Life Happens – Mahjong Helps

Within a week of her becoming a widow, my mother-in-law took me to play my first Mahjong game. I was accompanying her to a standing weekly game  — she has two of those, for those following along at home — and she would not be the only widow playing that week. The women around the communal table had been playing each other together for decades and so picked and racked and tossed tiles at quite a clip. My mother-in-law let me watch a few rapid rounds before she placed me in her seat and invited me to join the game under her close supervision. Another player won the game before I had the chance to assemble a legitimate hand, but everyone there was a gracious loser, and I was no exception. 

The rules that seemed so confusing to me then seem obvious to me now. While I have yet to become a mahjong maven, in the few months I have been playing regularly, I have become proficient. Today, I could even qualify as a respectable competitor. Mahjong is having a cultural moment all across America and the ranks of players are growing quickly and rather happily for everyone involved.

Younger women are joining older ones in droves, starting sometimes in their teens and twenties. Asian women are learning from their grandmothers and Jewish women are learning from their mothers. Generations of Southern women are throwing garden parties crowded with game tables appointed in pastel shades, as neighbors eagerly teach neighbors. Public libraries are offering free introductory courses that introduce people to the Americanized version of the Chinese game played by the rules of the National Man Jongg League, now in its 88th year of existence. Curiously, the eldest Mahj players are older than the League itself; I have heard credible accounts of nonagenarians and even centenarians staying razor sharp and still playing a mean game. 

Each year, on April 1st, the League releases the latest folding card outlining its revised rules of play as well as the permissible Mahjong hands for the coming year, the combination of 14 tiles — Jokers alongside Dragons and Winds and Flowers and numbers drawn from three different suits (called Bam, Crak, and Dot) — that will allow individual players to win a game.  Like the women I play with, I am a card-carrying member of the League (I have an NMJL membership number to prove it) — and like them, I am very eagerly anticipating the arrival of my new 2025 card in the mail. 

The League operates much the way it did when it started in 1937; it has a postal address, but no email address. You can try the phone number for the landline listed on the back of the card, and if you’re lucky, someone might be in the New York office to answer your call. But if you really want to contact anyone at the League, you will need stamps. Electronic versions of its annual card are not available anywhere. For that matter, no smartphones are allowed on or near a table where a game of Mahjong is being played: I suspect that explains some part of its growing and undeniably retro appeal.

In the past few months, I have learned more and more about the subcultures that comprise the Mahjong ecosystem. There are people who play in area tournaments and those who take Mahjong cruises to the open sea. There are people who play one another for money and those who compete exclusively in charity fundraisers. There are people rotate through friends’ houses and others who gather at a nearby senior center or the local synagogue. Presently, I am rotating between the weeknight games hosted by two different Reform synagogues in two adjacent towns and another hosted by the Greater Boston Jewish Community Center. I am trying to play once a week, at least, and mostly succeeding at that whenever I am in town.

My mother-in-law’s standing two games a week originally impressed me, but then I met women who had games four times a week, so that she was playing Mahj more days than not. Another woman told me of a standing game she had which for years started shortly after 5:00 pm on a Friday evening and then ran through to midnight, with only a brief break to eat the take-out Chinese that the players ordered for dinner. Most games run about two hours; I did play in a Mahjong marathon session this fall that ran three and a half hours, but we had an intermission for snacks and of course, the raffle. In it I won a purple and black coin purse; on it hangs a keychain that says: Life happens — Mahjong helps. Truer words have seldom been writ.

Currently I belong to a few different online communities of Mahjong players. In one, people post photos of their winning hands for the bragging rights. In another, people exchanged opinions about the best places to procure new and vintage Mahjong sets and debated the question about how many sets an individual players should aspire to own. Opinions varied widely. Somehow — between my birthday and Christmas — I already have five sets, which seems plenty at this point. My very favorite response to the count question was written by a woman who said that she had numerous sets, including a one that she kept in her car at all times “in case of emergency.” What constitutes a Mahjong emergency? One of two things: a shortage of players or a shortage of sets. Either way, she was standing by at the ready.

