My dearest table guests, welcome back.
This is the order of the tile, and I am Prim.
You are invited to enjoy issue #10 and before Prim says a
single word about strategy or sets or the summer circuit, she
would like to stop. She would like to ask you to
stop with her. At this table.
We remember This is the Issue of the Year in which a weekly
newsletter about a parlour game in a community that is
overwhelmingly made-up of American women has to
acknowledge that the Monday coming is not an ordinary
Monday. It is Memorial Day, the day this
country has set aside to remember the soldiers who did
not come home. Prim has family who served and
who serves and family who did not come home, and she is not
willing to publish an issue about flower pairs and push away
without first saying plainly and with no ornament that the table
we sit at this weekend is the table their sacrifice made
possible. She would like to say one more
thing before the issue begins because the community this week
has been asking for it in quiet ways and Prim would like to
answer clearly. There are a great many active
duty and veteran women in this community.
There are Military Wives and military mothers and military
daughters at tables across this country who play this game
precisely because the game is a respite, A ritual, a gathering
that has nothing to do with duty and everything to do with
presents. The joy these women find at the
table is not separate from their service or from the service of
the people they love. It is connected to it because
the purpose of everything they do and everything their people
do is to protect the possibility of a Thursday afternoon at a
kitchen table with four friends, a rack and a wall.
Prim would like this issue to be for them.
The tagline for this week was going to be something else.
Prim has changed it. At this table.
We remember that is the tagline, that is the frame.
Everything in these pages this week is in service of it.
We will still talk strategy because Prim would not honour
this community by stopping the work.
We will talk about the discipline of the hand that
cannot close, which Prim believes is the 2026 cards Quiet
Memorial Day lesson. We will talk about how to
acknowledge the day at your Thursday game without
awkwardness. We will meet military women,
past and present, for whom this game has been a refuge, A ritual
and in some cases a lifeline. We will look at the role this
game played in Jewish American women's wartime circles and in
veterans hospitals after the war.
And we will spend a long, careful moment with the sets and
mats that carry the visual language of patriotism without
cheapening it. Pull up your chair.
The wall is built. Let us begin.
Let us begin with what everyone is talking about.
This is the draw. The community pulse this week
has been unusually gentle, and Prim thinks it is because the
calendar ahead is a serious one. The Facebook groups have been
quiet about the typical fare. Fewer set drops, fewer
tournament debates. What Prim has seen in the last
72 hours, in larger numbers than she expected, are posts from
women serving whose husbands or partners served, whose mothers
and or fathers served, whose sons and daughters are serving,
whose grandmothers played Mashong on weekends when their
own husbands were overseas. The community is telling its own
stories this week in its own time, and the Mashong part of
the story is, for many of them, the part that held the rest of
the story together. Prim has been reading these
posts all morning. She would like the rest of the
community to read them, too. Scroll slowly this week, comment
when you have something real to say.
Do not scroll past a post from a Gold Star mother without
pausing. The community has always been
more than a set of tiles and this week is the week we are
reminded of it. The Mediterranean cruise
returned to port this week and the photos that came out of the
cruise are, as predicted, breathtaking.
Prim will post a round up in the next issue when the community
has had time to debrief for this week.
Suffice it to say that the first major destination of the summer
calendar executed well. Destination Mahjong delivered.
The players who went had a remarkable time.
The next wave of destination events is now within the
registration window for several of you and set your rack.
Below will have the particulars. One piece of news worth
flagging. Several Jewish community centres
across the country have announced that they will be
hosting Memorial Day weekend community play sessions, many of
them with a small donation component directed to veterans
organisations. Prim will list the ones she has
confirmed below. If your local JCC is running
one, Prim would gently suggest that this is a better Memorial
Day activity than whatever the hardware store is advertising.
Sit down, play a hand, give a few dollars.
Remember the reason the day exists.
