Mahjong and its consequences

I celebrate the holidays with my mom's side of the family, partially because of convenience (we all live within 30 mins of each other) and partially because my dad's family is insane. I've been learning mahjong for the last few months to prepare because I REALLY want to learn and finally be included with the uncles and aunts. It'll also be really good because I can play with the old folks when I visit my grandpa at the senior center.¹

You may be asking: Katal, shouldn't someone have taught you by now? It's like poker, everyone² at least knows the rules! Well, I... don't know? My mom never learned because she's a goody-two-shoes, I guess. My uncle is the only one who owns a mahjong set and it only comes out at the BIG gatherings. I guess all my close family is above a bit of friendly gambling.³ Lame. Luckily, my more distant relatives have no such qualms. The problem is when they play they speak in rapid Cantonese,⁴ which I cannot understand at all. Sitting in on their games, even after being given a barebones explanation, didn't help one bit. They didn't even tell me what the calls were!

I decided to take matters into my own hands and find an online game. And I did! ...The only problem is that it uses the Japanese ruleset. All of the popular online mahjong games use the Japanese ruleset. As you have most likely already surmised, my family plays using Hong Kong rules.⁵ There are quite a few things that don't exist in those holiday games, such as "riichi," which I am not going to go too in-depth in but MASSIVELY affects the strategy for the rest of the players. Still, it shares a lot of similarities with what my family plays so I've started playing anyway.

One of the problems with trying to learn Japanese mahjong (also known fittingly as riichi mahjong) is that pretty much everyone who talks about it uses a crapton of Japanese terminology. It's fine for the small stuff, like "chii," "pon," and "tenpai," (sequence call, triplet call, and ready hand respectively) but it gets difficult to understand when they start talking about more complex concepts like "furiten"⁶ and "shanpon." I ended up watching youtube videos to help me understand because even the game can be difficult to grasp even when using English terminology.

Anyway, I've started to get the hang of it. I've been playing Mahjong Soul for a little over a month and just ranked up into Adept 1! Hopefully at I can get my uncle to bring out the set at New Year's.

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1. People make a lot of assumptions about me at the senior center. It's catered towards Chinese people and I don't really look Chinese. People assume I can't speak Mandarin, and since everyone there is old their English is generally quite poor. I'm also usually one of the only young people there so nobody would talk to me anyway...

2. Okay, I guess by "everyone" I mean Chinese people. And a lot of East Asia, now that I think about it.

3. Interestingly, that aforementioned uncle apparently has a bit of a past as a gambler. He was supposedly pretty good at it, too.

4. Anyone who tells you Cantonese is a dialect of Chinese is lying to you. There is zero mutual intelligibility with Mandarin speakers. Using the same writing system doesn't mean they're the same language. Do people say that French is basically Spanish just because they both use the Latin alphabet??

5. My family (with the exception of one of my aunts, who married in) is not from Hong Kong. We're just Cantonese, lol.

6. Furiten is stupid and I hate it. Read the riichi.wiki page if you want to see more.