When I first learned how to play Filipino mahjong, all of the Filipino moms would stand over our shoulders and tell us which tiles to get rid of and which ones to keep. My mom would rearrange my pieces for me in a way that somewhat made sense. To me, it felt like deciphering a language that my mom already knew how to speak forwards and backwards.
Usually when you open up a new board game(something we explore in our latest show), the first thing you do is read the rule book. In my case, the moms were the rule books. And their moms were their rule books. Playing Filipino mahjong is like an oral tradition. Like in many oral traditions, mistakes can be made and things can be lost in translation. It took so many tries to even win my first game.
Then, when I first learned how to play American mahjong, it was with a bunch of older white women. I found a group here in Madison that plays every second Sunday of the month. The way they played mahjong was much more challenging for me. Tiles that weren’t significant in Filipino mahjong suddenly had a whole new meaning. There’s a shuffling of tiles between players called “the Charleston” that I still don’t understand. Different moves and hands had to be learned. This was like learning a new language, but in a different dialect. Sometimes I would find myself accidentally calling tiles by their Filipino names and not the American ones.
Like learning new languages, the best way to learn mahjong is to stumble through it. In the first American mahjong game I played, I threw away a tile that would have won me the game. The second time, I played the right hand, but with the wrong set of tiles. The third time, I played the same hand again, but with the right tiles this time. Sweet redemption. That’s one of the great lessons of mahjong: you always learn from your mistakes.
-Angelo