The game you love can do good work on a day that asks
something of all of us. Which brings us to crack the
card. The hand that cannot close on
the 2026 card. Prim has been thinking all week
about which Crack the Card lesson fits this issue, and she
has landed on one that is a little unconventional because
the weak deserves it. The lesson is about the hand
that cannot close. Every player in this community
knows the feeling. You are in round 8, The wall is
thin, the tiles you need have been thrown and called and are
gone, and the rack in front of you is not going to win this
game. The question is what you do from
that moment forward. Most players have never been
taught an answer. The 2026 card, more than any
recent card, rewards players who have thought carefully about
this exact situation. And Prim would like to walk you
through it. Because the discipline of the
closing out hand is the mahjong analogue of a much larger kind
of discipline. And she thinks it is the lesson
that belongs in this issue #1 the hand is over.
The game is not. The first thing to understand,
and the thing most players get wrong is that the moment your
own hand becomes unwinnable is not the moment the game becomes
unimportant. The game continues.
Other players still have hands they are trying to close.
The discards you throw from this moment forward are information
the rest of the table is reading.
The calls you make or do not make still matter.
A player who mentally checks out when her own hand is lost has
forfeited not just her own game, but her participation in the
game. Everyone else is still playing,
and this is a subtle but real violation of the communal
contract of the table. You finish the game with
attention, or you do not deserve the seat you are sitting in.
Prim will say it that plainly because she believes it #2 the
defensive pivot is a form of honour.
Once your hand cannot close, your job changes.
You are no longer building, you are defending.
Your task for the remainder of the game is to make it harder
for the player who is closest to winning to close her hand.
This is not petty, this is not sour.
This is the game as it is actually designed.
Every tile you throw is either a gift to someone or a stone on
her path. Read the exposures at the table,
read the discard pile, identify who is closest, and throw the
tiles that are least useful to her.
A player who executes the defensive pivot well, even with
a hand that is long dead, often changes the outcome of the game.
Not her outcome, someone else's. That shift is a form of honour.
The closing out player who plays defence well is the player who
earned her seat. The closing out player who
throws whatever she feels like because she has given up, has
given up on more than her own hand.
Do not be her number 3. The closed hand as a category
teaches this discipline. The 2026 card has several hand
families that are best approached as closed hands,
which means the entire hand is built from the wall without
exposing any meld to the table. The closed hand strategy is the
strategy of discretion. You are holding your cards
tight. You are giving the table no
information. You are accepting that your win,
if it comes, will come late, quietly, and without warning.
The closed hand teaches exactly the discipline Prim is
describing. You play the whole game as a
private document. You win if you win without
fanfare. You lose if you lose without
collapsing. The closed hand is a meditation
on patience, on privacy, and on the idea that the strength of a
player is not in what she shows, but in what she carries quietly.
Prim does not recommend the closed hand as a primary
strategy on every card. She does recommend that every
player spend a season training in closed hand discipline
because the discipline transfers the closed hand player even when
she is not playing. A closed hand plays every hand
better. Her discards are cleaner, her
reactions are smaller, her exposures, when she does use
them, land with more weight because she has held back so
long #4 what this week's discipline looks like in
practice. Prim is going to be direct about
what this section is really about, and she trusts you to
take it in the spirit it is offered.
The discipline of the hand that cannot close is the discipline
of doing your duty after your own reward is gone.
It is the player in round eight who plays the remainder of the
game with attention because the game deserves attention.
It is the soldier who finishes the mission after the personal
glory is impossible. It is the firefighter who goes
back into the building after she knows the building will not be
saved. The discipline of the lost hand
is a small weekly rehearsal for larger kinds of discipline that
other people in other contexts have practised at much greater
cost. Prim would not normally draw
this kind of line in these pages.
This week she will. The card we are holding this
year is a good card for learning this lesson.
Play the hand that cannot close. Play it well.
Remember why you can now. This publication receives
questions, many questions, and this week the question arrived
from several hosts, phrased almost identically.
This is the table is asking. I am hosting my Thursday game
this week, and it is the week before Memorial Day.