Traditionally, Mahjong is played by four player whose racks of tiles form a square. Nowadays, however, there are a number of variants that include anywhere between two and six players. What we play at the synagogue is usually the traditional game, across however many tables we can fill with however many sets we have available (lately I too have been known to store a set in my car). The volunteer coordinator used to put out a call for RSVPs, and inevitably, it reminded of the Jewish requirement to gather a minyan for prayers. We need enough players to make our Mahjong night a going concern and I think all of us felt a keen sense of obligation around that, much to our credit.

Because I am in an interfaith marriage, people sometimes have questions about how my Jewish husband and I handle certain religious matters. At a recent dinner, one of my husband’s hospital colleagues told us that her mother — who never converted to Judaism and was the only Christian in their household — was more observant of Jewish customs than her Jewish father. She explained that only person at home who fasted on Yom Kippur was her Gentile mother and then asked me if I did the same. 

“No,” I replied, “but I play Mahjong.”

“Oh,” she cried excitedly, “that’s even better!”

What I have jokingly called the Mahjong mitvah is no laughing matter. The National May Jongg League has long-time philanthropic commitments to organizations such as the Alzheimer’s Association, Epilepsy Foundation, Habitat for Humanity, Meals on Wheels, the Salvation Army, and the YWCA. But setting aside such worthy beneficiaries, keeping a standing game going is indeed a service to the community. Around various tables, I have heard relative strangers matter-of-factly share their health scares and marital challenger over clacking tiles and be met with encouraging words and perhaps an opportune discard. We have yet to catch up with all the years of wholesome socializing we missed during the long and awful pandemic, but it is not for a lack of players’ trying.

Mahjong teaches each of us to take playing seriously and to remain intentional about making time to play together. Life is happening rather routinely, so it should be punctuated with lots of fun as regularly as possible. As I like to remind my fellow players, it takes three losers at the table to make one winner. Our primary commitment is to being there for one another, for the losses as much as for the wins.

In my growing library of Mahjong books is lavishly illustrated volume titled The Great Mahjong Book: History, Lore, and Play, written by a Dutch author. In it, he includes a poem called “Come…” that reads:  “Come to the square center of the world/ where the wall keeps the ghosts at a distance,/ game of a hundred wonders/ game of ten thousand options/ game of the sparrows/ game of the winds/ game of the dragons/ game of dumb luck…” However much strategy a player masters, however skillful she becomes over time, fortune either favors her hand or it doesn’t, and she finds a way to play it just the same.

When the first American Mahjong sets were imported from Shanghai in the 1920’s, they invited a great deal of speculation about the origins of Mahjong in ancient Chinese history. Despite fables to to the contrary, Mahjong did not originate with Confucius in the sixth century BCE. Rather, it developed in the 1880s, as an amalgam of several earlier games of strategy. One writer publishing at the height of the Mahjong craze in twentieth-century America contended that the game actually started with the Biblical flood and that Noah and his three sons played Mahjong aboard the ark, which the eastern wind pushed through high waters for forty days and forty nights. As tempting as it might be to think that a Mahjong cruise actually has scriptural precedent in the Hebrew Bible, the story seems a highly suspect one.

While my own Mahjong journey has only just begun, I hope that it will — God willing— take me far in the coming decades. There is no denying that these are particularly dark days in America, and if we cannot yet bridge our bitter political divides, perhaps we can at least trade glitter-backed tiles around game tables in the Catskills Mountains and in the California Chinatowns and everywhere in between. Because Mahjong is such a complicated game, it functions as an immersive experience that invites players in to what psychologists call flow. Flow generally feels good because people cannot help but forget about their troubles – for a little while, at least. In addition, researchers in the U.S. and U.K. are finding that playing Mahjong seems to confer individuals with protective benefits against both dementia and depression.

Since I already own a pair of lucky Mahjong Crocs (yes, such things exist), I’d bet money on there being some pairs of lucky Mahjong socks in my future. Maybe the soles of their feet will read “Keep Calm and Play Mahjong” or “Happiness is Playing Mahjong with the Girls” or “Mahjong is My Therapy.” Whatever their ultra-bright color scheme, these socks tend to favor upbeat slogans, and I’d stand by — or should I say, on? — any of them. Learn to play Mahjong and you will soon understand why. I speak for nearly all the players I know when I say we’ll be glad to teach you, anytime, anywhere. Seriously: say the word! We might even have a Mahjong set stashed in the trunk of our cars for just such an emergency.