Go, Stop
BY TAMMY HEEJAE LEE
Hyun Jung Ahn, Quarantine Diary Part 3.5, felt and linen, 45 x 47 inches, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
Go, Stop
Tammy Heejae Lee | MAR 2022 | ISSUE 14
The first time I saw the cards, my mother was sitting at a picnic table with two other Korean mothers from church, with her back towards me. There were tiny red cards and a pile of dimes scattered in front of each woman, and my mother had placed the small fleece blanket she kept in the car to cover herself from sun exposure on top of the table’s surface, to cushion their game. They took turns slapping down the cards in their hands and taunting each other loudly while waiting for the next move.
“Assa!” I heard my mother say. The other women groaned in defeat and pushed their coins towards her.
“Tajja-ya, tajja,” they called her, in a tone that was more appreciative than anything else. She gathered all the cards, ready to shuffle and distribute them again.
I approached the table and reached over my mother’s shoulder for the card that she had just set down: a green and yellow nightingale, perched on a branch of plum blossoms. At the sight of me, my mother startled (“Omae!”) and gathered the cards with a swoop of her arm, until all the cards that had covered the table were tucked away in a plastic case. The other mothers pocketed the change and stood up to greet the rest of the approaching kids and husbands, all of us wet and holding buckets full of shells after exploring the nearby tide pools. Their game set-up disappeared just like that, the tabletop now holding grocery bags to prepare for a barbeque dinner. A mirage I was so sure I had just seen.
Later, when we had all piled into our respective cars after our day trip at the beach, I had asked my mother what game she had been playing, and what a tajja was supposed to be. I was met with the kind of silence that I would later learn was my mother’s way of trying to end the conversation before it could even begin.
“Umma?”
“It was nothing,” she said. She draped the same blanket that I had seen cover the table earlier across her shoulders and closed her eyes, waiting for sleep.
What she was really saying was that the game was something she had no intention of sharing with me, something I was better off without, for reasons that made sense only to her.
***
The cards are called hwatu, which means “flower fight,” or “battle of the flowers,” and contain forty-eight cards divided into twelve suits—one for every month of the year. The drawings in each card are works of art: detailed images of different flowers and plants like cherry blossoms, wisteria, peonies, chrysanthemums, etc., along with various animals and ribbons. The cards are thick and made of a glossy plastic, so when one comes in contact with another, it makes a satisfying slap. There are different games that can be played with a hwatu deck, but the one I had seen my mother play was called Go-Stop.
The rules of Go-Stop are fairly simple, once you get the hang of it. It’s essentially a matching game: you slap down a card that matches the design of any of the cards in front of you, and score points through different strategies. Once a player has made it to the minimum number of points they need to win, they’re faced with an interesting choice: to “go” and continue the game with additional rounds to win more points (and therefore more money), or to “stop” and end the game right then and there to collect their current winnings. If a player in the lead chooses to go but fails to score again, they’re required to pay additional penalty fees for the other players who have lost with them. It’s a delicate balance of calculating whether to risk everything while going forward or stopping while you’re ahead. The game punishes you for being greedy or leaves you with regret for being too timid, resembling life, a little.
I only saw the hwatu cards a handful of times after that outing at the beach, on special occasions when family friends or extended relatives stayed over during holidays like New Year’s or Chuseok. They played late into the night, slapping cards down and erupting into boisterous laughter, with cans of beer, peanuts, and strips of dried cuttlefish on the serving trays next to them. I would watch them from a distance where I was careful not to be seen, longing to join them.
The definition of “tajja” was something I had to look up myself: a gambler, a professional gambler. I could see the beauty in the word, simply from the way my mother flicked her wrist when she revealed her cards, her faint half-smile that appeared mid-game. She seemed like a completely different person when she played, with her hair loosely tied up and the mischievous glint in her eye when she stared down at her cards. She looked pretty, I thought. She wasn’t the tired Umma whose eyebrows knit together in perpetual consternation at bills, house chores, or work. She looked radiant while playing cards. Carefree.