I want to acknowledge the day, but I do not want to make it
awkward or performative or political.
Is there a right way to do this, and what is the wrong way?
Prem has thought about this one carefully because it is the kind
of question where well meaning hosts can easily overshoot and
make something more awkward than if they had said nothing.
Let her give you her answer in three parts, because there is a
right way and there is a wrong way, and the difference matters
#1 the right way. The right way is small,
specific, and brief. Before play begins, as your
guests are settling and you are pouring the first round of
whatever you are serving, you say something like this.
Before we start, I just want to acknowledge that Monday is
Memorial Day and I am thinking this week about anyone at this
table whose family has served or whose people did not come home.
If you want to say anything about someone you are thinking
of, there is a moment here for that.
And if you just want to play, that is also entirely fine.
Then you stop. You do not extend it.
You do not turn it into a speech.
You let the table do what the table does.
Some guests will say a name out loud, some will not.
Both are correct. You have opened the door.
What each guest chooses to carry through it is hers #2 the wrong
way. The wrong way is anything that
turns the moment into theatre. Do not ask each guest to share a
story. Do not prepare a reading.
Do not play a video. Do not decorate the table in
red, white and blue unless you would normally decorate the
table in red, white and blue for a summer kick off, which is a
different kind of decoration with a different meaning.
The wrong way is always the version that makes the evening
about the host's performance of reverence rather than about the
guests own relationships with the day.
Memorial Day at a private game is a quiet acknowledgement, not
a programme #3 the middle way, which Prim has seen done
beautifully in several private games she has attended, is to
add one small gesture that is specific to your table, a place
setting at an empty seat. Not explained, Just present a
single candle on the sideboard lit before play, A bowl on the
table for any guest who wants to contribute to a veteran's
charity, with the name of the charity on a small card and no
one asking who contributed what. The gesture is specific.
It is easy to ignore if a guest is not in the mood for it, and
it is there for the guest who is.
The gesture does not interrupt the game.
The gesture sits alongside the game the way all the best table
rituals sit alongside all the best games.
Choose the gesture that matches your table.
Do not choose more than one. The other question Prim was
asked, which she will answer briefly here because it is
adjacent. What do I say if a guest at my
table shares something heavy and I do not know what to say back?
You say this. Thank you for sharing.
Then you sit in the silence for a moment.
Then you play the hand. That is all that is required.
The pressure to respond with the perfect thing is the thing that
keeps hosts from creating these moments in the 1st place.
You do not have to say the perfect thing.
You have to make room for the real thing.
The table will take it from there.
Prim will close this section with one last piece of advice,
because it matters. Some players at your table this
week will be carrying more than they are showing.
A woman whose child is currently deployed and who has been
carrying it privately. A woman whose parent is a
veteran with declining health and who has not told anyone yet.
A woman who lost a sibling decades ago and for whom the day
has never gotten easier. These women will be at your
table on Thursday. You will not know who they are.
Play gently this week. The game will do its work.
Sometimes the most important thing a table can do is provide
a few hours in which a player who is carrying something can
put it down, forget about it and focus on the rack in front of
her. Give your guests that kind of
table. That is the real
acknowledgement. Now.
This publication makes it a point to recognise those who
distinguish themselves in the community.
Not through volume. Heavens no.
Through substance. This is who's talking.
And this week we are talking about the women who served, the
women who wait, and the game that held them.
Military women have been playing this game for longer than most
people realise. Prim would like to spend this
section with the women in this community, whose relationship
with American Mahjong is inseparable from their
relationship with service. They are not a small group.
They are, by Prim's rough estimate, hundreds of thousands
of women across the country, and they include active duty service
women, veterans, military spouses, Gold Star mothers, and
the daughters and granddaughters of all of the above.
The game has been a quiet companion to American military
life for most of its American existence, and the stories you
hear when you start asking are remarkable.
Prim has been collecting a few of them.
