Writer Nicole Wong says mahjong — and all its rules — helped her make sense of her own family

SAM DINGMAN: Mark, I don't know if you remember this, but a few weeks ago, Lisa Sullivan came by the station to give you and I a lesson in how to play mahjong.

MARK BRODIE: I do remember that, at least I remember we tried to learn how to play mahjong.

DINGMAN: Yes, it ended up being not so much a lesson as a realization that mahjong is super hard to play. And that was not Lisa's fault. She showed up with all these really beautiful mahjong tiles and scoring cards, and she was talking us through how to play this particular version of the game. But as we all kind of discovered, the version she was teaching us was really different from the game that you and I thought we knew.

BRODIE: Indeed, and we actually have a little bit of tape from the moment all three of us realized exactly what was going on.

Kiersten Edgett/KJZZ

DINGMAN: OK ... as we're talking about this, I'm feeling super nervous, because I think of myself as having played mahjong so many times. But so little of what you were just laying out is recognizable to me ...

BRODIE: ... I've learned how to play where like you just have like certain runs of tiles, and once you've used all of your tiles, you win.

LISA SULLIVAN: OK, well, I don't know how to play that way. So you can teach us.

[LAUGHS]

BRODIE: I'm not sure I'd be any qualified to teach that, but no ...

DINGMAN: So, for those who aren't familiar with mahjong, this is gonna be a crude description, but it's sort of a cross between dominoes and poker. There are Chinese versions of it, Japanese versions, Americanized versions. But the basic gist is that everyone gets this group of thick white tiles with these beautiful designs on them. The designs are basically suits, like in a deck of cards. Only in mahjong, the suits are things like dragons, or dots, or bamboo.

And the rules of what you do with these tiles, as Mark and I learned, vary widely from version to version, culture to culture and — critically — from family to family. And that, according to Nicole Wong, who recently published a book about mahjong, is where the game gets really interesting.

Andria Lo

NICOLE WONG: The game just kind of holds this space for memories, and it's an easy way to chat with people, I guess. And I am always just fascinated with what people have to say — whether it's something about the game itself, a trick that they do or a house rule, or just like the person that they learned from, or —

DINGMAN: Yeah, it seems to me, if I'm not mistaken, that that is not just a phenomenon that you have observed. But also one that you have lived, right, in your own journey with mahjong and how it's played in your own family.

WONG: Yeah, definitely. I my — I learned how to play for my grandparents when I just graduated from college one summer. I went and lived with them for just a month, but I played with them a lot. And when I started to take it more seriously in terms of documenting the rules for playing mahjong, I couldn't kind of extract that knowledge without hearing stories about my family or my grandparents or aunts and uncles.

It's kind of a game that, when you explain how to play it — 'cause it's often, it's more often explained when you're playing in the moment. It's just like the easiest way to explain it is to say,"Oh, ... your Auntie Carolyn loves to do this ... your Auntie Janice always does this when this situation arises." So there's a lot of like personality that comes through.

DINGMAN: Yeah, you mentioned a moment ago that part of this journey for you had was actually trying to physically document the rules of the way that your family played the game. And as you did that, you began to realize that the the rules — which are very specific of the way your family plays mahjong — would not necessarily apply at another mahjong table with other players.

WONG: That's right, yeah, and particularly the scoring systems can be really different. It felt impossible to play the game if I wasn't playing with my family. I don't know, that really led me to the documentation part of it. And then once I built up that foundation of my own family's rules, it made it a lot easier to kind of compare that to other styles.

DINGMAN: Yeah, well, can I ask you, I am a mahjong player, also. My brother taught me how to play. And we have this version that we play whenever I'm at home. Myself, my wife, my brother and my mom, we sit around the table and we play mahjong after dinner. And if we added it all up, it's probably hundreds of hours of mahjong. And in getting ready to talk to you today, we had somebody come in to do a little mahjong lesson for myself and Mark, one of my co-hosts on The Show.

WONG: Awesome.

DINGMAN: And it was like she was speaking radio static, the way she was talking about the game. I had no — [LAUGHS]

WONG: Yes, you're like, wait a second, I thought I knew how to play this game.

