Ancient Asian Game Could Go Far as Americans Catch On

Alan Chen, a child prodigy at the ancient Asian game of go, methodically counted the black pebble-like pieces before him on a wooden board. At game’s close, the 10-year-old totaled his score and discovered that he had defeated his opponent, a man who looked old enough to be his grandfather.

The occasion was a tournament in Monterey Park. And although Alan was the object of admiration, he said he would tell classmates he had gone camping.

“They tease me,” he said. He is timid about discussing the game that was developed thousands of years ago in Asia.

Little-Known in West

There was nothing shy about Alan’s aggressive play, however; he is one of the top 20 child players in the United States. Nor was there any lack of intensity among the dozens of other tournament players or among the scores of spectators who filled a Lincoln Park Hotel ballroom on New Year’s Day.

The dominant sound was not conversation. It was the clicking into place on wooden boards of plastic pieces known as stones. Most participants smoked incessantly as they pondered their games.

Only a few non-Asian Westerners know much about go. Most have never heard of it. Yet the game is played by millions in the Orient and is firmly established in U.S. cities, mostly on the East and West coasts, where there are many newly arrived Asian immigrants.

Go clubs in Los Angeles, Monterey Park, New York and San Francisco (where the first American club opened in 1936) are open around the clock on weekends. Membership in the New York-based American Go Assn. has doubled to 1,300 in the last three years, and interest has spread beyond the traditional following of Asian immigrants.

Southern California, because of its large number of players, qualifies as the nation’s go capital. There are three major Los Angeles clubs in the Chinese, Korean and Japanese communities and many others that meet in homes, offices and churches in Orange County, the San Fernando Valley, the San Gabriel Valley, Gardena and even in the back room of a Los Angeles barbershop.

Clubs in Santa Barbara, San Jose and San Diego, as well as in Boston, Baltimore, Washington, Miami, Dallas, Chicago and Seattle also have large followings.

Blind Spot in West

“When I first started playing 10 years ago, nobody had heard of go,” said Barbara Calhoun, a partner in a New York employee benefits consulting firm and president of the American Go Assn. “Now people at least say: ‘Isn’t that the Oriental game with black and white pieces, the war game.’

“It’s been a blind spot in the West,” she said.

Increased interest in Southern California happened partly because of Alan Chen’s father, Arcadia businessman James Chen, who learned go in the Taiwanese army. Chen has functioned as a go ambassador in this country.

Two years ago, James Chen brought from China one of Shanghai’s top coaches for children. Yang Yilun moved in with Chen and taught Chen’s children.

Yang also has taught 200 other youngsters at the American Go Institute, which James Chen and others set up to spread the word about go in the United States. Chen also has launched correspondence courses for American adults.

Three years ago, Chen brought together the top players from two countries that, because of political differences, had never competed. It was on neutral soil in Los Angeles and San Francisco that China’s top player, Nie Weiping, met one of South Korea’s best, Cho Hun Hyun.

For the recent Christmas-New Year’s tournament, Chen drew several of the world’s best players to Monterey Park. The highlight was a match featuring Nie, whom Sports Illustrated has called “the master of the masters.”

The 37-year-old Nie, playing one of his students, astonished fans by losing twice, but this spring he will have a chance to recoup. He will compete in a world title game against a South Korean player. About $500,000 in prize money will be at stake in the tournament to be played in Asia at an as-yet-undetermined site.

In Asia, top professional players--like marathon runners--peak in their late 20s and early 30s. Because of the mental and physical endurance go requires, they are viewed as erudite athletes. Matches can last for days, with players sitting before a board for 10 to 12 hours at a time.

But--as with golf, tennis and bridge in the West--most go enthusiasts are amateurs looking for diversion.

“Go can be profound,” said Richard Dolen, a Santa Monica computer software designer and president of the American Go Institute. “But since so many people play go, it must not always be so profound. There is something there for the common man.”

Said Aaron Rosen, president of a San Francisco club, “You can learn it in five minutes and spend the rest of your life not mastering it.”

Playing Field

The board is divided by lines into 19 columns, creating 361 squares. One player uses black pieces; the other white.

Each player take turns placing a stone, in a permanent position, on any one of the intersections of the squares.

The object, as with soldiers on a battlefield, is to eventually overtake the opposition by surrounding it; hence, the game’s Chinese name, WEI QI , surrounding chess. (Go is the game’s Japanese name.)

Whoever attains control of more than half of the board wins.

What entices people, many of them former chess players, is that no game has the same pattern.

“It’s like six games of chess going on at once and they interact,” Dolen said. “You can’t win with a single punch. There are many battles at once.”

Repeating one legend, Rosen said go was invented 4,500 years ago by a Chinese emperor who wanted to improve the mind of his dimwitted son. And, Rosen said jokingly, “We have a lot of idiots still playing 4,500 years later.”

“The moves reflect your personality,” said Long Beach’s Larry R. Holmgren, a high school algebra teacher and one of the few whites in Monterey Park’s U.S.-Chinese Go Assn. “If you’re greedy, envious, jealous or don’t know what you’re doing, or if you’re defensive or fearful, your moves will show that.”

For many players, go is deadly serious. A Japanese go master once cropped his hair in atonement for his country’s loss to China. Generals have postponed battles to complete a game. And the atom bomb blast in 1945 interrupted but did not thwart the completion of a Japanese title match in a Hiroshima suburb.

The Monterey Park club, in a small storefront office on Garfield Avenue, is often filled with members on lunch breaks.

Formed six years ago with just 22 members, the Monterey Park club has 180 members who pay $50 monthly dues. Among them are 15 women, including two former pros from China.

The weekend of the New Year’s tournament at the club, Chinese characters had been fashioned from red paper and bordered by Santa Claus cutouts to announce that the club “welcomes China’s top player to California.”

Club member Wen-king Chow surveyed the men around him, hunched over boards on long tables. “This is not a gambling game,” said Chow, 68. “This is for high-class people.”

He pointed out a UCLA graduate, then a past Hawaiian go champion and the club’s pro, T. C. Chang, a master player when he lived in Taiwan. “The player over there was a general in Chiang Kai-shek’s army,” he said of a sturdy man, graying at the temples and in deep concentration.

Chow stopped talking and suddenly clapped once, loudly. In swept an entourage led by James Chen and followed by Nie Weiping and his wife, Kong Xiangming, one the best women players in the world.

After greetings, Nie gathered three others for bridge. In this type of setting, James Chen explained, Nie will not play go. After all, he won’t even play the game with Deng Xiaoping, China’s top leader, his weekend bridge partner. He doesn’t like to lose to just anybody, Chen said.