Color Schemes

I have been teaching my English students the card game Blackjack/21. It’s fun, the rules are simple and there are some good vocabulary words to learn. Besides just the card playing, I also wanted to use chips to get at the betting and win/lose vocabulary.

Searching Taipei for poker chips took some time, as I wanted to use the blue, red and white chips that were most likely to be used in America. I did find chips, one set for teaching children how to make change and the other used to play Mah Jhong. But neither set had white chips.

I am not promoting gambling because I think people who believe they will be successful(without cheating) at Blackjack/21 are just stupid. They just don’t know enough math to figure this out. Here’s my favorite cartoon, explaining my position.

 

But that there were no white chips in either of the Taiwan sets has a simple explanation. In Taiwan/Chinese society, white is the color of death, it is the color of a funeral. If there was a color for weddings it would be red.

So in the English speaking world the order of the colors are:

Blue:  blue chip stocks, blue ribbon committee, first place

Red: red letter day, second place

White: third place

From the order of the Mah Jhong chips I would say the order in Chinese culture is Red, Blue, Yellow, Green. Mah Jhong is always played for money with winners and losers settling up at the end of the game. There is little need for chips. The set I bought had been in the window display for so long that one edge of the red chips were faded.

That red is special in China is even more reinforced by being the color of the communist party. I remember a story that during the Cultural Revolution in China (1966-1976), some the “Red Guards” wanted to change the meaning of stop lights so that  a red light meant “go” and a green light meant “‘stop”. There were so many accidents in the first few days that they eventually went back to the old order.

On a similar note, I recently heard that the Yin and Yang of Chinese mysticism has even numbers as Yin and odd numbers as Yang. If ever there was a balanced, complementary infinite sets then it has to be the Evens and the Odds.