You can’t see it for the crowd of onlookers, but four players are sitting at an outdoor table for a lively game of mahjong on a frigid afternoon. Mahjong is most similar to rummy or rummikub, with each player drawing 13 tiles, then taking turns until the winner is able to group every one of his tiles into a matching or running combination. Technically, the winner will have 14 tiles at the end- one new tile is drawn each turn and usually discarded- and he must have one matching pair to complete his winning hand.
I tried playing mahjong with Aunt Fong’s family during a “family party,” i.e. when her extended family was over for a holiday, chatting and enjoying their free time at her apartment. With generous assistance, I fumbled through the great lineup of intricate tiles and futilely tried what I thought would be a winning strategy. Of course, I never won.
One side contest between the experienced players in Fong’s family was to guess a tile’s face by rubbing their fingertips over its unseen engravings. These guesses were almost never successful, but the men were wound up like boys on a playground as they flipped their mystery tiles over and slammed them on the table for the big reveal. I think I made one correct guess while trying this feat, when my tile was one of the simplest- the red Chinese symbol for “center” which is a flat rectangle with a line cutting vertically down the middle, or one of the symbols for the cardinal directions.
North, East, South, West, and Center.
Anyway, the men at the table in this picture might have been playing for money, but even if not a sizable crowd would always snowball around outdoor mahjong or card games, with onlookers gazing over their shoulders and pondering how each player should make their moves.
I should also say that this outdoor concrete table, like so many of the other tables and benches I saw in China, was occupied almost every day. Throughout my time in the States, almost every piece of outdoor furniture I see is desolate and looking forlorn. As shocking as it might seem to Americans to see the peasant class huddling around in inclement weather for hours, just to watch a mahjong game, it seems more dispiriting to me to see empty streets and parks in modern, prosperous America, realizing that the happy imagination that built these benches is forgotten in vain.
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