#174. Mahjong (Friday, June 3, 2011)
What was your best day…of transferring your skills to something completely new?
Heading into the summer after junior year at Waterloo, despite things having substantially improved on the academic (#27) and “living an actual life” (#33) front, I still hadn’t addressed the main problem that had defined the previous disaster summer. Despite my honest (though still suboptimal) efforts, I hadn’t yet found a summer job in my field.
Things were looking bleak, when my parents suggested something a bit less conventional. Through our relatives, arrange a short unpaid internship at one of the banks in Shanghai, get some relevant experience, spend some time with relatives back home for the first time in nine years (#74), and gain a new perspective on the world. I jumped at it right away.
For the work, in the foreign overseas department (#64), I wasn’t asked to do much. I was mostly there to learn (Mandarin and finance); so most of the time was spent reading documents and doing small administrative tasks. The highlight of my day was taking two separate metro trains from my maternal grandparents’ house in Huangpu District to the bank’s offices in Putuo District, amid the dense crowd of commuters (most of whom I was a head taller than).
And indeed, most of the novelty came from being immersed in the Shanghai environment itself—especially after my mom returned home after the first month, and I was free to explore the city after-hours. I was still extremely sheltered at the time, so most of this “exploring” consisted of taking the train to one of many mega-malls in the city, aimlessly walking down Nanjing Road (i.e., Chinese Times Square), getting ripped off at large underground flea markets by guys selling “high-quality” box sets of Lost that didn’t run, and finding myself in quiet secluded gardens with a beautiful city view that I realize too late are a prime make-out spot for couples. Fun, but nowhere near the social and nightlife energy that Shanghai was renowned to offer and I, at any later point in my life (#45) would have killed to take advantage of.
As such, the highlight of my time there had to be spending time with my grandparents. Specifically, playing against them, and mostly winning money against them (betting was mandatory, as per my grandfather), in their lifelong favorite game: Mahjong.
This Friday, the day after my mother flies out, I return to my grandparents’ place late: after playing basketball at some gymnasium with colleague from the bank.1 I ring the 17th floor, and the first thing I hear is my aunt asking me to get her more cigarettes (people in Shanghai smoke a lot); but I don’t have any nor trust my ability to find the right kinds. So I just head upstairs, and the four of us just start playing Mahjong.
Side Note: The coolest thing about Mahjong is the special automated table we play it on. Once a game ends, you just gather all the pieces in the center of the table, click a button, and the main hatch opens up and they all just fall in. Following thirty seconds of distinct rumbling sounds, the four smaller hatches around it open up to reveal a neatly arranged (and sufficiently randomized) wall of Mahjong pieces. It was a machine of unending fascination for me during my time there.
And the Mahjong playing seems to go on all weekend, with my uncle and my twenty-seven-year-old cousin Zhou Ling coming by (mostly to play NES to satisfy my uncle’s Contra addiction, #41) to join in as well. Only interrupted for two hours each night, to watch a pair of new episodes for this cheesy Chinese drama that I have recently gotten addicted to myself. (Basic plot: Girl meets guy. Girl marries guy. Guy leaves for the U.S. to become rich. Girl is pregnant. Girl raises son with help of crazy mother-in-law. Girl divorces guy. Guy comes back after new wife runs away with all his money. Girl ends up marrying childhood friend who was there all along.)
I do pretty well for myself, simply by taking the conservative strategy of maximizing my win percentage period (versus gunning for the more difficult, higher point-value wins), based on the correct logic that if I win that at least my grandparents or aunt/uncle/cousin hasn’t won. To them, the fact that I—the younger nephew who they last saw when I was twelve and lives in the faraway civilization of Canada—am not only playing competitively but winning is seriously impressive.
To me, I’m just using the same brute force reasoning that I’ve been using for countless hundreds of hours playing Magic: The Gathering and Napoleon (#27) in the past year. Except here, as part of a deep-rooted but unfamiliar cultural institution that I was allowed to inhabit for one month at a key transitional point in my life.
- The players are much better than my cousin (#64), and they’re pretty serious NBA fans as well. This is taking place during the 2011 NBA Finals between the Heat and the Mavericks, where pretty much all of them are bandwagoners who want LeBron James and the Heat (“hot fire”, literally in Chinese) to win.