I have always been a very nostalgic person, I usually think about my past, especially my childhood. A specific time I used to think about it, it's when I was a baby and my parents and I used to live in Japan Tokyo. Here is when the story begins, one day my grandmother and my uncle from my father's side went to visit us there. I don't know all the details I was only about 3 years old, but they went to Asakusa and my grandmother saw a toy an interesting toy, but for some specific reason she couldn't buy it.
Time passed and all of us went back to Mexico, at this time I have a better sense of reasoning and I remember how my grandmother used to talk about this toy, I remember very clearly how she described this toy: It consisted of two sticks with paper at the end, and as you moved the sticks, the paper figure changed. A very strange description, right?, also she told us that she used to play with this toy in her school when she was a little girl, and they called them ‘El yoyo chino’ the Chinese yoyo, but that was all the information my parents and I had.
We were determined to find the toy, therefore my parents and I searched for this toy in several markets and places but we could never find it. It was frustrating and the search got complicated when a new toy called 'El yoyo chino', got trendy but it was different and not what my grandmother described to us.
Nothing happened in twenty years we could never find the toy, finally my grandmother died in 2018…
In 2019 I had the opportunity to go to Japan and even though my grandma wasn't with me anymore, one of my goals was to find the toy. I ask some people there, I went to several souvenir shops but I didn't see anything at least barely similar, the trip ended and one more time I couldn't find the mystery toy.
However this year. I woke up and started looking at my cell phone (a very bad habit by the way) and while scrolling through my Instagram, I saw an Internet friend share a TikTok video of a Chinese man playing with the exact toy my grandmother had described. It was a toy made of two sticks and paper that moved magically with every move. I was shocked, I finally found the toy! , I finally know what my grandmother talked to me about… I finally discovered the mystery, maybe it wasn't as difficult as I thought but at least for me it took me more than 25 years to find it, maybe if I had more Chinese friends or maybe if I had searched better on the Internet…. but finally I discovered by chance.
Even though my grandmother it's not here with us anymore I still wanted to find the toy one day, only because I wanted to complete the memory, I wanted to know exactly what was the toy my grandma used to play with when she was a girl when she studied and lived in the boarding school.
Mitsui
