On Secret Underground Gambling Dens

Boys,

I want to paint a scene for you. You’re walking down a darkly-lit hallway. You’re following somebody but they’re 15 or 20 feet ahead of you and with the low light, you can’t see much. There are doors on either side of you as you continue down the hallway and you hear ambient noises that are at first faint, but grow louder and louder the further down the hallway. It looks like the person leading you is looking back at you, but you’re not quite sure. Eventually, the hallway runs out into a single door. The person leading you is waiting. As you reach them, you start to speak, but before you get a word out, the person bangs loudly on the door with the side of their closed fist. You hear shouting and what sounds like unsteady rain on a tin roof. You don’t know where you are and you have the overwhelming feeling that you don’t belong there. Suddenly, all the noises stop. A small window slides open on the door. The person leading you yells something that you can’t make out. The slide on the door yells back, and the person you’re with yells again. The slide shuts. The door opens.

Smoke billows out into the hallway, and you can make out the glow of kerosene lamps inside a large room. The low noise you heard earlier erupts into the sounds of people shouting, and the pitter-patter of tap shoes fills the gaps between shouts. Only it isn’t tap shoes. It’s some kind of tile-like game. “What is this place?” you think to yourself. Suddenly, the door slams behind you and your mom is standing there. Her eyes are furrowed and touches her forefinger to her lips. She’s wrapped in a blanket and is wearing wooden-thong sandals and socks. “What is going on?” you think. She then points to an empty chair at one of the tables and shuffles to one of the far tables in the room. Then, like coming out of a dream, you wake up.

I say all that to tell you that your mom is now a Chinese lady. I know that might sound shocking, but she’s made the decision to dedicate her free time to playing a game called Mahjong. In case you haven’t visited Shanghai recently, here’s a little what’s-what about Mahjong.

Mahjong in Five Bullets

• A long time ago, around the 1800s in China, some people made up mahjong to have fun and maybe win some coins. It was like a super cool card game, but with tiles instead of cards.
• You play with four people and a big pile of 144 tiles with pretty pictures—like dots, sticks, and dragons.
• The goal is to make your tiles into special groups, like three or four that match or go in order, plus one pair. It’s like building a tiny tile puzzle faster than everyone else.
• You take turns grabbing a tile from the middle and tossing one you don’t want. If you see a tile you like, you can grab it and you yell “MAHJONG!” to win.
• If you play too much, you become a Chinese woman.

I should have seen it coming. The variety we used to know in our Doordash orders were becoming more and more Asian. The scowl that I was taking as general annoyance toward me was really just her narrowing her focus, as if training to better see the tiles.

Now don’t get me wrong; I still love your mom and I support her transition from former collegiate athlete and American mother of two. I don’t know for sure if she’ll give up golf completely to dedicate herself to the clickity-clacking of the tiles, but it will be difficult for all of us if this is the case.

Yesterday I got a text message from your mom that said she was unwell “physically and mentally.” I didn’t know what to make of it, but by the time I got home, she said Julie needed her and that she’d take Koen while I took Reagan to soccer practice. Reagan and I were to drop the two of them off. I didn’t think much of it.

When Reagan and I were walking toward the field, someone asked me if we were “team lime.”

“I don’t know,” I responded. “But I can find out.”

I called your mom and she was quick to answer. “What?” she said abruptly? Did I call her during a movie? What could be the reason for the annoyed tone? “Uh,” I stammered. “Are we team lime?”

“Yes.”

“OK. Someone asked and I wasn’t sure so…”

Click.

After practice, we head over to Julie’s since the plan was to pick them up after practice. I notice cars in the driveway, but when we made our way inside, there was no one there aside from the caged dogs under the TV in the living room showing a recap of that day’s golf. But where were the people?

Reagan and I check the basement. As we made our way down the stairs, your mom and four other women were huddled around a square white board with a wall of tiles scattered across it. Their eyes all met mine at once like alley cats getting caught rummaging through the days discarded trash. Koen, I assumed, was somewhere safe. Or was he? Was that two dogs upstairs or one dog and Koen in a cage? Who has time to parent when Mahjong is on the brain!

Fortunately, Koen was well and melting his brain with youtube videos of smoke detectors — his new obsession. Reagan and I recused ourselves from the situation — better to not ask questions you don’t want the answers to.

I fear that a Mahjong board will soon be delivered to our house, and that our basement that us currently full of bourbon and golf memorabilia will soon turn to brass lamps, dark curtains, opium smoke, and passed out Chinese women from the night before. We’ll need to come up with code words or secret signals to identify when the authorities are coming to check for an illegal underground gambling den.

Back to the dream. You get up from the table and back slowly to the door, calmly search for the handle and open the door without arousing any suspicion. As you back out and shut the door, you realize it was the door from our playroom to the basement. Was it a dream? Or was it the start of the rest of our lives, living with a Chinese lady that we used to call “mom?”

Time is a flat circle; past and present collapse, and in this moment, our basement becomes a crossroads where a newfound passion binds us to a lineage of players, the stacking of tiles, and a new history to which our future is still unwritten.

Or maybe she’ll get tired of it and go back to golf once the weather gets better.

Either way…

Love you boys,

Dad