My mother had refused every single time I begged her to teach me how to play, saying it was a game for adults, that the rules would be too complicated for me to understand, how its reputation for gambling made it unfit to teach a teenager. I resented her for it, knowing fully well that my grandmother was the one who taught my mother how to play because she had mentioned it once in passing. Why couldn’t she do the same with me? Why couldn’t she see that I didn’t want to learn for the sake of the game, but because I thought it could be a way for us to share something together? For me to learn a tiny bit more about my culture through my mother and her stories, which I would’ve preferred over being forced to attend Korean school after church on Sundays?
Still, she refused. Umma was the type of stubborn that seldom changed her mind about anything, no matter how many times I asked. If I wanted to learn how to play Go-Stop, I would have to figure it out on my own. Somehow, the idea of doing so felt even lonelier than if I weren’t to play at all.
***
When my mother was growing up, my grandmother had always told her: “너 같은 딸 꼭 낳아라,” which translates to: “I hope you give birth to a daughter who’s exactly like yourself.” It felt more like a curse than a blessing, something said out of spite because my mother was so headstrong and disobedient during her early adult years. As if the only way she would ever understand how difficult she was being was to have a daughter with a personality just like hers. My grandmother’s revenge took place a month before my mother turned twenty-nine, when she gave birth to me.
My relatives marveled at the ways in which I would butt heads with Umma, because it reminded them so much of a mini-version of my mother to my grandmother. They would all say the same thing: “피는 못속여”—one cannot deceive or hide one’s blood. Our defiance, imagination, and pride were mirrored in each other, taking precedence over the other similarities between us, like our love of flowers and houseplants, our careful handwriting and interest in language arts, the competitive inclination to win or have things done our way. There was one difference we would never be able to bridge, no matter how hard we tried to understand each other: as an immigrant, Umma believed in leaving the past behind to look towards the future, while as an American, I wanted to hold onto the glimmers of tradition I could find, fearing that they were already well out of my reach.
Years passed before the opportunity to learn how to play Go-Stop properly presented itself, when I had entered my mid-twenties. My cousin had offered to teach me how to play, and I learned that she and her family would play the game every time they went on a trip together, where they bet on each round with quarters. I felt a pang of desire at the thought—it was the very thing I had wanted for myself, with my own family. Something as simple as sitting down and shooting the breeze with my parents, spending time together with the smallest of traditions.
Soon after I learned the rules of the game, Go-Stop became something like an obsession—I wanted to play it all the time. I had a notebook where I wrote down all the winning moves and the meaning behind the cards’ designs in a notebook, and studied the pages every time I lost to see where I went wrong. I downloaded a mobile game of Go-Stop and played it on my phone during my two-hour commutes to and from San Francisco. I set up a stuffed animal that sat next to me so that I could play as two players against my cousin, where I could consider strategies from more than one perspective. I tried teaching the game to anyone who would listen: my younger sister, my best friend and her parents, and once, a pair of family friends who had visited us, much to my mother’s chagrin.
“With this kind of effort, Heejae could’ve gone to Harvard,” my mother wrote to her friends and family members in amusement over her Kakao group chats. She had sent them pictures of my detailed notes, and they had responded with crying laughing emojis.
“A tajja just like her mother,” one of them responded back.
I almost wanted to tell her that I wouldn’t have needed to go to these lengths if she had been the one to teach me herself. I refrained, knowing that that kind of fight wouldn’t have made a difference now, even though a part of me wished that it had.
***
The origins of hwatu can be traced back to the Japanese hanafuda deck, after Koreans changed the characters on the cards to match their own language, the material was replaced into the glossy plastic it is now, where various iterations of games using the flower cards were created. In my research of the cards, it struck me that hwatu would’ve meant something entirely different during the time my grandmother grew up, since her childhood began during the Japanese occupation of Korea. The cards were largely used to gamble, mainly so that Koreans would be able to forget the volume of hardships they had endured during the annexation. But for families like my grandmother’s, it was more likely adopted as a simple pastime, a means for them to bond with one another in the little free time they had to spare. A game played secretly within the confines of the family home.