This week. She would like to share. 3 #1
The Mahjong circle at the base. Prim heard from a reader, a
career Navy wife who asked to be identified only as Kay, who
described the mahjong circle she started at a base in Virginia in
the early 2000's. The circle met weekly in a room
the base Chapel made available. The players were a mix of wives,
a few active duty service women and one retired Army Colonel who
had learnt the game from her own mother in the 1970s and who Kay
said was a fearsome player. The circle was not advertised.
It did not have a name. It met for seven years.
Kay wrote that during deployments when her husband was
overseas. The Thursday Circle was the only
reliable structure in her week, and she can trace friendships
she still keeps to the women she met at that table.
The circle ended when the chaplain who had been
championing it retired and no one quite had the energy to
restart it. Kay would like the community to
know the circle existed and that it mattered, and that she is
still in touch with 11 of the regulars from those years and
that three of them have started Marsh on groups at new bases
where they or their husbands were later stationed.
The pattern replicates the game travels with the families.
Prim would like more of us to know this number 2 the VA
hospital rec room. Another reader, M, is a recently
retired occupational therapist who worked in VA hospital
settings for 32 years. She wrote to Prim to say that
American Ma Chong has been a quietly effective therapeutic
activity in several of the VA rehabilitation settings she
worked in, particularly with women veterans recovering from
injuries that affect fine motor control, attention, or cognitive
sequencing. The game requires exactly the
kind of sustained, multi dimensional attention that
rehabilitation protocols are often trying to rebuild, and the
social structure of the four player table produces motivation
that solo exercises cannot match.
M has run mahshong groups as part of her therapeutic work for
20 of her 32 years, and she wanted the community to know
that the game has done real work in places most mahshong players
will never see. She also noted that the wider
community sets, donations and instructional materials have
been a meaningful resource in these programs.
If you have a set you are no longer using and you are looking
for somewhere to send it, Prim will say on EMS behalf that your
local VA Hospitals recreation therapy department is worth a
call #3 the tournament champion who flew helicopters.
The third story Prim will tell briefly because the reader asked
a woman Prim we'll call Jay, who is now a retired Army Warrant
Officer and a current regular on the tournament circuit, learned
Mashong in 1998 from a friend at Fort Rucker in Alabama while she
was training to fly helicopters. She carried a travel set to 4
subsequent assignments, including one in Germany and one
in South Korea, and she started small tables wherever she went.
She has even placed in the top ten at Greenbrier.
She would like younger women in this community, military or
civilian, to know that the game is not incompatible with a
serious career and that the women who play this game include
women who have flown combat helicopters, commanded platoons,
served as military physicians, and raised children in service
or on their own while their spouses were overseas.
The game belongs to all of them. The community is richer for
every one of them. Jay was not sure anyone would
want to print her story. Prim is glad to honour the
players at your own table. The community this week is full
of women like KM and J, and you will not always know which of
your table mates fits this description.
What you can do is play gently, listen carefully, and carry the
awareness that the game is held up in part by women whose
relationship to the larger idea of service is more direct than
most of us will ever experience. If one of your regulars is a
veteran, thank her this week. If one of your regulars has lost
someone, sit with her. If one of your regulars is
actively deployed or has a spouse who is, ask her how she
is and mean it. The table is a place where these
things can be said without ceremony.
This week, more than most, the table should do its work.
And now a brief indulgence because this author believes
that one cannot play well if one does not play beautifully.
This is tile envy, where we Cove it openly and without apology.
Prim wants to walk a careful line in this section because
red, white and blue mashong sets are a real category and she does
not want to mock them or endorse them uncritically.
The honest truth is that some patriotic themed sets are lovely
and some are garish, and the difference is in the restraint
of the designer. Prim would like to point you
toward the restrained end of the spectrum this week, because a
Memorial Day table deserves a visual vocabulary that matches
the weight of the day, not the aesthetics of 1/4 of July
cookout. See, the mAh Shong line has
several colorways over the years that have leaned into Americana
without caricature. They're crisp white and true
blue palettes in particular carry the feeling of a classic
American aesthetic without the pageantry of full flag colours.
