I grew up with the sound.
I am American. I spent sixteen years in Singapore — fifteen of them growing up, and one more after college, back on my own.
In Singapore, mahjong is not a boutique hobby. It is a household sound — the wash and clatter of tiles through open windows, carried down the block on warm night air, still going long after a child has been sent to bed. I fell asleep to it more nights than I could count. Some mornings the neighbors were still at it when the sun came up.
I played, the way a child plays: at the edges, badly, with whoever would deal me in.
I am still learning the games.
Here is the part most shops leave out.
I am not a master. I have sat down at mahjong tables many times over many years, and I have played a different game almost every time — different rules, different scoring, a different idea of what the tiles even mean. Singapore’s animals. Canton’s faan. Tokyo’s riichi. America’s jokers and Charleston.
Never twice the same. Almost always the one at the table who had to ask.
That is why this house exists.
A third-culture kid learns early that there is no single right way to do anything — that the rules change depending on whose house you are in, and the only real error is assuming yours are the rules. Which is also a fair description of mahjong.
Every mahjong shop I admired served exactly one tradition and called it the game. Nobody was serving the player who crosses between them — the one invited to a table where the rules are not the rules she learned last time, and who would rather understand than guess.
So I started writing it down. The charts I wished somebody had handed me. The Charleston explained plainly, without assuming you already know. The Singapore animal tiles, which virtually nobody covers in English, and which I grew up hearing called across a courtyard.
Making a complicated thing plain to someone meeting it for the first time is, as it happens, what I do for a living — I teach second grade.
信
Our chop is the character for trust. It means we tell you what we know, and we tell you when we are still learning. It is also a promise.
Singapore · Canton · Tokyo · America — named in the order I met them.