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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.
Mahjong was serious business. The game was governed by specific rules, unspoken etiquette, superstitions, and a complicated scoring system. It was also a lively diversion. As we played, other sides of my grandparents’ personalities emerged—their cheekiness, their competitive rapport, their smug pride in winning a hand—and it cracked a little window into their youths.
When I returned home to Los Angeles, my parents were amused that I’d learned how to play, going into their own garage to fish out the mahjong set and table that had been collecting dust for 25 years. They had brought them over when they moved to America, but, raising three kids in the California sunshine, weekend soccer games got in the way. Once the set had been rediscovered, however, whenever my brothers and I were home for a holiday or long weekend, they’d break out the blocks and we’d play a few rounds.
Eventually, I started taking notes whenever we got the blocks out, asking my dad to slow down while he tallied points. If I didn’t understand a rule, I pressed them for details. It took a few years of excavating and a lot of targeted questions (and patience), but eventually I got there. Along the way, I learned more about my family history than I had ever thought to ask. With every question about gameplay, a bit of family lore or a fact about my grandparents also fell out.
Some were relatively small details, like learning what type of mahjong players they were or what phrases they’d repeat during the game. (For example, my grandmother, whom I called Ma, would always say “Don’t come back!” whenever she discarded a dragon tile, as if that would help her chances of not drawing another one.) Other things colored in a larger picture, like learning that my grandparents used to host a regular game every Sunday at their home. That it was a preferred way to spend their one day off from work as greengrocers. That my Ma would pop up between rounds of the game to cook dinner. Stories about other family members also rose to the surface. Details about my grandfather’s siblings, pranks that my aunts and uncles played on my parents when they returned from their honeymoon—everyday details that my parents never would have thought to share but helped build a picture of their lives.
Last year I had the wonderful opportunity to write a book about mahjong. I enlisted my mom’s help to search for family photos of us playing and connected with regional museums, scholars, and archivists, as well as mahjong tile collectors and online enthusiasts. But more personal discoveries followed: I learned that my great-grandmothers were some of the earliest Chinese women to immigrate to New Zealand in the 1920s and that one of them, Gert, loved playing mahjong. (My aunties believe all the strong women in our family take after her.) I learned that my grandfather used to teach mahjong at the local community college in Dunedin. Also, that if you were a Kiwi Chinese university student in Dunedin at any point between the 1950s and the 2000s, you probably passed through my grandparents’ house for dinner and mahjong.
In my quest to document my family’s rules of the game, I also learned about mahjong’s history and the variations of it played worldwide; there are as many ways to play mahjong as there are languages, and within that there are regional dialects. Talking to someone about the way they approach the game can naturally open up a conversation about family history, immigration, and diaspora. I also happened to be pregnant for most of the book-writing process, gestating a book baby and human baby at the same time. I thought a lot about what traditions would get passed down to Oliver; I know mahjong will be one of them.
Last month I was in New Zealand for a family reunion, and one of the main events was a mahjong tournament. In many ways, the reunion marked a generational shift. My parents and their siblings are now the elders; my cousins and I are now the tired parents; my nieces and nephews are the kids running around with sticky faces, making towers out of mahjong tiles when no one is looking.
You can pick up the basics of the game in an afternoon, but you can spend a lifetime mastering it. Mahjong is a game that builds community, reinforces social ties, and is as good a reason to get together as any. I love playing mahjong, but it’s never been just about the game. It’s an entry point—to my heritage, to my family’s history, and, I hope, to our future too.
