So, I’ve been learning to play Mahjong1. Specifically, Riichi Mahjong, which is the Japanese variant. If your first guess as to why I’m learning how to play Mahjong included the words “the” and “duchess,” you would be very, very correct2. Earlier this year The Duchess announced that she wanted to learn how to play, for reasons, and invited me to join her on this journey of discovery and awkward social interactions. Me, being no dummy, knew that any resistance would be interpreted as an Act of War with commiserate punishments, so I said sure, why not3.
I’ve always had a fraught relationship with any activity that required skill. Or strategy. My father taught me the basics of chess and gin rummy4 when I was a kid, and I was very bad at both almost immediately5. I played Little League baseball so badly they more or less invented a new, largely unnecessary position known as Left Out. I love First Person Shooter Games, but when playing single player I tend to rely on God Mode, and when playing multiplayer I am the Most Hated Camper of Them All. When my friends and I went through a (mercifully brief) Hearts phase, I found one strategy that tended to work for me and I stuck to it so religiously it was almost psychopathic.
In other words, playing Mahjong is the worst thing a brain like mine could attempt6.
Riichi Mahjong is an incredibly complex game. You play with tiles that are very pretty, but inscribed with Chinese characters, so memorizing their value and meaning is your first hurdle. You have to arrange the tiles into beautiful shapes that follow very stringent rules, and playing the game itself also follows pretty stringent rules.
If you’ve ever met me, you know that the word stringent does not, as a rule, attach itself to me as a descriptor. I am florid, and messy, and irritatingly sweaty, but not, yanno, stringent. About anything, except my choice of whiskeys7.
But, to be honest, Mahjong has been a lot of fun. It’s so complex, so symbolic, and so goddamn poetic that I’ve really gotten into learning all the strange, obscure rules and traditions. I sometimes joke that I have zero cultural traditions, but it’s not really a joke: I have no specific ethnicity beyond “North Jersey White”, my family wasn’t particularly religious, and I barely have any kind of contact with extended family, and only knew a single grandparent. I’m about as blank slate as you can get, so diving into this unfamiliar bit of someone else’s culture is a lot of fun8.
What’s not fun is the social interaction, when The Duchess forces me to play people in real life.
Hi Jeff, I’m Awkward
Mahjong is a four-player game. You can play bots online, of course, and there are some awkward, unhappy two-player rule variants that no one likes, but basically if you want to play Mahjong you need a few friends9. The Duchess wants to play Mahjong, and I am swept along in that enthusiasm, but so far all her attempts to recruit people into the game go like this:
DUCHESS: Come play Mahjong with us! It’s so much fun!
FRIENDS: Sure!
DUCHESS: Great! Here’s a 500-page rulebook and here’s a place where you can take lessons. Get up to speed over the next six months and let us know when you understand what Furiten is.
FRIENDS: Uh … just realized we’re busy. All the time10.
To solve for this, we found two people who were taking Mahjong lessons at the same place as us and formed a little ad hoc Mahjong group. The four of us go for a weekly lesson, which is basically us playing a very (very) slow game while an instructor offers advice and information. It’s fun, believe it or not, and we have the ideal relationship with our Mahjong Friends: We make light banter while we play, we know next to nothing about them outside of their Mahjong style (I only recently learned one of their last names!), and when the lesson is over we say good night and go our separate ways11.
That’s fine, and works for Your Humble Author Who Hates Social Interactions, but The Duchess isn’t satisfied, so she sometimes forces me to go play Mahjong with total strangers at open tournaments. I cannot describe to you the stress of this. Not only am I playing a game I barely understand with strangers, but these strangers are good at this game. They play fast, they can do the Magic Mahjong Math in their heads, and they stare at you tensely if you hesitate to make your move. This scenario happens often:
OTHER PLAYER: <discards tile>
OTHER PLAYERS: Oh! Oh my. Yes. I see everything perfectly.
ME: What? What’s happening?
OTHER PLAYERS: In two rounds you will owe her 50,000 points and be forced to perform a humiliating dance.
ME: Again?
As a man whose sole wish in life is to be allowed to slowly die while sitting in a comfortable chair drinking whiskey and talking to no one other than The Duchess, this has certainly been a learning experience.
Of course, one other thing came out of The Duchess’s Mahjong Mania: Our cat Pinfu Riichi Mahjong Somers, who was named after the game, as one does. Plus, I can do some of the Magic Mahjong Math, which is more than I could ever say about Regular Non-Magic Math.
- This is like saying “I am learning quantum physics.” It will take years of study and leads only to more questions.
- She gets more powerful each year. Soon she’ll be able to control me like a marionette over vast distances.
- The words “sure, why not” have not served me well over the years, yet I continue to utter them with disturbing frequency.
- Also: Drinking.
- I was very good at the drinking, however.
- My brain is designed for shockingly few things, actually.
- Even there I usually just go with the flow. If you offered me a shot of something with a handwritten label called YOU WILL REGRET THIS, I’d probably still drink it.
- This is probably why I have such a rich inner life, but having a rich inner life isn’t as cool as you might think.
- Nothing brings home the fact that you’re a middle-aged white man more forcibly than suddenly trying to come up with more than one friend.
- To be fair, we get this response a lot even when Mahjong isn’t involved. Are we the baddies?
- I mean, this is the ideal friendship parameters in general, if you ask me. The less I actually know about my friends, the better it goes.