Mad about mah jongg
By Sarah Bearup-Neal
Sun contributor
There are women in Glen Arbor who are addicts. Their drug of choice? Mah jongg, an ancient tile game not unlike gin rummy.
“It’s addictive,” said Linda Gretzema, and happily one might add, “because every hand is new. It’s crazy. It has become a huge thing.”
How huge? There are millions of U.S. players, according to the National Mah Jongg League (NMJL). And while exact numbers aren’t available for the locality, one can say that mah jongg games are bustin’ out all over the village and township, in homes and public buildings. Gretzema helped bring one to the Glen Arbor Township Hall after her group outgrew a series of homes and the Glen Lake Yacht Club. The Dune Dragons—a loose consortium of 8-28 regular players—meet every Monday from 1-4 p.m. at the town hall. Mah jongg is now an official activity offered through the township’s Parks and Recreation District.
“This whole town is rabid over mah jongg,” said Flora Newblatt. She hosts a Thursday afernoon game in her Glen Arbor Township home, and plays Monday nights with a different group of players. She’s been playing for the last 10 years. And yes, she, too, freely admits she’s hooked on mah jongg.
“It’s a very addictive game,” Newblatt said. “It makes you forget everything else. You have to concentrate and put everything else to the back of your brain. It’s like a meditation.” When she first got interested in mah jongg, there weren’t many players in the neighborhood. Newblatt said she was “desperate” to find a group.
“Addicted” to a game? “Desperate” to play it? One wonders: What’s up with this?
Elaine Sandberg, author of A Beginner’s Guide to American Mah Jongg, explains the game succinctly: “(I)t originally came from China, and uses small rectangular tiles stamped with symbols and characters. The object of the game is to be the first to assemble combinations of these tiles into specific patterns that make up a hand. You assemble these combinations. That’s the game.”
Well, sort of. According to Wikipedia, mah jongg is a game for people “4 years and older.”
“I think a bright 4-year-old could play; but we have trouble remembering the rules,” Gretzema said.
Mah jongg is a rule-heavy game. It’s usually played by groups of four. Each player starts with 13 tiles, then picks up and discards tiles until one of several dozen official tile combinations has been assembled into specific patterns. Different mah jongg organizations annually publish and sell their own patterns and combination “cards” (nine bucks American from the NMJL); but the NMJL—headquartered in Manhattan—“standardized the procedures and rules of the American game,” Sandberg wrote. That was in 1937. The NMJL has since become the final word on all thing mah jonggian.
There are fifty-leven variations on this Chinese game, which was imported to the west in the 1920s. The U.S. version, American mah jongg, is a simplified rendition of the Asian original.
“No matter where you go there are local house rules,” said Jacki Westbay, a founding Dune Dragoneer. The Glen Arbor Township resident learned to play in Scottsdale, Ariz., where she spends part of each year.
“Two gals there taught year after year after year, so I learned how,” Westbay said. And yes, the inevitable happened.
“I got addicted,” she said.
That was 2009. When Westbay returned to Glen Arbor the next spring, she started looking for other players, and in 2012 found her mah jongg soul mate—Empire resident Mae Van Houzen, another seasonal resident who learned the game in the sunny south: Northport, Fla., circa 1990.
Westbay and VanHouzen are the go-to girls for mah jongg rules, said Gretzema. “In the winter, we’d email Jacki (for rules clarification). We’ve played enough now that we know the rules, but people who have been playing the longest know the rules best.”
“You don’t just sit down and watch someone play the game,” Westbay said. “You really do need someone to take you by the hand and go step by step through the rules.” But with practice and perseverance the game can be learned. One of Westbay’s own teachers assured her that “someday you’ll be able to play the game and have a glass of wine at the same time.”
Wine or no, it’s not uncommon for players to wind up with what VanHouzen calls a “mah jongg headache” after three hours of “concentrating on the card and trying to find the right tiles to fit the pattern.”
“It’s not a real social game,” Westbay said. “Theoretically, you should be very quiet.”
Yet, she adds, “half the joy (of mah jongg) is listening to the clicking and the clacking of the tiles.”
These smooth, cream-colored tiles supply audio and visual pleasure. The American version may be a stripped down from the Chinese, but the symbolism has been retained.
“It’s no surprise that the mah jongg tiles, coming from China, are rife with symbolism. Each tile in the set reflects some universal aspect of human nature, seen through the prism of Chinese life and culture,” Sandberg writes. Groups of tiles represent bamboo, birds (peacock, sparrow), the Chinese/Taoist concept of the 10,000 eternal things, the four directions and flower blossoms (plum, orchid, chrysanthemum), each of which represents a season.
Further back in time, mah jongg was “a gambling game and women weren’t allow to play,” VanHouzen said.
Today, however, women have broken through that barrier, too; in Glen Arbor women are the face of modern day mah jongg. And, if this game of skill and luck, with its visual and aural aesthetics, its symbology and history; if this game with its innate ability to bring people together in a communal activity; if this game is indeed an addiction, then one wonders: What’s not to love?
