Why I Stopped Studying Mandarin(Elephant's Game, Part 1)

My best friend in middle school was from Taiwan. I spent most afternoons at his house where he taught me to play a game that he called Chinese Chess. 

My own Xiangqi board showing the
traditional characters on the red side
and universal glyphs on the black side.

In Mandarin the game is called Xiangqi, meaning "Elephant's Game." It evolved from an Indian board game that's also the ancestor of the chess played more widely in the rest of the world. My friend always won, in part because he'd grown up with this game and better grasped its strategy. But his advantage also came from the pieces being flat discs marked with Chinese characters, and one needs to discern each character to know which piece is which. 

My middle school friend was pretty good at teaching me: "You can remember that ⾺ is the Horse because of these four little brush strokes and a horse has four legs. And the bottom of 象 looks like an elephant's trunk." But the characters in Xiangqi are different for each side, and no matter how many times he went over which was what, I kept confusing them.

In high school I took a course in Mandarin. The first semester was easy: I'm adept at imitating accents and thrived off of Mandarin's nuanced consonants and tonal vowels, so learning spoken vocabulary and building that into sentences was fun and I found opportunities to speak my bits of Mandarin with people around the city. But when the second semester brought in Chinese's characters, I still had trouble discerning them because I just couldn't see them well enough to tell the more complicated characters apart. So I struggled, and at the end of that first year, I stopped studying Mandarin.

I still play Xiangqi, but made stickers for the pieces' non-Chinese symbols. And now I wonder: Do people who have low vision who grow up with Chinese struggle the same way I do in telling these characters apart? Or is my impediment more linguistic than visual?

Superpowers Beat Paper

I often write the word "dis/ability" with that slash in there to designate that those of us with disabilities sometime possess abilities that other lack. Call them superpowers. I do.

My friends Beth and Meridian. circa 2001.
FYI: This story is not about either of
them, nor about Beth's piñata, seen here.

Playing piñata is a unique sport. There's a spirit of cooperation—we're all working together to smack that thing, to bust it open so that we can get at the good stuff inside. But there's also a little competition in that some of us will hit it, some won't, and ultimately one person will deliver the final plow that sents bits of paper and candy flying everywhere.

Piñatas possess a special place in my heart. When the blindfold gets wrapped around my face, the broomstick placed in my hands, and I'm spun around to stagger toward that swaying paper mâché target in the air, I feel at home. And I feel super. Over the years I've cultivated an advantage in learning to use my other senses like superpowers to find that piñata in the darkness behind the blindfold. I get my bearings in space, feel the air and objects around me. I listen, I hear. I even smell and taste. And then I swing.

At one person's piñata party, I did this a little too well. I was the first at bat, and also the last. That's right—I took down the piñata so fast that no one else even got to play. In the moment I felt great because the "dis" was diminished by the "ability" and I got to flaunt my superpowers. But in hindsight I'm flooded with remorse, for I ignored Stan Lee's Law of "With great power comes great responsibility," like every good superhero must.

So if you're reading this birthday girl, I owe you a piñata, and several chances for you to swing.

Bowling Blind

Last year I inherited my grandfather's shoes. But it was my grandmother who gave me her eyes and the cone dystrophy that's at the center of this blog.

Grandpa Dan had been a league bowler in Illinois. He'd once bowled a perfect game. But I have never and will never bowl a perfect game, because I grew up in Boston. And that means I grew up with candlepin bowling. 

I could wax nostalgic on this great New England pastime, but this is a blog about vision loss. I'll let this vintage article about candlepin bowling explain the game to all you barnies out there. And here's a photo of the candlepin lanes I once called home in Davis Square:

I started bowling when I was six, and even then I had trouble seeing the tall, skinny candlepins. Had I ventured up the lane, I would have understood their triangular layout, but from far away they looked like a set of clenched teeth waiting to be knocked out. And knock them out I did, like some maniac dentist who hurls 2-pound marbles into his patients' open mouths until someone tells him that the game is over. When it came time to tally the score, I usually thought my 6 was a 7, not because I was a cheater or a spoilsport, but because the ninepin was hidden behind the three and I just couldn't see.

On a trip to Boston last week, I went candlepinning with my mom. I know she reads this blog, and probably wasn't thinking of how much my vision has waned when she told me that I could do better every time I missed my pins altogether. I thought of my Grandpa Dan, the tenpin (a.k.a. "big ball") league bowler whose shoes I'd inherited, and how he'd also lost his vision, only it was suddenly when age-related macular degeneration set in. And I thought of how even into his 90s, even with a white cane and dark glasses, Grandpa Dan continued to bowl. 

So I, now, standing in my grandfather's shoes, wearing my grandmother's cone dystrophic eyes, breathe with ball in hand, tapping into all my senses. Legs run forward, arm swings back, and I bowl. I bowl a strike, and then blow it in the next frame with a gutter ball. I score a 7, but the now automated scoring system tells me it's actually a 6. No one to argue with, just balls to bowl, pins to fell, shoes to wear, and eyes that see differently with the passing of each frame.

