Mah Jongg Quotes

Bubby: All my friends are dying! The bastards! Don't they know I want to play mah-jongg?!

never spoke of it. He took the miracle to his grave. All Andrew ever said about the voyage was that a nun had taught him how to play mah-jongg. Something must have happened during one of their games.

An air force general with so many campaign medals on his uniform that it looked like someone was losing a game of mah-jongg on his chest.

Only God can turn a mess into a message, a test into a testimony, a trial into a triumph, a victim into a victor.

Tibet has not yet been infested by the worst disease of modern life, the everlasting rush. No one overworks here. Officials have an easy life. They turn up at the office late in the morning and leave for their homes early in the afternoon. If an official has guests or any other reason for not coming, he just sends a servant to a colleague and asks him to officiate for him. Women know nothing about equal rights and are quite happy as they are. They spend hours making up their faces, restringing their pearl necklaces, choosing new material for dresses, and thinking how to outshine Mrs. So-and-so at the next party. They do not have to bother about housekeeping, which is all done by the servants. But to show that she is mistress the lady of the house always carries a large bunch of keys around with her. In Lhasa every trifling object is locked up and double-locked. Then there is mah-jongg. At one time this game was a universal passion. People were simply fascinated by it and played it day and night, forgetting everything else—official duties, housekeeping, the family. The stakes were often very high and everyone played—even the servants, who sometimes contrived to lose in a few hours what they had taken years to save. Finally the government found it too much of a good thing. They forbade the game, bought up all the mah-jongg sets, and condemned secret offenders to heavy fines and hard labor. And they brought it off! I would never have believed it, but though everyone moaned and hankered to play again, they respected the prohibition. After mah-jongg had been stopped, it became gradually evident how everything else had been neglected during the epidemic. On Saturdays—the day of rest—people now played chess or halma, or occupied themselves harmlessly with word games and puzzles.

In 1937, a group of thirty-two Jewish women formed the National Mah Jongg League, which today has over 350,000 members. These

Spread the gift. Teach someone to play Mah Jongg!

Is there room in that Mah Jongg game for me too?!

You might be addicted to Mah Jongg if... you're allowed only one carry-on and you choose your Mah Jongg bag!

Insignificance by Stewart Stafford From the emerald Draco star, Fell the coiled Rosslyn figure, Unwinding into elongated form, The golden crozier of St Patrick. Faded gods upon ruined temples, All came alive, screeching creeds, Overwhelming minds and bodies, Fanatics expiring from confusion. In the shamanic ritualistic dance, Of an in-out, Hokey-Cokey culture, Spins the stained mah-jongg piece, The missing link apes checkmate. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

she wouldn’t have seen the booklet, considering everything going on at the time. The photo that grabbed her attention first was the one front and center. There were four people—Dani, Matthew, Becca, and Todd. She and Matthew used to hang out with Becca and her husband, Todd. The four of them had joined a bowling league and used to get together every few weeks to play mah-jongg. A twinge of sadness swept over her. Dani and Becca used to talk every day, but since Tinsley’s disappearance, they had talked only a handful of times. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. Dani had only one thing on her mind after Tinsley was gone. Conversation became awkward. They both had moved on, gracefully and without guilt. There were truly no words to express what it felt like to lose a child. Dani still held on to hope that Tinsley was alive. She often imagined the homecoming, a surreal moment when she would see her daughter again. She imagined Tinsley would appear as an apparition right up until

Gone the glitter and glamour; gone the pompous wealth beside naked starvation; gone the strange excitement of a polyglot and many-sided city; gone the island of Western civilization flourishing in the vast slum that was Shanghai. Good-by to all that: the well-dressed Chinese in their chauffeured cars behind bullet-proof glass; the gangsters, the shakedowns, the kid­napers; the exclusive foreign clubs, the men in white dinner jackets, their women beautifully gowned; the white-coated Chinese “boys” ob­sequiously waiting to be tipped; Jimmy’s Kitchen with its good Amer­ican coffee, hamburgers, chili and sirloin steaks. Good-by to all the night life: the gilded singing girl in her enameled hair-do, her stage make-up, her tight-fitting gown with its slit skirt breaking at the silk­ clad hip, and her polished ebony and silver-trimmed rickshaw with its crown of lights; the hundred dance halls and the thousands of taxi dolls; the opium dens and gambling halls; the flashing lights of the great restaurants, the clatter of mah-jongg pieces, the yells of Chinese feasting and playing the finger game for bottoms-up drinking; the sailors in their smelly bars and friendly brothels on Szechuan Road; the myriad short-time whores and pimps busily darting in and out of the alleyways; the display signs of foreign business, the innumerable shops spilling with silks, jades, embroideries, porcelains and all the wares of the East; the generations of foreign families who called Shanghai home and lived quiet conservative lives in their tiny vacuum untouched by China; the beggars on every downtown block and the scabby infants urinating or defecating on the curb while mendicant mothers absently scratched for lice; the “honey carts” hauling the night soil through the streets; the blocks-long funerals, the white-clad professional mourners weeping false tears, the tiers of paper palaces and paper money burned on the rich man’s tomb; the jungle free-for- all struggle for gold or survival and the day’s toll of unwanted infants and suicides floating in the canals; the knotted rickshaws with their owners fighting each other for customers and arguing fares; the peddlers and their plaintive cries; the armored white ships on the Whangpoo, “protecting foreign lives and property”; the Japanese conquerors and their American and Kuomintang successors; gone the wickedest and most colorful city of the old Orient: good-by to all that.

