Interested in learning a new (ancient) game?
Recently established mah-jong association working to promote centuries-old Chinese pastime to Canadians
NICHOLAS KEUNG On a recent Saturday afternoon, a couple dozen people brave pouring rain and gusty winds to get to a Markham gym to learn a centuries-old pastime for the Chinese diaspora around the world.
In groups of four, they take over the green-matted square tables and start shuffling the little white plastic tiles in a secluded room at this local badminton club.
Welcome to the weekly mah-jong training workshop at the Denison St.-Steeles Ave. location, one of three venues in Toronto and Markham, organized by the newly established Canada Mahjong Association.
While Canadians may not be unfamiliar with the game, thanks to its adaptation into popular computer games, many tend to associate it with illegal gambling and overlook its benefits as a form of exercise like chess and bridge to keep the brain active, says association founder Ying Fu Wang.
Through free workshops and tournaments, Wang says he’d like to promote this “healthy exercise of the mind” to Canadians with a new set of standardized rules and scoring system that he helped develop with the international mah-jong community.
“Mah-jong is an integrated part of the Chinese culture. In China, 900 million of the 1.1 billion people play mah-jong and the rest watch as audience,” jokes Wang, a director of the Beijing-based World Mahjong Network, who followed his daughter’s footsteps and moved to Toronto in 2007.
“We want to change the West’s perception of mah-jong. We want people to see mah-jong as a healthy, intellectual game. We want to make it as popular as poker.”
The standard mah-jong is played by four players with a set of 144 tiles based on Chinese characters and symbols. Players take turns to draw and discard tiles until they complete a hand with a fourteenth tile to form four groups and a pair.
Since its inception in August, the Toronto-based mah-jong association has attracted more than 150 members, some from ethnocultural backgrounds other than Chinese.
Founded in 2005, the World Mahjong Network held the first biennial mah-jong world championship in China in 2007, with participants from 12 countries.
The game has since caught on in Europe from Austria to Finland, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Sweden, Switzerland and even Bosnia and Hungary. The European players have even outshone the Chinese on mah-jong tables.
At an international tournament held in Toulouse earlier this year, French players swept the podium, winning gold, silver and bronze, followed by two Italians and a Dutch player. The best Chinese player only came in seventh out of 108 contestants. An inaugural Canadian cham- pionship is planned for February.
Markham resident Brian Lansdowne was introduced to mah-jong five years ago by his wife Mimi after seeing her play with her friends. Since then, the retired Canada Post worker has been hooked on the game, playing on his computer every day and occasionally filling in for his wife with her friends.
He jumped on the opportunity to improve his skills when he learned about the mah-jong training workshop in local media this summer.
“Mah-jong is much harder than poker because you have way more scoring combinations,” said Lans- downe, flipping a copy of the mahjong handbook, translated into English by Wang’s association. “Mah-jong keeps your mind active and busy. It really makes you think and you have to watch out for your competitors, too. This is way more fun than playing it on your computer, which is all programmed.” Growing up in Shanghai, Mimi Lansdowne said she started watching her family play mah-jong as a kid and began playing the game as a teenager. “We played every weekend as a gathering to chat and socialize over the mah-jong table,” said the retired restaurant owner. Michael Chen, another workshop participant said he, too, grew up in Hong Kong with mah-jong, but stopped playing on a regular basis after moving to Toronto in 1989 because everyone is busy and it is hard to get four players all at once for the game. “Here in Canada, people are more family oriented. Everyone stays with their family on the weekend,” said the retired radiologist. He noted another benefit of the workshop: “Depending on where you are from, the rules of mah-jong are a bit different for everyone. It is nice to have one international standard.”