A New Tradition

It was a Friday night and I was returning home from my weekly model UN meeting with my friend Kevin. As we boarded the 6 train, he turned to me and asked if I knew how to play Mahjong. I had seen relatives playing Jewish Mahjong, and I had seen yakuza play it in old Japanese mafia films, but I had a feeling that wasn’t going to cut it, so I told him that I didn’t really know, but that I would love to learn.

We got back to the dorm, and two of our friends were sitting in the community room, eyes glazing over as they stared at their laptop screens. They were more than willing to play with us.

The game started off a little rocky. Each of us knew a different version of Mahjong; Jewish/Japanese, Shanghainese, Hong Kong, and a Toisan/Canton mixture. By the end of the fifth round, however, everyone started to get into their own groove. We were able to mix and match our different Mahjong styles and it made for quite an interesting game.

“Rokuman!” I cried out, putting down the tile with the Chinese characters for “six” and “ten thousand” on them.

“Samton!”

“Pon!”

“Window!”

Because we could all read the Chinese characters and recognize the pictures, we could cry out the name of the tile in whatever language we so pleased. As the game progressed, five languages (Japanese, Cantonese, Mandarin, Shanghainese, and English) were being combined, giving way to quite an amusing game and learning experience.

The game lasted from 8:30 PM until 3:00 AM, us laughing and shouting the whole time. The later it got, the more ridiculous our combinations became, until no one could understand what anyone was saying, nut we didn’t need to. We all found ourselves on the same page, connected through our extremely fun multi-cultural game of Mahjong.

Although I lost all of my chips and ended up owing some to everyone, I won a few games and greatly broadened my cultural horizons while deepening my friendships. I cannot wait to play again.