Feet light with my recent success I was ready to take on a more intense challenge and find 围棋 (Weiqi/Go) in the streets of Fuzhou. This thousands of years old game began in China but fortunately my expectations had already been set by the sorry number of Chinese people I’d met who knew what it was. As with all of the most fascinating treasures of China this art, too, has failed to meet the fundamental criteria of modern Chinese people: how will it make me more money than anything else I could be doing?
Of course, businesspeople, countries and companies who have been through a few generations have learned of the many benefits of indirect investment. Apple’s UI designs and Honda’s Deming style investment in people are good examples, but the president of Casio even talked about Go explicitly:
Back at the Tokyo Birdie Club, Mr Kashio reveals his secret for keeping the brain youthful: he is addicted to playing the Japanese strategy game Go on the internet and tends to rack up about three half-hour games every night before going to bed. “We should all exercise our brains more. The more you think, the better it works,” he says.
But I digress. No high-minded mission speeches were going to help me find the little crew of stone throwers I sought. I had to get down to character by character translations of out of date web pages online. I spent a few hours translating, sifting and mapping what I could. I found three addresses I could enter into google maps and, given enough patience, I could wait until my ancient iPhone drew those maps for me on the street. I scribbled some notes on a new paper map as well, picked up a few sticky rice bundles, a sun umbrella and a fresh bottle of water and hit the pavement.
The first bus took me near my destination, and the phone got me close. My crude translation of the website said something about a department store. I went there first and discovered the most expensive place I had yet seen in Fuzhou. The place was full of ties and glass and huge banners of western men in suits. I went through several floors but no one had any idea what I was talking about. One woman sent me out back into a alley for some reason I still don’t understand.
I crossed one of the many huge pedestrian bridges and watched my little dot on the phone again, hoping it would help. It danced around the area of the bright dot of my target, but without any street numbers I couldn’t seem to get any closer. Suddenly… I found it. A set of characters I recognized for a store a few buildings down on the map. I counted several addresses backwards and found an apartment building. I stepped inside and my pulse quickened as the smell of stale urine convinced me that I must be close. This was the kind of leftover dank building where the last go club would be struggling to survive. I looked up and then I saw it: 围棋. These were some of the first characters I had memorized, and they were embossed into an old metal placard next to the mailboxes.
The elevator doors opened on the tenth floor to reveal a giant sign that read “welcome” in english and was covered with plastic flowers. A wedding planner dominated the tiny floor. There were two doors leading to wedding planning offices and they were both wide open. Brightly colored plastic and aluminum foil wrapped much of the surrounding doors and hallway. Of the remaining two doors one was covered by a huge cardboard sign showing yogis and talking about “peace and tranquility space” in english. The other was unadorned and closed.
I knocked on the closed door and, getting no response, decided to brave the wedding planners. They were all deeply engaged in video games and card playing, but one was happy to try to help me out. Once we went back and forth a few times more people got involved until someone dragged the english speaking guy from a back room. “It’s residence,” he told me. “They moved. You should ask security.”
I wound my way back through the tinsel to the first floor and the security guard angrily rebuffed my question. 没有。(Not here.) The Go gods giggled as, to leave the building, I had to pass through a large group of people gathered around a street game of what the Chinese call chess.
Google’s out of date bus map sent me in the wrong direction for a while, but I managed to make it to the second address. I walked up and down the street several times, again asking countless people who had never heard of the game and often assumed I was looking for the kind of club foreigners must want, one filled with beer and girls. I haven’t yet learned the word for nerd, but maybe that would be helpful. Not to say that it wouldn’t be incredible to find, at the end of this quest, a club full of beer drinking Go playing girls…
At last it was time for a twist in the tale. A street vender sent me upstairs to the seventh floor of a large building, insuring me that I would find weiqi there. I have no idea why. I arrived at some kind of travel or banking or… well, business office. The crew behind the counter was delighted to have me brighten their boring day and I bantered around with them for a while. One even made a short attempt to go online, but then instead dragged me downstairs. She helped me talk to someone else there and then began dragging me down the street. I still don’t know why. She asked me where I was going to try next and I said that I was probably going to eat next. Suddenly between pauses to answer the phone or call more people about locating a Go club we were winding down old streets and wandering past museums. At some point I realized that she had no real plan other than moving around and that she had no intention of going back to work. When I asked her about this it turned out that she didn’t actually work at the office I had stumbled into, but instead sold massive amounts of tea to people who wanted to use it to bribe or impress clients.
I picked the next noodle place I saw and went in. She gamely followed me and as I went through my routine of “no meat. No chicken, no pork, no cow…” she kept at the texting and phone calls. By the time the noodles arrived she had scribbled the phone number of the club that had vanished. A few calls later and… we had a date, a time, and a pile of Chinese characters that resembled an address! I was ecstatic!
I walked out of the restaurant happy and fed and she asked me to come check out her office. She dropped by an apartment to pick up a key and we cabbed to a building across town. It was already 10:00pm when we arrived and she turned on the lights and cranked up the AC. The huge space was full of beautiful old wooden furniture and massive conference tables. In the center of one room was what I now know to be a tea serving table. She expertly prepared some of the better tea I’ve had here (and believe me, this is China and one of my best friends here is a tea expert) and we talked, laughed, scribbled characters and struggled through my bad Chinese until midnight.
This is what I’ve been looking for and the real purpose of the quest. Already the search for Go alone has brought me chinese practice and people and opportunity. Now I just need to get my game skills back up before meeting my first players tomorrow night…
click first photo for link to photographer’s site
