Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 17, 1990 TAG: 9003202725
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: MADELYN ROSENBERG NEW RIVER VALLEY BUREAU
DATELINE: PULASKI LENGTH: Medium
He'll show off his plastic chess set, tucked away like a professional's pool cue in a carrying case, a candy bar strapped to the inside.
He'll nod vigorously when asked if he likes the game, and he'll say a few words about it from the safety of his mother's lap. But he won't say much.
Ming, who is ranked as the best 6-year-old chess player in the country, isn't used to attention from strangers. When a television crew caught up with him at the state tournament in Roanoke a few weeks ago, Ming talked to the reporter while staring at the ground.
"I was shy," he said.
Talk about his favorite game for a little while, though, and Ming starts to warm up.
"It's fun," he said during an interview at May's Kitchen, a restaurant run by his mother.
Ming said he usually plays against his 9-year-old brother, King, who also is nationally ranked by the United States Chess Federation.
Asked who wins those games, Ming cocks his head to one side. "Sometimes me, sometimes King," he said. "I'm very tricky."
"He learned by watching," said May Chan, Ming's mother. "Now he likes to play everyone. He runs around and says `Do you want to play chess? Do you want to play chess?' "
May Chan said Ming, a first-grader at Draper Elementary School, sometimes has trouble finding a willing partner his own age. "He has even beaten some middle school kids," she said.
And he has a few trophies to prove it.
King Chan said he and Ming keep their awards on a shelf above the fireplace in their Pulaski County home.
"It's getting all filled up," he said.
The brothers remember the games they've played and sometimes they remember moves. They talk about one of Ming's games at a tournament last year. Ming began playing when he was 5. King began going to tournaments in third grade.
"Once he could've taken a free knight, but he didn't chance it," King said. "All he had left was his king and . . . "
"One rook," Ming added as he ran a little red car along the top of a table.
"I thought there was a bishop, too?" King said.
Ming shakes his head. "No, just the rook." Regardless, he won the game.
May Chan said Ming also is crazy about Nintendo, a popular video game in which the players use hand controls to try and beat the computer.
"He would play and never stop," she said. "I knew Pulaski was famous about chess, so I said `Why not play chess?' "
So he plays. And he wins.
Ming and King started playing chess with their parents, who are from Hong Kong. But King, who was born in California, said he doesn't play against May Chan anymore.
"Mom taught me and I gradually got better playing my parents," King said. "Then I got to beat her."
May Chan laughed. "Even Ming says I am too easy to beat," she said.
Both children caught on quickly, she said. "You think they don't know it, but they do."
Rich Jackson, a chess master from Roanoke who recently started giving both boys lessons, said anyone can learn to play.
"I've taught it to 4-year-olds and I've taught it to 62-year-olds," he said. "A 4-year-old can compete with a 70-year-old. It brings the generations together."
Jackson said when chess players are young, like Ming, they can be "intellectual giants. Anything you say, they can absorb like a sponge. The younger you can teach them chess, the better."
The game teaches reasoning, Jackson said. "The younger you teach them, the younger they can learn to reason. You think all they do is play a game, but there are a lot of skills they develop as a result."
King Chan agreed. `It keeps you thinking - deciding and thinking about what would happen and what is the best move you would do."
And Ming? He just grinned. "I like chess better than Nintendo," he said.
by CNB