#1 Pen Tricks

You sit across the room, staring at both the lecturer and from the corner of your eye, a constant twirling object. It hits you that you have still not accomplished a skill so heavily embedded in the Asian being. You put your head down, hoping nobody notices your pen, motionless.

I ask my friend whether he can twirl a pen. He replies, “Of course, I’m Asian.” I dart away from the mirrors. He tells me that I can’t learn it now. “It’s a high school thing,” he says smugly. Apparently there is a critical learning period for these things that I was unaware of in my upbringing in white suburbia.

In class, I ask another Asian friend whether she can twirl a pen. I mean, maybe she can’t? (And I won’t be alone.) To my dismay, I once again witness the formidable pen flip from one side to the other with a movement so effortless. She proceeds to show me more variations of the flip, from which she claims to have copied from simply watching another student in class at a distance!

I am hopeless. There must be something in these genes susceptible to this defining characteristic. I am to prove something to all of them. I begin with the history. From what I remember, it had become very popular in Hong Kong and spread like wild fire from student to student, teaching each other this wonderful form of entertainment. There are other earlier claims made by the Japanese…but who really knows?

Next, I search for instructional videos. Needless to say, the results are innumerable. I am in shock of some of them and know that I will probably never achieve that level. Long story short, I can now twirl a pen around my thumb (beginner’s flip) with greater that 50% accuracy. I knew I had it in me, somewhere.