The Game My Parents Never Taught Me

By nine o'clock, the tiles are the loudest thing in the house.

Some nights there were three tables going at once: one in the living room, one in the dining room, one down in the basement, each clattering on its own rhythm like a kitchen with too many pots going. My dad's voice always rose above the rest of it, calling a discard or needling a family friend about a tile he should have held onto. My mother played quieter and slower than anyone else at the table. My grandmother came as much for the company as the game. This happened once a week, sometimes twice, at family friends' houses or in ours, for most of my childhood and well into high school. I did homework twenty feet away, close enough to hear every round, and it never once occurred to me to ask if I could sit down.

Nobody taught me the rules, not on purpose. There was no lesson, no kid-sized version of the game with the money taken out. Mahjong in my house was adult territory, the way a poker table is adult territory, mostly because there was real money on it and my parents weren't in the business of teaching a ten-year-old to gamble. So I learned it the way you learn a language nobody bothers to teach you: by being in the room. I could recognize a winning hand by sound before I understood what made it win.

That was the whole of my mahjong education for most of my life. Then my sister-in-law Shauna asked if I would teach her book club.

She wasn't after a history lesson. She and her friends wanted to actually play, the way you learn a language before a trip instead of just admiring it from a distance. I said yes before I had fully worked out whether I remembered enough to teach it. Turns out osmosis holds up better than you would think.

That first night, six of us around a table, I watched a room move from polite curiosity to the specific, slightly manic joy of people realizing they can do the thing. Someone built a hand nobody saw coming and the table erupted like she had just hit a straight flush. Before that first session, mostly on a lark, I had built a small AI chatbot loaded with the rules so people could ask it questions instead of interrupting me every few minutes. I expected it to sit there unused. Instead people kept pulling out their phones mid-hand to ask it things, and trusting the answers the way you would trust someone who actually knew what they were talking about. That part surprised me more than anything else that night. I had built a tool for myself, and it turned out other people needed it too.

I did not know it yet, but I was not early to anything. Yelp's search data put mahjong club and lesson searches up more than 4,000 percent over the past year, and outlets from PBS to public radio stations across the country have covered some version of the story I was watching unfold live in my sister-in-law's living room: a game a lot of people had filed under "grandmother's hobby" had become, almost overnight, everyone's reason to leave the house and sit across a table from actual humans again.

The part that probably took me longest to see, mostly because I was standing too close to it.

The version of mahjong having this moment in America right now, the one with the springtime new card and the sets given as wedding gifts, is not actually the game my grandmother played. It is a specifically American invention, and it was not invented by anyone Chinese. In 1937, a group of Jewish women in New York, led by a housewife named Dorothy Meyerson and a hotel resident named Viola Cecil, got tired of every table playing by slightly different rules and founded the National Mah Jongg League to standardize it. The game spread through Jewish women's social networks for the next two decades, from city apartments to Catskills bungalow colonies to synagogue sisterhoods, until it became as associated with Jewish American households as it had once been with parlors in Shanghai. It was never one fixed thing. It kept getting remade by whoever needed it next.

My own family is a small proof of that. The game I grew up watching was Hong Kong style. A few years ago, my dad switched to Taiwanese style instead, the way someone might change their preferred drink without much ceremony about it.

"I just got bored of playing the same HK style for more than 30 years. Friends suggested we play Taiwanese style, and it's a more interesting and complex style of play that I got hooked on and never looked back." — my dad.

Even inside one household, across one lifetime, the game did not hold still.

Which brings me to my wife. Seven years ago, a friend gave us a mahjong set as a wedding gift, the classic kind with a wooden case and a brass clasp, and it sat in a closet for a while because neither of us had gotten around to actually playing it. Sarah is Jewish. When I told her the real history of the American game, that it was not just Chinese in origin but was standardized and carried forward for generations specifically by Jewish women, she did not treat it as trivia. She recognized it immediately, the way you recognize your own grandmother's living room inside someone else's story. Her own family were not mahjong people, but the shape of the thing, a game passed table to table as a way of staying connected, was completely familiar to her. We had not married into two separate heritages that happened to both like a board game. We had married into the same lineage, walking in through two different doors.

None of this is a finished tradition yet. Sarah knows the basics now, thanks to a few kitchen-table lessons of her own, and she is already talking about gathering a group of friends the same way Shauna once gathered hers. My parents and my brother know about all of this: the teaching, the chatbot, the whole project. They have not said much about it either way, which tracks. We are not a family that performs its feelings, and I have not had much to show them yet beyond a vision for this website that is still very much a work in progress, exploring, evolving, on a journey.

What I keep coming back to is that none of this required my family's version of the game to be the only real one, or Sarah's family to have played it themselves, for it to belong to both of us now. Mahjong has never asked anyone to keep it the way they found it. It got remade in 1937 by women who had never seen Shanghai, and it is getting remade again right now, by book clubs and bridal showers and, in my case, two people who found out their very different childhoods had been circling the same table the whole time. The game does not stay still. It just waits for whoever's turn it is to pick it up.