When “Chinese” was code for “Bizarre”- The Origins of “Chinese Checkers”, “Chinese Handball” and other American Pastimes
Growing up in Brooklyn in the 90s, I encountered a peculiar neighborhood vernacular that has seemingly fallen out of favor in recent decades. The word “Chinese” was frequently appended as an adjective to all sorts of games, tricks, and activities to indicate that they were bizarre, strange, or downright unintelligible ways of doing something. While the origins of this usage are murky, the examples were plentiful during my childhood.
Take “Chinese Handball” for instance. This game, born from the concrete playgrounds of New York City, involved a simple but crucial deviation from standard handball rules. While normal handball followed the fast-paced, aggressive volley of tennis against a wall, Chinese handball started with a bounce on the ground before the ball could be struck. This imparted an awkward lob and completely changed the flow of the game into something slow and almost comically plodding compared to its normal fast-paced variant.
Then there were the famous “Chinese Checkers” — originally the German game “Stern-Halma” from 1892. The name “Chinese Checkers” originated in the United States as a marketing scheme by interior designers Bill and Jack Pressman in 1928, despite the game having no connection to China. With its unique gameplay and board design, it was certainly a novel game, if not certifiably “Chinese” by any stretch of the imagination.
My personal favorite, however, was the “Chinese Ollie” — a skateboarding trick that seemed to defy physics and sanity in equal measures. Instead of the normal ollie motion of snapping one’s foot on the board to make it jump, the Chinese ollie involved using wheels to launch off a crack in the curb. Watching skaters pop their boards vertically into the air this way was both mesmerizing and maddening, as the contortion seemed so improbable.
Another quintessential “Chinese” activity seared into my memory is the “Chinese Fire Drill.” Rather than its typical meaning of a frantic emergency evacuation, in American lingo this referred to a ridiculous prank to pull on unsuspecting drivers. The gag involved a carful of people stopping abruptly, jumping out, and then rapidly swapping positions — driver to passenger, passengers to the opposite door, etc. — before peeling off again. A completely inane disruption of traffic flow for no reason other than comedic absurdity.
What prompted this wholesale annexation of the word “Chinese” to describe the random, unorthodox permutations of kids’ games? Perhaps it stemmed from internalized prejudices of the era that fueled casual xenophobia. Or maybe it really did originate from a few authentic cultural imports that got distorted over time. Regardless of its roots, this linguistic peculiarity served as linguistic shorthand that allowed us 80s and 90s kids to immediately convey a sense of abnormality or strangeness about something.
While certainly insensitive by modern standards, this co-opting of “Chinese” was so ubiquitous in my slice of New York that it felt like an inextricable part of the city’s rich cultural fabric at the time. As such multi-cultural communities like Brooklyn evolve, it’s fun to look back on these flashes of hyperlocal slang — however problematic — and appreciate them as lingering geographic accents that made growing up in that period so unique.
