DO WE STILL HAVE FRIENDS?
written by NELSON ZHU
edited by JASMIN SIN
artwork by YI YOU TAING
“Dad, can I play Clash Of Clans for a bit?”
“Here you go.” I mindlessly threw my phone at my six year old son as always.
I watched my son’s emotionless face break into a beaming smile as he started playing that video game Suddenly, I froze in place. I saw my younger self in my son’s bright smile. My memories of playing spinning top, glass marbles and rubber band jumping with my childhood friends gushed into my head. It was the time when smartphones, televisions and video games were not essential for our entertainment.
The images of the spinning tops came to mind and brought me back to primary school.
The spinning top’s squat bodies, rapidly spinning on its sharp tip at the bottom, caught our eyes quickly. When me and my friends were dismissed from class, we would bolt to the local shops and look for gnarly designs of spinning tops. When everyone else was buying snacks we would save up money to buy our favourite wooden spinning tops. We would customize the plain spinning tops by painting them with our own favourite designs and compete with each other for the title of having the coolest spinning top. After that we would play a variety of minigames with our spinning tops. We would spin the tops with our hands as hard as possible to compete for the longest record; we would bowl with our spinning tops for the most pins knocked down. But the most thrilling game was always the spinning top contest, where two people spin their tops in a circular ring. The two spinning tops would strike against each other multiple times and the spinning top which “knocked out” the other won the contest. The spinning motions and the banging sounds of spinning tops exhilarated my days and formed some irreplaceable memories with my childhood friends.
Other than spinning tops, glass marbles games were also a big part of my childhood entertainment. The glass marble’s luxurious glass with aesthetic colours made them extremely precious to us at that time. Marbles were one of everyone’s favourite games because they were super versatile and could be played in a variety of ways. My friends and I could play marbles anywhere , we would just stuff the marbles in our pockets and play on the classroom floor during breaks, on the grass in the park, at our house, etc. We would draw a circle on the ground and put a bunch of glass marbles in the circle, taking turns to shoot a marble into a group of marbles in the circle until they were all knocked out of the circle. The person with the most marbles knocked out would be the winner. We would also put different coloured marbles on the floor with the rules of having to hit the marble that matched the colour of our marbles. The marble games let us to relax yet focus on aiming which was what drew us to this game. The clinking sounds of the glass marbles hitting each other hyped us up and made us feel accomplished.
One of the games that took me back to the earliest of my childhood was rubber band jumping. I remembered playing this game with my neighborhood friends everyday in my hometown when I was around six years old. Me and my friends at the time enjoyed playing rubber band jumping because it was accessible for us to play. The game only required one long rubber band rope which was really cheap to get. To play this game two of us had to stretch the rope out between us at a certain height, and the rest of us would take turns to hop over two rubber strings without tripping over. While playing the game we would play music from a speaker and hop over the rubber bands with different rhymes and styles as if we were dancing. My friends and I would always share a laugh when our friend attempted funny “dance moves” but ended up tripping over the rubber band. These became the unforgettable memories of my childhood.