Fanning Flames

I made my first protest sign when I was very little. There was this impending tax cut called Proposition 2½ that would impact public schools, and my mom and her friends were against it. My sign, drawn in red and orange crayon, had a picture of a flame and the words, "Proposition 2½ is like a flame: it fires people."

The next morning, parents and children and teachers gathered for the protest. We marched around an intersection. We blocked traffic. One driver got so pissed that he rammed through the crowd and carried a guy away on his hood.

I've always gone to protests. It's part of the American tradition. It's what we do—what we've always done when our government isn't working for us. We've refused to pay taxes. We've thrown bales of tea into the harbor. We've freed slaves. We've marched and stood and sat where we've been told we couldn't march or stand or sit. We've decreed the right of the people to alter or to abolish any destructive form of government, and we've done that. And we continue to do that.

150 years after the abolition of slavery and 50 years after the Civil Rights Movement, people of color are still getting a raw deal in the United States. Police and courts and jails carry on persecuting, prosecuting and executing African-Americans at much higher rates than other citizens. Folks are fed up with this, and they are protesting. So yesterday I marched. And people blocked traffic. And police came and I saw cruisers and horses and nightsticks. And I heard sirens and helicopters and shouting. 

Having low vision makes being at protests a little confusing. I can't really tell you everything that happened yesterday, because I couldn't see much. Sometimes this makes things scary, and sometimes my ignorance might save me.

Several years ago I was at a manifestação in Brazil where activists were publicly occupying a building. The police came and the crowd I was with suddenly shouted and ran away. I had no idea why. I'd only been there for a week, was just learning their language, their history, their laws, their culture. So I didn't know that Brazil's polícia militar can just pull out their guns and shoot them. And if they did this, I didn't see it. I just stood there. And if the tiras did draw their guns and I just stood there, they must have thought that I wasn't running because I wasn't a troublemaker, so they ignored me.

As I see less, I go out and protest less, but I think it should be the other way around. Even though no one is "doing" blindness to me, things are getting harder. And when things get harder, we need to raise our voices more. Yet as time marches on, I access fewer services for the visually impaired, not more. What's happened? Have I become the visual equivalent of a complacent liberal whose flames of discontent have been reduced to little embers burning dimly in the back of my eyes? Or has this blog become my protest sign that I waggle around from the safety of an armchair?

Happy May Day. See you in the street.

Dumb Waiter

This might be a little gruesome. Read at your own risk.

I grew up in a tough neighborhood. I was a bookish, bespectacled kid in a school full of jocks. Walking home without torment from bullies was rare. And gym class was like an hour-long hazing ritual for a club that I'd never be admitted to.

There was one bully in particular who did more than just call me a "four-eyed goon" like so many other kids. This guy actually targeted me for being nearsighted. He got so much delight in walking right up to me at the cafeteria, in hallways, out on the sports field and around our neighborhood, and then he'd shout in my face, "MORGAN! CAN YOU SEE ME?!?" There was usually some spittle involved.

This persisted past grade school and well into high school. And then the really gruesome thing that I warned you about happened. You can stop reading now, if you want to.

He had a job working in this yuppie market in our hometown. At the end of the day, they'd transport prepared foods to a basement fridge from the main floor via a dumbwaiter. One day this kid who'd bullied me for years was high at work (on marijuana, in case you're curious) and he'd called for the dumbwaiter.

Maybe it seemed to be taking a long time to arrive, maybe he was just goofing with his friends, and for kicks he stuck his head into the dumbwaiter shaft and looked up to see what was holding it up.

That's when the dumbwaiter came down and crushed his head.

I never wished this to happen to anyone who has ever bullied me before of since. Yet I felt guilty, as if I had wished it and then it actually happened. Fact is, I never really thought about this particular kid until he was up in my face, yelling at me to ridicule my nearsightedness, and now I felt guilty for not thinking about him. And then he was gone. And then I did think about him. I can still hear his loud voice, smell his adolescent breath, and feel his saliva spattering against my face.

And yes, I could see him.

What Would Owen Meany Do?

As anyone who's read A Prayer for Owen Meany knows, absorbing lots of text in all capital letters can be intense. John Irving was clearly aware of this when he wrote that novel in 1989. Irving used all caps to augment everything spoken or written by Owen Meany, a precocious adolescent whose voice and stature set him apart from everyone else in the book. Could Irving have known that, just a few years later, writing in ALL CAPS would become a major faux pas on this newfangled thing called The Internet? That ALL CAPS would signify the text equivalent of shouting and even brand its purveyors as wingnutty wackos whose very words and ideas were to be ignored altogether? Reading Owen Meany pre- and post-Internet are two very different experiences to be sure, and if you, dear reader, are seeing these words online, I regret to inform you, that it's too late to undergo the former: you've already been corrupted.