I couldn’t picture my grandmother (who was so devoutly Christian that she had written the entire Bible by hand numerous times) teaching a card game associated with gambling to my mother and her siblings back in the day. It had to have some kind of sentimental meaning to her at some point, one that would forgive its tarnished reputation of being the kind of game that led into something more insidious: people putting their life’s savings on the line, or cheating and brawling within gambling operations or websites. Perhaps she had justified it that as long as the card games stayed within the family, they could be perceived as harmless fun.
My mother recalls her family using a small change of coins to play Go-Stop against each other, with the winner switching for almost every round. She said it was a luxury to sit down and play cards with one’s parents back then, during a time where children wandered outdoors or played with kitchen utensils instead of toys. When I asked her what the real purpose of hwatu was in her eyes, she said, “Kinship.” The cards offered them the opportunity to bond as a family and laugh their stress away. In other words: rest.
Now that I was good enough at Go-Stop to play against my mother and win for the majority of the time, the initial sacredness of the game had dissipated a little. It felt strange to win against her, because this wasn’t what my younger self wanted at all—perhaps it never was. All I was looking for was that same kinship she had mentioned, looking for ways she could teach me something, even if that something was as insignificant as playing cards. Deep down, I knew my mother would have understood why I wanted to learn—why this was something I wanted to preserve.
My mother claims she didn’t think I would be interested in such an obsolete card game, one with more ties to the past than it would have in the present. But that was exactly why this mattered to me, as someone who had a wildly different upbringing than hers: if I had nothing to leave behind or remember when it came to traditions, wasn’t it up to me to learn them, so I could understand where she was coming from?
***
During the course of the pandemic, my deck of hwatu cards has become worn at the edges, rounded and faded from playing Go-Stop every night with my younger sister mostly, or occasionally my cousins. Unlike my mother and grandmother, I don’t gamble with coins, instead designating the losers with tasks like scooping ice cream, doing push-ups, or running errands as punishment. Go-Stop for me has turned into something like a ritual: a ten-minute brain teaser after dinner every night that helps me temporarily dissociate, sharpening my focus that way. It’s mindless, almost mechanical by now, with no real care of who wins or loses, but I turn to it the way we all turn to the smallest of things that give us comfort. Rest. A slight breath before going back to my tasks in the real world.
I had originally thought that Go-Stop was a matching game, but what it really is is a conversation between players: studying, shifting, going, stopping, all of it a calculated exchange. Some days, it feels like meditation. Other days, it feels like a task I have to check off my to-do list so that I can move on to other things. Either way, these cards are something that I’ve adopted as my own, a steady and meaningful ritual I can turn to for years to come.
Certain things are passed along from one generation to another without meaning to: a stubborn and evenly matched mother-daughter duo, an affinity for flowers and literature, a card game. Regardless of how they’re discovered, our similarities are saying this: there are reasons, clear as day, that we belong to one another.
Tammy Heejae Lee is a Korean American writer from Davis, CA. She has a BA from UC Davis and an MFA in fiction from the University of San Francisco, where she received a post-graduate teaching fellowship. A Tin House Summer Workshop, VONA/Voices and Sewanee alum, her writing has appeared in Sundog, The Offing, and PANK, among others. She is currently a 2021-2022 Steinbeck Fellow in fiction at San Jose State University, where she is working on her first novel about expat and hagwon culture in Seoul.
Hyun Jung Ahn is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist from Seoul, South Korea. Through her work, she investigates enigmatic abstract forms. She begins by drawing from her visual diary, which captures feelings, personal connections, and emotional states of being. She then translates these notions into minimalistic drawing and sewn painting. She has attended residencies including Vermont Studio Center, MASS MoCA, and Trestle Art Space. Ahn graduated from Duk-Sung Women’s University, Seoul (2010 BFA and 2013 MFA). She received a second MFA in painting and drawing from Pratt Institute and currently lives and works in Brooklyn and Seoul.