Fierce competition and Lychee Martinis in an underground Mahjong Club
The idea for a mahjong competition for offices unexpectedly came to Bella Janssens, director of the architectural firm Food New York, which has collaborated with Virgil Abloh, Axel Vervoordt, and Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art. On a flight from Amsterdam in 2021, when travel resumed after the pandemic, she felt inspired while watching “The Joy Luck Club,” the 1993 film adaptation of Amy Tan’s 1989 novel, in which the intertwined stories of four Chinese women and their daughters unfold in rounds of the four-player tile-based game.
Although it originated in China in the 19th century, mahjong has long been popular in Southeast Asia, Japan, and America; it was brought to the United States by a Standard Oil company representative returning from Shanghai in the 1920s. Janssens, who hails from the Netherlands but grew up between the UK and Singapore, decided that she and her colleagues should play in Food’s Chinatown office after meetings or over lunch; eventually, those pick-up games grew into an amateur-friendly mahjong tournament that the company’s founder, Dong-Ping Wong, 43, and Janssens, 34, have been hosting twice a year since late 2021. Born and raised in San Diego, Wong had a typical second-generation immigrant relationship with mahjong. (His parents are from Hong Kong.) “I played it once, probably with my grandparents and great-aunts, and I remember winning that game,” he says, “and it wasn’t until 30 years later that I realized they were probably just now [messing] with me.”
The first Food Mahjong Club, in December 2021, was a hit. Wong and Janssens didn’t do much preparation other than buying some mahjong sets, designing a logo and sending out invitations to friends and collaborators in the design, fashion and art worlds. By its third iteration, last September, the ad hoc gathering had become a ticketed event at a defunct dim sum parlor in the 88 East Broadway Mall that benefited the community-building nonprofit Welcome to Chinatown and so on. drew 150 people. “A lot of our work is trying to engage the public in some way,” says Wong, noting that “a dream project for the office would be to build a community center in Chinatown.”
Here’s how the most recent tournament came together on a weeknight in March, when a few dozen people gathered at Food headquarters to learn the game, compete, socialize — and eat dim sum — after most of them inevitably lost.
The hosts: Wong and Janssens have worked together at Food New York for more than five years, where Janssens handles operations and Wong leads design. After leading the novices to the beginner’s tables and introducing acquaintances, Wong served as the tournament’s MC, counted down the rounds (“Twenty seconds to choose a winner!”) and guided those who advanced to their designated tables. Wong’s punctuality was a lesson learned from slackers at the first Food Mahjong Club, when the games went way too late. “Now I’m yelling at people to ‘get up!’ and ‘go there!’ and ‘finish your game!’” he laughs.
The rules: This tournament started with 32 players. After a quarter- and semi-final round, the remaining four players (creative strategist Brendan Chareoncharutkun, producer Wei-Li Wang, casting director Najia Li Saad and – quite coincidentally – this writer) competed for the prize of a new mahjong set. , which eventually went to Wang. Food Mahjong Club plays a Cantonese version of the game, in which players start with 13 tiles and win by completing a 14-tile hand of four sets of three tiles (called melds, similar to hands in poker) and one pair of eyes. Cantonese style is considered the easiest for beginners, unlike, say, Taiwanese style, which requires you to win with a 16-tile hand and has more complicated scoring conventions. For non-speakers, Wong and Janssens also designed maps that translated the Chinese symbols into numerical characters and the necessary vocabulary: pong when a player obtains three of a kind, or tingpai when they are one tile away from victory (the Mandarin equivalent of “uno”).
The location: The game took place at Food headquarters off Chatham Square, a studio on the ninth floor that can fit just six square tables, with just enough room to cram extra stools for spectators, a buffet for food and drink, and some standing room for those who are more focused on industry gossip. Wong and Janssens set the mood with red lights that evoked a Wong Kar-wai movie (or an “underground parlour,” as Wong puts it), though the exact color took trial and error. “The lights were a little orange and blue before we switched to red and pink, which made it look cohesive,” says Janssens. “You couldn’t tell there was a messy architectural firm behind you.”
The food and the beverages: The caterer Jamie Cheung from Edible things hosted a spread based on Hong Kong-style street food, featuring smaller bites and non-greasy bites (the better you can eat while drawing tiles), including hard shrimp dumplings, curry fish balls, and tea eggs. The centerpiece was a croquembouche, not made from profiteroles but from shoutao (long-lived peach buns filled with lotus paste, typically eaten during birthday celebrations for the elderly). In keeping with the night’s lychee martinis—the club’s signature drink—Cheung also served lychee-filled goji berries and chrysanthemum agar jelly in the shape of mahjong tiles.
The music: Wong created a Spotify playlist inspired by Hong Kong pop singer Sammi Cheng’s 1995 song “Du Jiang Shi Chang” (“獨家試唱”), which became the club’s anthem after Wong and Janssens listened to a track list that Chinatown community organizer Rochelle Kwan curated for the streaming radio station NTS. The mostly mid-tempo songs on Wong’s playlist – Cantopop hits from the 1990s and 2000s by Gigi Leung, Faye Wong and Ekin Cheung – hit the mostly 30- and 40-something crowd with a wave of Chinese-tinged nostalgia. “Some told us that they almost felt emotional,” says Janssens.
The equipment: While some Chinese Americans are lucky enough to play with vintage resin mahjong sets inherited from their parents (which are actually similar to versions you can find on Amazon), Wong and Janssens had to get creative given the number of tiles required. They borrowed sets from friends and family; Wong, asking his parents to lend him theirs, discovered an oversized set that his grandparents owned decades earlier in Hong Kong (but they didn’t send it from San Diego). The co-hosts also bought new sets from Walmart and Yellow Mountain Imports: sparkling champagne versions and emerald green ones that resemble pandan jelly. Somewhat controversial to the purists were the American sets, which have numbers printed on tiles with Chinese characters so that non-Chinese speakers don’t have to guess whether a character means five or six, for example.
The architectural touch: Wong says that while some mahjong players don’t use them, pushers — the ruler-like sticks used not only to arrange the tiles in straight lines, but also to count them — are essential. Depending on the style of mahjong, the pushers are the length of 13 or 16 tiles arranged side by side; because preferences differ, the tools often have to be purchased separately. Instead, some Food New York employees have made their own from balsa wood, the lightweight material used for design mockups. “We make a lot of models in the office,” says Wong, “so that was easy.”