Ingrid ZH | Fangruo’s Cereal — Writing, Food, Travel & Coaching

I woke up at a friend’s place today. Compared to New York, I really do like Chicago more. Last night I talked about this with some of my friend’s friends.New York, maybe, is just a bit too cramped. Chicago moves fast too, but it’s bigger, more open, and close to Lake Michigan. In New York I carried around an anxiety I couldn’t quite name. I know Chicago better. In college, it was the nearest big city to me. I can still recognize the names of some restaurants on Michigan Avenue. But that’s not the most important way I’ve built a connection with this city: I remember the layout of every Walgreens store along its main roads. Holding onto that kind of memory is what makes me feel close to this place.

The friend hosting me is a Filipino American, a classmate of mine from the same major in college. She always says that aside from me, she doesn’t really have any friends left from our program. Our major was small, a dozen or twenty people per year. Maybe I just like being friends with women who are beautiful and smart, and since we were both Asian, it felt natural at the time that we’d grow close.

A few years ago, I was walking outside a steel mill in Pittsburgh when she suddenly called. She said she was about to get a tattoo and wanted me to check if the Chinese characters were correct. I was equal parts annoyed and amused. How do you not ask about something like a tattoo beforehand? What if I hadn’t picked up? She’d have inked the wrong Chinese onto her body forever.

She sent me a photo — a mahjong tile with “六万” (six of the character-tile suit) written on it. She and her siblings, it turned out, had each gotten a different tile tattooed on themselves. I still wasn’t quite confident writing the traditional form of “万” — 萬. I stood outside the steel mill, carefully checking every stroke in the midst of sulfite smoke.

I never really asked her why she wanted a mahjong tile tattoo. It was much later that I learned her mother side was Chinese. She grew up in the US and even went to Chinese school for a while.

Last night she and her friends threw a mahjong party. I grew up watching my grandfather play, but I never actually learned how myself. I knew what “chi,” “peng,” and “gang” meant. But before last night, I didn’t know how to actually win a hand. After my friend taught me a few rounds, I picked it up fast. There was another new friend at the table who really was playing for the first time. I learned so quickly it almost felt a little embarrassing.

Mahjong has always felt to me like a familiar unfamiliarity. I grew up watching my grandfather play, and during Chinese New Year the whole family would often play too. I wonder if some part of me never learned it on purpose — like I was saving it, a kind of time capsule for myself. My grandfather left us three years ago. He didn’t leave behind much of anything to begin with, and what clothes he did leave were thrown out by my mother. In some way, I’m quite jealous of my husband. He has a necklace and a scarf that belonged to his grandfather. I have nothing at all.

Before going to my friend’s place yesterday, I’d already braced myself to be the introverted kid who refuses to learn. That’s how I am with a lot of games. I don’t want to play board games, I don’t want to play mahjong. I don’t want to face losing, and I don’t want to face the friendly friction of competing with friends.

My friend asked if I knew how to play, and whether the reason I didn’t was because my family never played. I told them I had no excuse at all. Everyone in my family plays. My friends explained a few rules, simply, and I found I picked it up incredibly fast. I remembered the way my grandfather used to play. He’d turn his own tiles face-down on the table. When he drew a tile, he wouldn’t even look at it. He’d just run his thumb over its face and read it blind. I used to sit beside him like that, watching him play, inhaling more secondhand smoke than I could stand. I couldn’t understand any of it. I just thought mahjong was a beautiful thing. My grandfather, playing mahjong, was so fascinating to look at.

By the end of one round, I was close to winning, but didn’t quite make it. I moved to the couch after that and watched Switzerland play Argentina. My friends kept playing mahjong beside me, and the sound of it dissolved into a lovely kind of background noise.

I’d spent the whole day traveling, and after the match ended I went to sleep. I slept upstairs while my friends kept playing below. The clatter of mahjong tiles colliding was like thunder, like drumbeats, like the sound of money changing hands, like smoke drifting through a room. All those metaphors that had settled into my mind as a child during lunar new year surfaced again in that moment.

A mid-July night in Chicago felt just like the end of January — Lunar New Year.

For reference:

My friends do run a majhong club in chicago area call @144tiles (https://144tiles.com/). Very fun majhong club if you are in Chicago. Definitly recommed their events!