December 2, 2014

We had just finished a meal in a Japanese restaurant and were about to pay our bill with cash. We weren’t sure how to tip without a sufficient amount of change. In the end we somehow tipped $1 which I suspected wasn’t going to sit very well. I was washing my hands at the sink and noticed there were remnants of a bamboo patterned sticker on my palm and fingers. The glue was especially resistant to water. It was right about now when someone puked and we were ushered out.

“How many times has this happened now?” someone asked.

“Remember that incident with Hannah last time?” another added. Someone got rather upset with that comment which apparently referred to something that happened in eighth grade.

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My dad was driving to visit a friend of his. We were going there to return some Chinese flash cards I had borrowed years ago. We arrived at a small shop with the bundle of flash cards in my hand. They asked if I had started going to college to which my dad answered no. I interjected saying that yes, I was now in college to which my father replied with, “Okay, you answer the questions then”. They were sorting some items on the shelves when they picked out some flash cards that had Chinese characters printed on a white card with a gradient orange circle in the center. “Looks familiar, doesn’t it?” they said while eying the pack I had in my hand.

“Are you still learning Mandarin?” they asked.

“No.”

“How about Japanese?”

“Not any more, no…”

“So then it’s just going to be English, English, English, English for all four years?”

I didn’t answer this final question but in my head I was thinking that perhaps my four years were to look more like “ENG-JPN-RUS-SPN” instead. I finally replied that I couldn’t do Japanese unless I took a bus everyday.

We were now going to go home.They asked if we needed a ride back while my dad needed the restroom. I interpreted this as them driving us back in their car while someone else drove our car back separately. I didn’t trust having another person drive our car while we weren’t around so I declined. I stopped in the middle of the road to re-wrap the flashcards.

We got into the car and my dad was fumbling with something while keeping his foot on the brake. The car was slowly slipping down the incline. “Braking is tiring” he said. “Well, why not just use the handbrake?” I asked. “Oh right, thanks” he replied and pulled up the handbrake. After realigning, he started the car and drove up the hill to a parking spot by a waiting area with a bench before getting out, presumably to go to the restroom.

I went to sit at the benches and now I was in charge of looking after the daughter of our friend. Shortly after, a door to some stairs going down opened and out streamed a bunch of people with matching jackets. I tried to find distinctive features between each of the 15 or so people that came out but I couldn’t find anything from their apparel, to their accessories, to their faces. “Hey, do you play Hearthstone?” one of them asked me. I didn’t reply.

Now out of the door more people came out in different jackets from the first group. Supposedly these were pro-players of some kind of game. I asked the second group what they played and they said they played a French game called “Pedigreed”. These people laid down on the cement under the sun when one of them told them to take for a break as they did not want to “bring down the win rate”.

Out came another team of people who played rhythm games with their coach who accused the second group of being lesser for playing a game for “government moral work”.