When my mom found out I was planning to travel to Dallas to play in a Lunar New Year mah-jongg tournament, she texted a reasonable query: “Don’t they require some level of competence?”And yet, during the third week of February, I found myself first at a dazzling private home in Dallas, and then at a luxury hotel, sitting down with my more refined counterparts to play in a competition in the epicenter of the country’s American mah-jongg resurgence. First, a bit about how I got here. One of my oldest friends, Catherine—who, like seemingly half of all women in my middle-aged-mom peer group, had suddenly become obsessed with the game—came over to visit one afternoon when I was back in my childhood home for a stretch last summer, helping my mom recover from surgery. Catherine brought her mah-jongg set, along with the promise that she’d teach us and we’d love it and it would be so much fun. Initially, it did not feel particularly fun; it felt like learning a confounding new language, with Chinese characters, complicated rules (and exceptions for every rule), and hard-to-recall new words: crak, pung, chow, bam (and birdbam, another name for one bam, and also an excuse for players drinking alcohol to clink glasses and take a sip). At one point, I realized my brow was actually furrowed, my hands were on my head, and I was having flashbacks to BC Calculus—brain fully engaged, answer still elusive.“At some point,” Catherine assured us, with a sunniness I did not yet feel, “you’ll even be able to chat while you play.”I wasn’t hooked, but I was intrigued. I liked the way the tiles—colorful and sleek, each the size of a chunky domino—looked and felt, slightly weighty in my hand. I liked how they clacked when I swirled them together or stacked them in neat rows. I liked that I hadn’t checked my phone—hadn’t been able to, such was the required concentration—as we played. And I liked the promise of the game: that if I put in the effort to learn the tiles and the language and customs and the rules, I could become privy to a subculture of sorts, an activity that connected me not only to my peers but to those who came before. I also realized that to get good, or even competent, I needed to play regularly and continue to be taught, and that is… [TheTopNews] Read More.
5 days ago