DINGMAN: I've played this game so many times, I was telling myself.

WONG: Isn't that like kind of an awful feeling? [LAUGHS]

DINGMAN: Yes, thank you for saying that.

WONG: 'Cause like that for me, I was like, wait a second, this thing that I thought was so core to my family — and sounds like you, too. Like it's like you have these very specific experience, you feel like, you know, it's familiar, whatever. And then all of a sudden you're like, what? Like what is happening?

DINGMAN: Yeah. The feeling honestly was — and I'd be curious to know if you relate to this — it was like, I know this, but I don't understand this.

WONG: Yeah ... I talk about mahjong a lot about — I compare it to like different languages. So, you know, there's like traditional Chinese mahjong and its variations. And then there's the Japanese richi mahjong, and there's American style mahjong. And then even within those styles, there's like different "dialects."

Wait ... so then what happened? Did you, did you all play? Did it — did you work it out?

DINGMAN: Not really, no. ... It ended up being a conversation about, because Mark, who again is one of the co-hosts on the show, was in a similar situation to me where he was operating under the impression that he knew how to play mahjong. And realized in the course of doing this that he just knows how to play the version of mahjong that he has been taught. And I knew a different one. And it felt in the moment like, oh, it would take several hours of intense focus to unwind all of the different associations that we have specifically to our family's version of this game to get to a version that we could actually play together.

WONG: Which kind of does lead you to just like, "OK, well, we'll just play with the four of us forever." Which is, which is also OK. Like if that's just gonna be your thing. I think that's another part of what I'm doing is also to make conversation around that. Because it's yeah — it's totally fine if like you before your family just wants to play that way, like forever and not bring in new people, you know what I mean?

But, yeah, like I think just like that idea that like you felt very disoriented, you know, having learning another thing. I think for me what was also compounding that when I was first experiencing that was, like, I grew up in, Santa Monica in Southern California. My family's from New Zealand. And so this thing of mahjong that I always felt was cultural knowledge that I thought I understood. All of a sudden I was like, "Wait a second, do I not even understand what this is?" And so I think just like, I don't know, for my own Chinese-American experience, I do think there's something kind of like juicy and complicated there. Where it's like this idea where we are ... for me ... I did not grow up speaking Chinese.

I grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood, and so I don't have a strong connection to like China. But culturally, there are certain traditions — like food is a very obvious thing to think about when you think about like heritage and cultures that get kind of like that we hold on to and pass down. Language is another one. And for me it's kind of like mahjong was a really interesting different type of thing to think about.

DINGMAN: Absolutely. Boy, you know, Nicole ... the way you're talking about this, it feels like this really profound idea about mahjong, which is that when we talk about a game like this, it's like you're not really talking about the game. You're talking about who you are in a certain way. Because to realize I don't know the game the way I thought I did, or I don't know the game at all, is in some way tantamount to saying, "I don't know my own family. I don't know my own history. I don't know my own self." And it makes me think about that thing you said earlier about the game being this ideal container for for memories.

WONG: Yeah, thank you for saying that. I definitely — I'm so glad that that's like coming across. 'Cause that's totally what I, how I think about it. And for my family, it's like we're we're competitive, we're not like super sentimental. Like we're, I don't know, like there's something about it being a game just fits.

DINGMAN: Right, absolutely, yeah. That's something I was thinking about getting ready to talk to you, is there is this way with mahjong where knowing how to play it implies not just time spent with other people, but a certain kind of time.

WONG: Yeah, and I like that we're talking more about like the, the regular game, too. Like in the sense of your family, 'cause like it's also just like, oh, when you get together, that's what you do. It's like a plan that you can make that isn't really a plan, right? It's like in lieu of saying let's sit around and talk to each other like it's like, oh, let's play mahjong.

DINGMAN: Well, Nicole Wong is a writer and the author of "Mahjong" House Rules from Across the Asian Diaspora." Nicole, thank you so much for this conversation.

WONG: Thank you. I have really enjoyed it.