The Mahjong Project’s origin story
My grandmother, Ivy Wong.
Auckland, New Zealand (2014)
Who will teach me mahjong?
A few years ago, I realized that there would come a day when I wanted to play mahjong but there might not be anyone around to lead the game.
My grandparents taught me how to play. The summer after I graduated from college in 2009, I spent a month in Dunedin, New Zealand, where the seasons are opposite and the central heating was sparse. In the Southern Hemisphere, Dunedin is one of the closest inhabited cities to Antarctica, and so while friends were backpacking across South America or spending long days lakeside in upstate New York, I eased into the rhythms of my grandparents’ schedule. Watching a lot of local news, which repeated the morning’s broadcast in the evening, cooking meals, cleaning up after meals, discussing future meals, and on Sundays – playing mahjong.
Mahjong was serious business at my grandparents’ house and it became clear very quickly that you must abide by a specific set of house rules, unspoken etiquette, superstitions and an archaic scoring system that stretched my mental math.
By the end of the month – I had the basics down. Over the next few years, whenever my brothers and I were home for a holiday or long weekend, my family might break out the blocks to play a few rounds.
My outlook on mahjong changed the day I played it for the first time with a few adult friends, who I’m not related to. Someone else set the rules according to the way she’d learned to play, and all of a sudden it was like I didn’t know how to play at all. Similar in ways, but also different in other ways I couldn’t articulate. And on top of that, I couldn’t recognize the tiles without the anglicized numbers printed on them (what shame!). It hit me all at once and I panicked: I needed to document my family’s house rules, signature catch-phrases and traditions, so that they wouldn’t be lost to time.
I started compiling an oral history of the game, taking notes whenever we played, asking my dad to slow down while he tallied points to capture the logic behind it. The process was slow going, and still continues today. It’s more like writing down elusive family recipes than a simple rule book. There have been plenty of starts and stops along the way, but over time it has come together.
And in my quest to document my family’s house rules, I have also learned the fascinating history of the game and how it spread across the western world.
I believe that mahjong’s enduring popularity is connected to its malleability. Variations of it are played all over the world — it’s inherently tied to diaspora and cultural identify. On this website, I will also be sharing stories and anecdotes I have collected about the game from friends, family members and people in my community.
The Mahjong Project is an effort to preserve a small piece of my family history, bring people into the joy of playing the game, while also encouraging others to contemplate unique family traditions in their own lives. Because if you don’t preserve your own family history and cultural legacy, who else can you expect to do it for you?