Clack clack clack

I'm proud to be Chinese -- our ancestors were pretty smart. We invented noodles, silk, gunpowder, ping pong, and apparently, we also founded America way before Columbus had his first serving of pasta. And we also invented a card game named mahjong. More than that, we made three-dimensional glass tiles so that you didn't have to hold the cards in hand for a four-hour round. You could eat, drink, gesticulate wildly while telling stories and play, all at the same time. If you had a flair for theatrics, you could also discard tiles with aplomb, stack the deck with style and bang on tiles to showcase a lovely winning hand or disgustedly to knock the bad luck out of a lousy one.

I first learned how to play mahjong from my Singapore Recreational Club softball teammates. We were on a training tour of China and somewhere between Beijing and Shanghai, I stacked my very first deck of tiles, and promptly knocked it over before I refined my game etiquette (there is a lot of this -- rule number one: do NOT be slow). We played softball during the day, played Pictionary at night and travelling between cities when 10 people couldn't crowd around two seats to draw and yell, we played mahjong.

Now, for anyone who's ever played a team game, you'd know how close you can get with your teammates, particularly if your team had a good mojo going. We had a fantastic one. We came from all backgrounds -- college, no college, veteran, rookie, English-speaking families, Chinese-speaking families, had our own set of wheels, took the public bus everyday -- it didn't matter. Over mahjong, we bonded like a perfect double play, like a spot-on centrefield-second base-catcher tag-out assist. We talked softball, then we ate, chatted about our mutual love for travelling, ate again, sassed each other out and joshed about everything else, and when we ran out of things to talk about, we talked more softball. And then we ate.

So I learned how to play mahjong, and I learned about a whole new world outside my prestigious private school education, and I love it. Whenever I'm home, all I have to do is send an email with one word: "Mahjong?" And we'd set a date. For the last 10 years, I've considered my mahjong kahs (legs -- a nickname for partners) some of my closest friends. They say it's not possible to have that many good friends, but it is. There really are that many good people around. You just have to make sure you've got the mahjong chops to go with it.