… I notice differences in how we all handle the mahjong tiles. Pat and Amy treat the tiles with something bordering on reverence. They silently select tiles for discard from their racks and place them gently on the tabletop, in a dainty almost whispering motion. Sue and I place our discard tiles down so they make that clicking sound I have always loved hearing. Betty flings her tiles onto the tabletop with a throw-away motion befitting the worthless items they are.

In American mah jongg there are five different categories of tiles: Suit tiles, Dragon tiles, Wind tiles, Flower tiles, and Joker tiles—152 tiles in all.

Need a fourth?' he asked, earning himself a set of strangely satisfying startled glances. The only way the moment might have been better would be if El had taught Marty the game. But that had been his grandfather, years and years ago. The white-haired man smiled. 'You know how to play?' 'I’d need a card.' 'Card?' Then understanding dawned on the white-haired man’s face. He shook his head. Again, he looked kind. 'Ah. Of course. Jew Mah Jongg. Entirely different game.' His companions were nodding, too. The guy with the belt buckle said, 'Completely different. Very frustrating. So few ways to win. So many to lose.' Yet again, Marty felt tears well in his eyes. His uncle’s absence seeping in. 'Yep,' he said. 'Sounds like a Jewish game, alright.' ("Shomer")

The streets of downtown Shanghai likewise seemed a continuous freak circus at first, unbelievably alive with all manner of people performing almost every physical and social function in public: yelling, gesturing, always acting, crushing throngs spilling through every kind of traffic, precariously amidst old cars and new ones and between coolies racing wildly to compete for ricksha fares, gingerly past "honey-carts" filled with excrement dragged down Bubbling Well Road, sardonically past perfumed, exquisitely gowned, mid-thigh-exposed Chinese ladies, jestingly past the Herculean bare-backed coolie trundling his taxi-wheelbarrow load of six giggling servant girls en route to home or work, carefully before singing peddlers bearing portable kitchens ready with delicious noodles on the spot, lovingly under gold-lettered shops overflowing with fine silks and brocades, dead-panning past village women staring wide-eyed at frightening Indian policemen, gravely past gambling mah-jongg ivories clicking and jai alai and parimutuel betting, slyly through streets hung with the heavy-sweet acrid smell of opium, sniffingly past southern restaurants and bright-lighted sing-song houses, indifferently past scrubbed, aloof young Englishmen in their Austins popping off to cricket on the Race Course, snickeringly round elderly white gentlemen in carriages with their wives or Russian mistresses out for the cool air along the Bund, and hastily past sailors looking for beer and women—from noisy dawn to plangent night the endless hawking and spitting, the baby's urine stream on the curb, the amah's scolding, the high falsetto of opera at Wing On Gardens where a dozen plays went on at once and hotel rooms next door filled up with plump virgins procured for wealthy merchants in from the provinces for business and debauch, the wail of dance bands moaning for slender bejeweled Chinese taxi dancers, the whiteness of innumerable beggars and their naked unwashed infants, the glamour of the Whangpoo with its white fleets of foreign warships, its shaggy freighters, its fan-sailed junks, its thousand lantern-lit sampans darting fire-flies on the moon-silvered water filled with deadly pollution. Shanghai!

because I convert the Joker into a 9 Dot, and utilize the Flower and the Power Pair, making six tiles toward a Maj Jongg hand. Very respectable, and so far, the strongest Section/hand. F 3, 6, J (9 Dot) 99 Crak (6th hand) In the Consecutive Run Section, a close search reveals that the Consecutive Run hand (the 2nd) is definitely a hand to be considered because again, converting the Joker to an 8 Crak allows me to use the Power Pair and gives me five tiles toward Mah Jongg. 6, 7 Dot J (8 Crak) 9, 9 Crak (2nd hand) This example shows the power that Jokers have to help you create hands from seemingly unrelated elements. They also strengthen a chosen Section/hand(s). That’s why Jokers are a valuable asset and must be included as an integral part of your selection. All the hands

In the moon road on the water, Mei Lien saw her father laughing with her as he taught her mah-jongg at the rickety table in front of his store. She watched Grandmother's wrinkled hands patiently guiding her own through short, precise stitches on silk, the smell of ginger and onions scenting the air. The memories rolled together, coming faster and faster, then pausing on one image only to flash forward again, pulling her in, soothing her.

Conversations around our mah jongg tables have created intimacy through trust and honesty, dared vulnerability, and exposed realness. Friends often hold up mirrors for us to glance into long enough to show us glimpses of ourselves we might have otherwise missed. They are gatekeepers into sisterhood and female-bonded love.

She would rather live her own life of mah-jongg games, while pretending all those starving in the streets are invisible.