Etiquette aside, there are also design considerations that make a case against using all caps. The user experience blog UX Movement explains how contrast is an important factor in presenting blocks of text, not just in size, font and color, but also in s h a p e. Take the word, "shape" and the word "style" each printed in three formats here:

shape          style

Shape          Style

  SHAPE          STYLE

Notice how the word in ALL CAPS stand out from those in lowercase or Title Case, but not from each other. UX Movement's article points out that words consisting of mostly lowercase letters have greater variance in terms of shape because some of the letters possess ascenders (b, d, f, h, i, k, l and t), descenders (g, p, q, and y) or bother (j) that make whole words of similar length more identifiable from each other, whereas words in ALL CAPS tend to form a more uniform, rectangular shape, as in the words SHAPE and STYLE.

But what about readers who have low vision? As a person with low vision, I type in standard English sentence case, but my handwriting is rarely contains any lowercase letters. Instead, I print in all caps as I was taught in drafting and cartooning classes I attended in 8th and 9th grade. My handwriting, at its best, looks like something you'd see in a high-caliber comic book or on an architectural blueprint. I do this because, for me, it's easier to see. Online and in printed publications I would never type in all caps, and I find reading sentences in all caps to be as stressful as when someone is physically shouting at me.

So, what would Owen Meany do had he lived in the Information Age instead of the Cold War Era in which Irving set his book? Would Meany have relented, toned down his voice and conformed to the conventions of etiquette and design dictated by Internet 101? And what does that say about those of us who must occasionally defy these conventions for the sake of accessibility? I'll touch on that in a future post about all caps—STAY TUNED.

Careers Ended, Some Un-Begun

Tonight someone asked me if I wanted to participate in a reading of a play. I didn't tell him that I'd need a script in very large type, that I might not be able to read it at all, or that I once didn't return a call from a casting director who'd wanted me to come in and read a part in an audition.

I used to make and sell woodblock prints and was often hired to make puppets for plays. As my vision waned, it became more difficult to do the detailed work that these jobs required. Eventually I could no longer do it at all. I stopped making prints and puppets in 2010.

When I was a college radio DJ, I applied for a third shift public radio job in Boston. The interview was great, but after the board operator showed my AP feed, PSA cards and atomic clock, none of which I could read, I didn't go back for my studio test. I stopped DJing soon after.

I love to cook. Years ago I briefly worked prepping salads in a restaurant on Chicago's North Side. One day the head chef yelled at me for not making one the way she wanted. I hadn't seen what she was talking about. I gave notice the following week.

When I was very young, I worked at two moviehouses, starting out as a corn-popper and ticket-ripper, and then got promoted to manager-operator. The "operator" part means knowing how to run and maintain the film projector, which I couldn't focus. I left after the owner told my coworkers, "What can he do? He's blind."

As a kid, I loved math. In 4th and 5th grade our math teachers gave us these quizzes that were printed so faintly that I couldn't read them. Instead of taking these tests, I'd just sit at my desk and cry. By high school my math skills had dwindled to the point where I was getting C's and D's.

The takeaway: My many possible careers as stage actor, visual artist, NPR reporter, DJ, chef, cinematographer and mathematician may not have panned out, but I sure do have a lot of skills under my belt. Got a job for me? So long as I can do it and it's discrimination-free, I'll consider it. You know how to reach me.

Can you spot the the mistake here?

When I was kid, one of my favorite books was Optricks by Melinda Wentzell and D.K. Holland. It was full of bold, immersive, classic optical illusions, just about all of which you can now find online. Among these was the one that you see in the title of this post—did you spot the the mistake? That's it: "the" appears twice consecutively, but many people don't notice because the repeat word is on either side of a line break. It's also an article, a tiny, auxiliary part of speech that, in print, the brain tends to gloss over more than, say, a flamboyantly flourished adverb.

Blind Film #8: The importance of the worst cartoon ever made

What else can one say about that one-joke wonder, Mr. Magoo? As a kid I suffered through this poorly animated cartoon about an oblivious old myopic white guy and his manservant Charlie, depicted as a pigtailed, slanty-eyed, bucktoothed, Asian stereotype who's always shouting, "Mistah Magloo!" and calling the man "Bloss."

Hoo boy. A popular cartoon that's racist and ableist. I'd like to say that I can't believe I was allowed to watch it, or even that the TV station was allowed to air it. I'd also like to say that it's been discarded and forgotten as an antiquated artifact from the pre-PC era, but none of these statements would be true: Magoo lives on into another century, perpetuated in part by Disney's live-action remake. They even tried to PC-ify their version by transforming Charlie into a pan-global female love interest for Magoo's nephew, and then inserted this end-of-film disclaimer:

Siskel and Ebert sum all of it up in their review:

So Disney made a crappy film, based on a crappy cartoon. But Magoo serves an important role in popular culture. While other movies portray people with visual disabilities as having absolutely no vision, Magoo is one of the few mainstream media representations of someone with low vision. He's become an ableist cultural icon, an insult lobbed at people who act like they don't see something that's right in front of their faces. Magoo also gives context for understanding how people with disabilities can be misunderstood when they pass as abled—like a very nearsighted person who doesn't walk around with dark glasses and a white cane. To Magoo's credit, his antics are somewhat accurate. Too bad they couldn't have done that with a good film.