My Father

        His left hand, tilted towards his inner wrist, half fisted, shakes mildly.  He is determined to flex the fingers and pick up the “Five Bamboo” tile on the Mahjong table. His functional right hand raises up, then freezes midway, before pushing down again. With a deep inhale, he manages to grab the tile he does not want and drops it close to the center of the table, knocking down two neighboring tiles on the way. “I did it!” he exclaims. 

        His smile of victory reminds me of the time he stood on the center of the platform, receiving a gold medal at the Table Tennis Tournament among all the university faculties in my hometown. That was forty years ago; he was forty then. He is known to everyone as the “Ping Pong Champion,” as well as Professor Kang of Electrical Engineering. 

        I look at my father across the table. He still has the wavy hair, thinner, sandy, but looks better than many people in their fifties. He sits straight, concentrating the tiles in front of him, pondering, calculating, strategizing, just like when he tried to solve some problems in operations research. 

        Soon, my mother will call off the game and urge him to stand up. He will have to struggle with his left leg, swing his trembling left foot forward, while grabbing a cane with his right hand. He does not actually use the cane as a support, but simply dangles it as a way to balance, or maybe to assure himself he can do it. Then he will start to walk by himself, the routine excercise just like the Ping Pong training he had done for sixty years as the semi-professional table tennis player, before his stroke five years ago. 

        He anxiously awaits his turn. Pushing up his reading glasses, he can hardly hide the gleam in his eyes or the smile at the corner of his mouth.  I steal a glance at my sister, who is hiding her chuckles.  We both can tell that he has a ready hand, waiting to draw a winning tile.  He is not good at hiding things. “Don’t tell your dad things that you don’t want other people to know. He can never keep a secret,” my mother likes to remind me of this weakness of his. 

        His reading glasses slip down again. He used to be proud of his 20/20 vision, an exception among his near-sighted siblings, mostly benefitted by his Ping Pong training. 

        I may have inherited many traits from him, but not his Ping Pong skill. “Don’t tell others that I ever trained you,” my father used to say. He is only half joking. 

        The truth is I can play Ping Pong beautifully, like a pro, so long as I am not in a match. I only want to play with my father, but never in a tournament with others. I know he is proud of me for so many reasons, but maybe my Ping Pong skill will always be his disappointment. I will never know for sure, because that is the only secret he can keep.