Finding Your People: Notes From a First Season

I want to be honest about what my first session was like: I was nervous. Not worried about the rules — I'd been warned, clearly and correctly, that the rules would sort themselves out — but nervous in the way you are when you show up somewhere new and don't know where to sit or who to talk to or whether you'll belong.

I sat down. Someone passed me a drink before I'd finished settling. The host introduced me to the two women already at the table, said a few words about how the evening would go, and then — this is the part I remember most clearly — just left us to it. Not hovering, not narrating, just present and easy.

The table changes things

There's something about mahjong that makes conversation inevitable. The game moves in a rhythm — draw, consider, discard — and in the pauses, people talk. Not about the game. About their weeks, their work, a film one of them had seen. The tiles give you something to look at when you don't want to make eye contact; the game gives you a reason to stay at the table past the point where you'd normally say you should be going.

By the end of the first session, I'd laughed at something I couldn't remember afterward, exchanged numbers with one of the women across from me, and signed up for the following week before I'd put my coat on.

Eight months later

I have a standing Thursday. I know which players discard too quickly when they're close to winning, and which ones will hold a tile for two full rounds just to see what happens. I have a favorite rack position and a particular fondness for the dragon tiles — their weight, the way they feel like luck.

More than any of that: I have people. Women I see every week who I wouldn't have met any other way. The game was the excuse; the evenings were the thing.

I'm writing this for whoever was me, eight months ago — slightly nervous, sitting in a coat, not knowing whether they'd fit. You will. The table makes room.