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Disclaimer: There is no easy way to win a game of chess. But that’s only if by “winning” you mean hunting down your opponent’s king until he is gasping for air in a solitary corner, his vision fading into the black and white static of the board as your opponent (John, Meera, or Jeremy) commits seppuku by resignation. Only gradually will you return to the hard seats and smudged tabletops of your school’s B-grade lunch counter. You'll blink in a daze at the face of your opponent who, you must remember, is your friend in real life.
If it’s John, you know he'll vent his frustration through his unusually long and eloquent middle finger. If it’s Meera, she’ll run back over every move and wonder where she went wrong. If it’s Jeremy, he’ll congratulate you with sad sad eyes that are worse than failure. You wouldn’t inflict that suffering on them even if you could; you’re the kind of person who catches wasps under a glass and escorts them outside, for crying out loud. At least, that’s how you rationalize your consistent losses. No, in order to win a game of chess, you will have to define your own purposes on your own terms.
Objective. You may not fully understand your objective yourself at first, but you have a sneaking suspicion that there’s a reason you’re always willing to play losing games. The trick is not to let any of your opponents realize your motives– what if someone tries to obstruct them? Perhaps the best way to explain the goal right now is “figure out your objective before your opponent does.”
Players. You will need the four members of your unofficial club known as RCIA, or the Racially Confused Individuals Association. To join, you must be a “halfsie”– half-white, half-non-white. This is of course a reference to the half-white, half-black of the chessboard, but also a testament to the nature of halfness itself: 50/50, incompletion, the friendship charm your bestie gave you when you moved from California and promptly forgot about. Sometimes you feel that you are simply that, two halves of a whole; two halves that, I might add, don’t always get along.
You: Half-Mexican who joined a chess club in second grade and haven’t improved since then. Power: You can quote the entire script of Napoleon Dynamite by heart, in case that comes in handy (somehow it never does
ns 18.68.41.141da2
