Being Chinese | The art of winning at and beyond the mahjong table

My friend is a millionaire by way of owning a home in Hong Kong, the world’s least affordable housing market, but you wouldn’t guess from how personally she takes it when the winds of fortune aren’t blowing her way at the mahjong table.

Mahjong has been all the rage internationally, after Crazy Rich Asians made it cool for a new generation. Personally, I preferred the vicarious thrill of seeing such mahjong-related films to playing the Chinese game itself, which dates back to at least the Qing dynasty and seems to revolve around “waiting so long that one’s neck stretches longer”, as we say in Cantonese: waiting for things to fall into place as four of you draw tiles in rotation, wishing another player would unsuspectingly toss out a tile you need to build a high-scoring hand, waiting to luck out and draw the winning 14th tile yourself.

I only picked up the game again at my friend’s place during the pandemic, as it became increasingly challenging for four persons to sit down together in public. It helped that we were playing a simplified, sped-up style known as “horse racing”, the whole object of which is to win the fastest.

It may be a strange point of pride, but I believe I was quickly popular with my mahjong buddies because I played like a dysfunctional Chinese person who doesn’t like money. Not for me the caution of a bean-counting business person, nor the gloomy “losing less is winning” logic of a defensive player. Cluttering up my hand with an unneeded tile for the tenuous purpose of perhaps thwarting another player, rather than boldly throwing it out, would be the opposite of joy. I couldn’t have my style cramped even if it blew up in my face and I had to pay twice the price for helping two opponents win in the scenario succinctly dubbed “one cannon blast, two hits”.