Mahjong, My Grandparents, and Me
Like a cherished family recipe, the way my family plays mahjong is time-intensive and involves complicated steps: shuffling, stacking, drawing, and discarding tiles. Play is led by intuition, wisdom, and strategy accumulated over time until it becomes muscle memory.
While mahjong comes as second nature to its best practitioners, marinated in decades of practice, for the uninitiated it can feel intimidating to know how to start. New elements of the game seem to unfold as you're playing, privy only to the most seasoned players, leaving the rest of us to just follow along. Mahjong is a game best learned in person. However, I realized there would come a day when I'd want to play it just the way my grandparents taught me but there might not be anyone around to remind me how. This idea spooked me deeply and set me on a course to thinking about, researching, and writing about mahjong. I grew up an ocean away from my grandparents, but the game of mahjong brought us closer together, and now that they are gone, playing mahjong by their house rules—which I spent the past five years carefully taking down—is a way to remember them.
I grew up in Southern California, a 12-hour plane ride away from New Zealand, where my parents lived until the 1980s. To my kid brain, New Zealand was a place where the seasons were opposite, ketchup was called tomato sauce, and the first meal you ate upon landing had to be a meat pie or fish and chips. My Chinese heritage felt secondary to my Kiwi roots, though the outside world sometimes disagreed. In my younger days, when strangers asked, with that question behind the question, 'Where are you from?' I'd get a little thrill in matter-of-factly saying, 'New Zealand,' to upend their expectations.
My great-grandparents left China for New Zealand in the early 1900s, not long after the game of mahjong reached the Western world. Yet over generations, as my family has lost our Cantonese language skills, somehow mahjong has made it through. The few phrases I know in Cantonese fall into three categories: household requests (things like 'wash your hands' and 'set the table'), food-related terms, and things to say during a mahjong game.
My paternal grandparents taught me how to play mahjong when I visited them for a month the summer after graduating from college 15 years ago. Despite holding dual New Zealand–American citizenship, this trip was the longest stretch of time I'd ever spent there without my parents. While friends backpacked across Europe or took summer jobs as baristas, I settled into the rhythm of my grandparents' lives, and on the weekends, we played mahjong.
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