What was amazing to Sam—and what became a theme of the games he would go on to make with Sadie—was how quickly the world could shift. How your sense of self could change depending on your location. As Sadie would put it in an interview with Wired, “The game character, like the self, is contextual.” In Koreatown, no one ever thought Sam was Korean. In Manhattan, no one had ever thought he was white. In Los Angeles, he was the “white cousin.” In New York, he was that “little Chinese kid.” And yet, in K-town, he felt more Korean than he ever had before. Or to put a finer point on it, he felt more aware of the fact that he was a Korean and that that was not necessarily a negative or even a neutral fact about him. The awareness gave him pause: perhaps a funny-looking mixed-race kid could exist at the center of the world, not just on its periphery.
In Los Angeles, Sam suddenly had grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, all of them invested in the drama of his and Anna’s lives. Where would Anna and Sam live? Where would they go to church? Would Sam enroll in Korean school? Would Anna star in a television show? Why had she left New York? All of these issues weighed pleasurably on the family. His mother was treated like a celebrity. She was the Korean girl who had made it among white people. She had been in A Chorus Line. On Broadway! His grandmother, Bong Cha, doted on him, and they played the Korean card game Stop-Go, and she fed him mandu and pleaded with his mother to take him to church. “But he will grow up without God, Anna. He will grow up lost,” Bong Cha said.
“Sam’s very spiritual,” Anna said. “We talk about the universe all the time.”
“Oh, Anna,” Bong Cha said.
That summer, Sam’s greatest spiritual experience was with the Donkey Kong machine in his grandparents’ pizza place. The machine had been a promotional idea of Dong Hyun’s during the early-’80s height of arcade game mania. When the machine had arrived, he had sent out postcards: dong & bong’s gets donkey kong. families, come eat and play! buy one of our famous, new york style pizzas! one game free on us! The postcard had a non-Nintendo-licensed illustration of Donkey Kong tossing pizza dough in the air that Bong Cha had drawn. When he named the restaurant in 1972, Dong Hyun knew that if you removed the Hyun and the Cha from his and his wife’s perfectly ordinary, respectable Korean names, Dong and Bong became hilarious-sounding to white people. He hoped the Donkey Kong promotion would further capitalize on the comic properties of their names, drawing in customers from beyond K-town even—that is to say, nice white people. For a time, it did.
By the time Sam arrived in Los Angeles, arcade mania had passed, and almost no one ever competed with him to play Dong Hyun’s machine. Dong Hyun would turn the machine’s release key so Sam could play as long as he wanted. Sam felt a peacefulness come over him when he was playing Donkey Kong in his grandparents’ pizza parlor. When he could time the little Japanese Italian plumber’s jumps and ascend the staircases at the right pace, it felt as if the universe was capable of being ordered. It felt as if it were possible to achieve a perfect timing. It felt like synchronicity. It felt like the opposite of a frigid winter night when a woman had jumped from an apartment building on Amsterdam Avenue and landed at his and his mother’s feet. That woman, her face, the gruesome angle of her neck like the handle of an umbrella, the earthy, copper scent of her blood mixed with his mother’s familiar tuberose perfume—she appeared to him almost every night in his dreams. He wondered what had happened to her after she’d been taken away in an ambulance. He wondered what her name was. He never mentioned her to Anna. He knew that woman was the reason they had left New York. “In California,” his mother had promised, “nothing bad will ever happen to us again.”
Sam turned ten the day Mary Lou Retton won the women’s all-around gold medal. At the party his grandparents threw for him, the television was left on, but muted, so that people could celebrate Sam while still watching Mary Lou. It didn’t matter to Sam that everyone’s eyes were on the television; he, too, wanted to know if she would win. Sam blew out ten candles, and in the distance, Mary Lou Retton received a perfect 10 on her floor routine. And he almost felt like he, by blowing out the ten candles at the precise moment that he had, had been what caused her to get the perfect 10. He fantasized that the universe was a Rube Goldberg machine. If he had blown out only nine candles, maybe the Romanian girl would have won instead.
That next day, Sam and Anna went to lunch by themselves. To Sam, it seemed like years since it had just been them, and even at barely ten years old, he felt a palpable nostalgia for the railroad flat in derelict Manhattan Valley and the takeout Chinese and the life they had left behind. At a nearby table, two men in suits were discussing the gymnastics final in booming voices.
“She never would have won if the Russians hadn’t boycotted,” the man insisted. “It’s not a victory if the best players aren’t there.”
Sam asked his mother whether she thought the man with the loud voice was right.
“Hmm.” Anna sipped at her iced tea and then she rested her chin in her hands, which Sam had learned to recognize as her philosophizing gesture. Anna was a great talker, and it was one of the most profound pleasures of young Sam’s life to discuss the world and its mysteries with his mother. No one took him, and his queries, more seriously than she did. “Even if what he says is true, I think it’s still a victory,” she said. “Because she won on this day, with this particular set of people. We can never know what else might have happened had other competitors been there. The Russian girls could have won, or they could have gotten jet-lagged and choked.” Anna shrugged. “And this is the truth of any game—it can only exist at the moment that it is being played. It’s the same with being an actor. In the end, all we can ever know is the game that was played, in the only world that we know.”
Sam considered his French fries. “Are there other worlds?”
“I think there probably are,” Anna said. “But I don’t have any hard proof.”
“In some other world, maybe Mary Lou doesn’t win the gold medal. Maybe she doesn’t even place?”
“Maybe.”
“I like Mary Lou,” Sam said. “She seems like a hard worker.”
“Yes, but I imagine all those girls work hard. Even the ones that didn’t win.”
“Did you know she’s only four foot nine inches tall? That’s only two inches taller than me.”
“Sam, do you have a crush on Mary Lou Retton?”
“No,” Sam said. “I was stating a fact.”
“She’s only six years older than you.”
“Mom, don’t be gross.”
“It seems like a big age gap now, but it won’t in a couple of years.”
At that moment, one of the men in suits approached their table. “Anna?” It was the man with the loud voice.
Anna turned. “Oh hello,” she said.
“I thought that was you,” the man with the loud voice said. “You’re looking well.”
“George, how are you?” Anna said.
The man with the loud voice turned toward Sam. “Hello there, Sam.”