COMBINATORICS
by TALAN TEE
Taipei, Taiwan, 15 July 1987: Martial law was lifted island-wide after 38 years of the White Terror.
壹萬 | One of Ten Thousand
Freedom began with a crack of lightning—tile
striking tile. Swimming arms, synchronizing
sweeps to reset the surface. Grandma’s mahjong games
rebuild her universe in fours: East wind, west
wind—air imbued with camphor & tiger balm
each shuffle. Nowadays, the men gather
silently. It begins with a single flick of the wrist
onto the noiseless felt. The unavoidable descent
into the table’s green marrow, one of the plastic chairs.
Grandma points at me & counts one. Of ten thousand. Of
the lucky bastards who got out. These tiles are more
than tiles, they are unmarked bones scattered across
Green Island, beneath makeshift trees & footstones.
How can a tile or two not go missing?
貳條 | Two Of Bamboos
Two green stalks, vertical as bars. My uncle takes
a seat to deal me in. A pair of red-packets clotting
like blood, filling my pockets, coaxing me into this
hidden room. Under the window’s shuttered eyelids
neighbors vanished, seats overturned. The elmwood
legs set with rigor. Every morning, Grandma
swept the parlor clean. Back in her country, she says
we revered the dead. But I brought pennies—American
currency, now discontinued. They doubled
as souvenirs. In the old newspapers littering
her tatami, off-coast lighthouses rise & I can’t
read the Chinese enumerations. I fold
paper boats, float them down the strait. The ones
who hid didn’t get lucky. They just got quiet.
叁餅 | Three Of Circles
Now, three players await a fourth. The fourth
never arrives, a mouth suspended. The Generalissimo
long-dead, his face braided into the auspicious
clouds, bloating the tablecloth with breath. We play on
anyway. His jester face hangs in every schoolroom. Playing
death tolls in typhoon eyes, holding lucky numbers.
We play find the body by chance in the river, pockets
full of pennies. Body to ballast, the river god gagging
on its bribe, washed ashore post-typhoon. Soldiers
stuffing boys into matrices. Grandma minting Japanese
lacquer, recounting the years. Fear always returns
to chase its losses. Tile by tile, we optimize sparrow warfare
in quartets. I count them—plum blossom concealed
in my hand. God, I’m winning & want so badly to lose.
Talan Tee is a Taipei-based poet born in Phoenix, Arizona. His work appears or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Chestnut Review, Cleaver Magazine, and West Trade Review, among others, and has been recognized by the YoungArts Foundation and the Scholastic Awards. A 2026 Adroit Djanikian Scholar and an Anthony Quinn Scholar, he is the founder of Afterbodies, an international literary magazine. Talan is a sophomore at Taipei American School.
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