it's ironic to learn that Chinese Checkers was actually invented in America during the 1920s. American pop culture back then was going through a Chinese fad: one enduring example of this fad is Grauman's Chinese Theater. To cash in on this Chinese fad, the inventors of this game decided to call their product Chinese Checkers. Since my grandparents were children in this era, I'm sure they played this game in their childhood. And thus, they passed on this game to their grandchildren.