Sit down, you're playing

Hello. I'm Miss Flower. Before we do anything else today, let me tell you about the first time I played mahjong. January 2012. Taipei. I'd just come out of a dumpling place on Yongkang Street. The one on the corner, the one with the bamboo steamers stacked to the ceiling and the two old men at the counter who've been pleating soup dumplings by hand for forty years. Two in the afternoon, already too late for lunch, too early for anything else, and the perfect time to be walking around Taipei in January, because the winter sun does that low thing where everything turns gold, and you can't see your own breath but your hands feel it. Across the street, under a green awning. Four women at a plastic table. Tiles everywhere. They were laughing, and not the polite laugh you do with strangers. The real one. The shoulders-going one. One of them looks up, sees me standing there with my hands in my coat pockets, and just waves me over. Nothing said. I didn't speak Mandarin. She didn't speak a word of English. She pulled a fifth chair out, pushed a paper cup of tea across the table at me, and started handing me tiles. I had no idea what I was doing. None. I still don't know what they called the tiles that afternoon in Mandarin. Whatever the word was, I never caught it. I just watched them. For maybe an hour. And by the end of that hour, I understood enough to sit down at a table with four other humans and hold my own. That's what I'm going to do for you today. Not four hundred years of history. Not a textbook. The thing that happens when you pay attention at a table for an hour. Alright. Look down at your hand. Let's start.

Hello. I'm Miss Flower. Sit, I'll deal.

Four players. You're South, at the bottom.

Sixteen tiles each. Let's tidy yours.

Bamboos. Four, five, six in a row.

Characters. Two sevens, written in Chinese.

Circles. Two eights.

Dragons. Red, green, white.

Your flower is already showing. Bonus points.

East goes first. Watch the discard.

Two pairs. One becomes your fifth set.

Now we wait. Watch their discards.

Self-drawn, so it scores extra.

Sixty-one tai. Tai are points.

First hand, first win. Told you.

Same shape every time. Five sets, one pair.

That's it. You play mahjong now.