Forty-eight.

In which I explain the origins of my gambling addiction.

I think I've accidentally started a mahjong social club here in New York.

Recently, I've been feeling the itch to play. I have a set with oversized tiles that I painstakingly—and lovingly—lugged back to the States from my most recent trip to the People's Republic, but it wasn't getting much use because I seldom am in situations with at least three other people who know how to play the game, and even less frequently so with folks acquainted with the particular regional rules I've known since childhood.

Because both of my parents needed to work, a good portion of my upbringing was spent in Changsha, the capital city of China's Hunan province that today numbers over ten million residents. There, I was raised in part by my grandmother and many aunts and uncles, an ocean away from where I was born.

I look back on those years with fondness. I remember cycling through various relatives' houses, each home an adventure of its own with its quirks. Aunt #1 was strict and wanted me to be well-read, #3 struck a balance between serious and fun, #4's defining characteristic was gentleness, and #5 was the cool one, given her youthful demeanor. Growing up in America was an experience of isolation, where we had no relatives and very few friends; growing up in China meant an existence of connection, where the list of relatives was seemingly endless and everyone knew everyone.

It's my maternal grandmother with whom I spent the most time. She was a devoted guardian, accompanying or bringing me everywhere, including the mahjong sessions she'd have with her friends from around the neighborhood. Fascinated by the colorful tiles and the clinking sounds of the tiles against tabletops, I was always drawn towards the game.

I recall the adults being entertained by my fascination. Some might have jested that I should stay away because gambling isn't a great habit to form, but almost always they welcomed me to watch and learn. Although I was always rooting for my grandmother to win, the adults at the table would converse with me too, explaining to me their logic as they snatched and discarded tiles.

Frequently, they'd let me play, too. I'd adopt the seat of one of the players, who would then hover next to me and teach me how to construct my winning strategies. Some hands were predisposed towards certain combinations; others were exceedingly unlikely to win. Round by round, I learned to mimic their thought processes and began to formulate schemes of my own. As I did, I listened to them gossip. I ate their sunflower seeds and chewed their betel nuts, unaware of the latter's addictive qualities and links to oral cancer. Despite being a child, it was like I was one of the adults.

Nowadays, my return visits to China are made with two priorities: good food and good games of mahjong. Fortunately for me, the generation that taught me to play is still extant and is now retired to boot—meaning that they have plenty of time to indulge me in a spot of gambling. My relatives will set a date and call up all their friends to meet us at a local hotel, where we wolf down a quick meal before playing for hours on end. Being that I end up playing against people who've played the game for at least twice as long as I've even been alive, I'm quite proud to say that I can almost hold my own against them, coming out of the sessions with at worst a net-zero monetary loss.

杠上花, 碰碰胡, 庄家扎鸟.

Changsha mahjong is played with few deviations from Hunan mahjong, which itself is vastly different from the play-styles popularized by the more numerous Cantonese and Taiwanese players here in the West. Winning hands are comprised of fourteen tiles constituted by one identical pair and four sets of triples (three tiles of the same suit in sequential order or three identical tiles), and non-themed hands must have their identical pair be tiles numbering two, five, or eight. "Honor" and "flower" tiles aren't in our games, as their presence is an extraneous hindrance at best. Because the decks have been whittled down to just the three distinct suits of tiles, Changsha mahjong is much more strategic in nature.

Like some of my favorite foods in the world (Changsha-style stinky tofu and hand-pulled noodles), I've not been able to find Changsha mahjong in the United States. In New York, the people of Chinese descent are most commonly of Fujianese and Cantonese ancestry, so it's reasonable to expect the games played here to follow the rules of those regions.

Of the new wave of regular mahjong meetups, I view Green Tile Social Club (GTSC) as the one that catalyzed the game's recent revival here. GTSC began sometime in the early 2020s as a hangout for a handful of friends who simply wanted to play and grew into large, public sessions as word spread of their gatherings. I attended their first few monthly sessions in the aftermath of my Henry breakup because I was looking to keep myself busy as a distraction from grief, content to sit down at tables with strangers so long as I could be occupied. It was a pseudo-networking event without the pressures and artifice of making connections because we were all just there to play, and it contrasted with the other social activities I had begun to frequent (gays playing volleyball, gay finance professionals meeting up at a bar, Chinese speakers canvassing for a local election campaign).

In the most polite way possible, I want to say that I was unimpressed by the GTSC attendees. I don't mean it personally or professionally; rather, I mean it in terms of their ability to play mahjong. The broad majority of attendees were twenty-year-olds whose heritage stemmed from the Greater China region, and most of them didn't really know how to play. They showed up to GTSC hoping to learn the game, whether because it made them feel connected to their culture or because it reminded them of their grandparents. That was fine; I learned to play from spending time with my own grandmother, after all, and I understood the impetus. However, that usually resulted in me taking on a more advisory capacity whenever I showed up, watching over the players at my table and teaching them strategic processes.

Plainly, I grew bored. The people were nice, and I became acquainted with artists and McKinsey employees and Harvard Business School students, but I just wanted to play at a higher level. Moreover, the GTSC games typically followed Hong Kong- or Taiwan-style rules, which I dislike because I find them to be cumbersome in comparison to my region's. After a handful of sessions, I stopped attending.

There was a deeper reason for my dissatisfaction, of course, as there often is with me whenever I frequent anything that generally targets people of Asian descent here in America. I felt that the crowd was similar to that of Bubble T and Papi Juice and all the other social circles in that the cultural element seemed to be performative, not natural, and I've been a bit frustrated with the political ignorance and/or apathy expressed by the people who look like me. I disdain the discursive stagnation of lunchbox trauma and I don't derive affirmation of my cultural heritage by publicly drinking milk tea because I don't identify as a boba liberal, but I don't assume that every GTSC attendee was one, either. It's just that the tiniest ripples of self-orientalization were pervasive enough to be another reason why I no longer wanted to attend, particularly because I viewed them in stark contrast to the people I met as we canvassed for a better collective political future.

Maybe it's not a coincidence that I've somehow managed to rope a group of people (friends and friends of friends and friends of friends of friends) into playing regularly with me this May, commonly known as Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month. Maybe it's just because it's finally warm again here in the city and we're all the more willing to leave our homes. Maybe we're creating our own third spaces and building community and all the buzzwords, or maybe I'm finally caving in to inevitability by teaching people to play according to the style I know best (because it is the best!), but I figure it's all relevant only as much as I want it to be. We don't bet money, instead swapping cards from my Céline Dion-branded deck of playing cards as collateral, but stakes were always secondary to the main event, anyways: getting together to spend some time with one another.

P.S.—Vote for Zohran.