A table set with crisp white tiles, a white mat, and a simple
white linen runner feels appropriate for the week in a
way that a red, white and blue sequin set may not.
Prim would argue that the grown up version of patriotic table
design is about palette, not about flags.
For the tile set itself, Prim would point you toward the
vintage collectors market this week, not the new design market.
There are sets in private collections from the 1940s and
50s, often owned by families whose original buyer was a
military spouse or a post war bride, that carry the aesthetic
and material signature of that era.
If you have access to such a set, whether in your own family
or through a collector friend, bringing it out for Memorial Day
week is a more authentic gesture than buying anything new.
The set has seen this week before.
Let it see this week again. One last note on the accessory
side. Several brands in the community,
including some that Prim has featured in these pages, offer
modest percentages of sales on specific items to veterans
organisations throughout the year, not only during Memorial
Day week. If you are shopping this week,
do a little homework on where your dollars go.
The brands that are giving quietly year round are the ones
worth supporting far more than the brands that mount a
performative Memorial Day sale and then go silent until the
next holiday. Quiet generosity is the
aesthetic of this week. Let it extend to how you spend
as well as how you decorate. Now to matters of the calendar.
Where shall one be seen this season?
This is set your rack. The summer destinations are
confirming dates. Destination Mahjong's San Diego
Double Tournament is 2 weeks from this weekend and
registration is now firmly closed with a wait list in
place. The Shriners Mahjong Tournament
in Austin on June 20th still has open slots.
Destination Mahjong Atlantic City in mid August has about 60%
of its registrations filled, which is typical for this point
in the calendar. The full calendar is beginning
to solidify. Mashong World Championship in
Las Vegas is tracking for its usual October scale, with
registration running slightly ahead of last year at this
point, which Prim would note as a meaningful indicator of
overall community growth. Mahjong Fever Late Summer
Preview The next major Mahjong Fever event is a late summer
resort destination, and Prim has heard enough community buzz
about it to say that it is worth considering if you are still
deciding on a late summer event. The fever culture, which Prim
discussed in Letter 9, is the warmest on the national circuit,
and late summer registration tends to fill rapidly beyond the
schedule a Memorial Day thought. Prim will close this section
with a thought that is not on any calendar.
Several veterans organisations across the country run ongoing
game programs that welcome civilian volunteers, and
American mAh Shong has begun to show up in some of these
programs in recent years. If you are a player who has been
looking for a way to contribute that uses the skills and
community you already have, these programs are worth a
conversation. The game you know how to play
could be taught at your own pace in a setting where the
transmission would matter to the person receiving it.
This is not a call to action. Prim will make every issue.
She is making it this week because the week calls for it
this weekend. Memorial Day Monday, May 25th,
wait list destination. Mahjong San Diego double
tournament June 5th through 7th open.
Shriners Mahjong Tournament Austin, TX June 20th Open
destination Mahjong Atlantic City August 16th through 18th
open Mahjong Fever late summer destination event open Mahjong
World Championship Paris Las Vegas October 16th through 18th
Check your local Memorial Day weekend community sessions.
You may find a fun game in your area.
Full event calendar at the order of the tile.com/events.
And finally, because this author believes every player deserves
at least one piece of knowledge that makes her the most
interesting person at the table, we close with crack
intelligence. Prim would like to offer this
section not as a history of the game during wartime, which is
too large a topic for a single section, but as a history of the
circles of women who kept the game alive through the most
difficult American decades of the last century.
The story is specific, regionally varied and largely
undocumented in any academic sense.
What follows is what Prim has pieced together from
conversations with older players, reading in the
Catskills, oral histories and her own family's stories.
The bibliography is thin. The practice was real.
In the 1940s, as the American economy mobilized for the Second
World War and millions of American men went overseas, the
women who remained at home formed countless informal
mashong circles that functioned as much as grief and waiting
structures as they did as game groups.
