Mahjong

I bought my first mahjong set this past weekend. I vividly remember the clacking sound of the tiles smashing together while I tried to sleep on my mom's lap. My aunties used to play a lot when I was a kid, and my grandmother once told me she won my mom's crib by playing mahjong, or "machiok" (麻雀), as they would pronounce it in Cantonese.

I never learned the rules and I was too young to play with the adults. But I would patiently wait until someone at the four-sided table asked me to take their place for a round while they went to the bathroom, or to serve dinner, usually dumplings or soup. I would call "pon" if I had a triplet. That was my favorite part.

My parents had a brown mahjong suitcase with green-colored tiles that I used to make towers with. I can still remember its old smell. We had a mahjong table that was gifted by their godparents, and later returned to them after 30 years. My mom's twin had a yellow tile set that used a plastic LEGO box as a container.

Mahjong has become sort of popular these days. Put simply, it's a combination of sudoku and poker. To win a hand, you need four sets plus a pair (the eye, as they call it). A set can be a triplet (or a quadruplet) or a sequence (three consecutive numerical tiles in the same suit). There are three suits with numbers one to nine (four of each): circles, bamboo, and characters. And there are four winds (east, north, west, and south) and three dragons (red, green, and white). The game is played in four rounds, one for each wind, with four hands each as the wind moves.

I put together a complete beginner guide on how to play mahjong. It's the Hong Kong style, with some house variations, written in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

The game is beautiful in every possible way. The tiles are one of my favorite physical objects in the world. They are chunky, rounded, and the perfect size in your hands. It's almost like you want to eat them. And as my dad says, the engravings can tell you which tile it is without looking at it. You just need to feel them.

The sound they make when melding is just pure bliss. The way we stack them in walls. The way we slide them on the felt mat. The way we place them in the center of the table. The way we fold them to reveal the winning hand so elegantly. Chef's kiss.

I bought my first mahjong set this past weekend. I feel it's something I'd always want to have ready at home, in case we ever want to play it. None of my friends know how to play mahjong, but I've started my quest to gently introduce them to the game, so they can also fall in love with it.