The circle Prim's dear friend described in a small town in
Ohio, met every Wednesday afternoon in one of four
rotating kitchens. The players were all Military
Wives. The game was the reason to
gather. The gathering was the reason to
endure the week. When telegrams arrived, the
circle was often the 1st place the news was told.
When the men came home, the circle continued because the
women had become each other's primary friends by the end of
the war in a way that even marriages did not always match.
Some of those circles ran for 40 years.
Some of them are still running in modified form through the
daughters of the original players.
The Jewish American women's circles of the 1940s and 50s,
which Prim has referenced in earlier issues, were a central
variant of this pattern. The Catskills connection Prim
covered in letter 4 is part of this story.
The resort communities and the urban neighborhoods that fed
them were built around intergenerational women's
gatherings, where the game was the anchor.
The National Mahshong League's founding in 1937 had
standardised the game enough that these circles could
function across geographies. A woman who learnt in Brooklyn
could join a circle in the Catskills, could visit a cousin
in Cleveland and sit down at a table that played recognisable
hands. The standardisation was its own
kind of infrastructure, and during the war years that
infrastructure held. the VA hospital story is different and
less discussed. After the Second World War and
again after Korea and Vietnam, American mahjong showed up in VA
rehabilitation settings in ways that are almost entirely
unrecorded. But M, the occupational
therapist who wrote to Prim this week, confirmed from her own
career the game's combination of fine motor practice, cognitive
sequencing, social interaction and gentle competitive structure
made it a useful tool in rehabilitation contexts,
particularly for women veterans returning with injuries that
affected attention and sequential processing.
The formal documentation of this practice is nearly non existent
because the therapists who used the game were generally running
informal groups rather than publishing academic results.
But the practice existed. The game did the work.
The women it helped now have great great grandchildren
carrying on their legacy, and the stories they told mostly
disappeared with them. The thing Prim would like you to
carry from this section is the simple recognition that the game
you are playing has been load bearing for a very long time.
It has held women together during wars.
It has rebuilt attention in VA hospital rec rooms.
It has kept widowed spouses in community for decades after
their circles original purpose had changed.
This is not a story about mahjong as a metaphor for
anything. This is a story about mahjong as
itself, a set of tiles, a card, a wall, and four women doing the
work that community always does when it is done well.
At this table, we remember. We remember the women who built
this community in circumstances we will never fully understand.
We remember the soldiers their tables waited for.
We remember that the game we play on a Thursday afternoon was
once the thing that made a Thursday afternoon bearable for
a woman whose husband was somewhere she could not reach.
Play this week with that awareness.
The wall is built from more than tiles.
Remember a memorial weekend note for the families, the veterans
and the mothers who waited. If you are a veteran reading
this, Prim thanks you. If you are the mother, spouse,
sibling or child of someone who served, Prim thanks you.
If you are a Gold Star family member, Prim honours you.
If you are none of the above, and you are planning to sit down
at a Mashong table this weekend with people whose lives have
been touched by service in ways you may not know about, play
gently. Ask less than you usually ask.
Listen more than you usually listen.
Let the table do its work. If you are moved to give this
weekend, Prim would gently suggest the Tragedy Assistance
Program for survivors, known as TAPS, which supports military
families grieving a loss, and the USO, which has supported
military personnel and their families for more than 8
decades. And finally, Mission 22, which
works to prevent veteran suicide and to support the families it
touches. All three are widely respected.
All three would welcome your contribution.
The amount does not matter, the gesture does.
Subscribe at the Order of the tile.com if you have not yet
forward this issue to the women in your life who should be
reading it, especially the ones who have served or who have
loved someone who served. Everyone deserves a seat at this
table, and this week more than most, the table is for them.
Until next week, may your rack be blessed, your Charleston
ruthless, and your remembrance clear eyed.
This has been the Order of the Tile issue #10 at this table we
remember. Do forward this to your favorite
4th. Everyone deserves a seat at this
table, and everyone deserves to be properly informed before they
take it. Until next Thursday, dear
listener. Prim as always.