“I stumbled into co-founding a mahjong club. Now it’s one of the biggest in the city”

I grew up in Reading, about 65 kilometres west of London. There wasn’t much of an East Asian community, or at least not one I was involved in, and I often felt like I was stuck between identities. Chinese is my first language—I started to learn it when I was a baby—but I never learned to read or write in it, and I’ve lost much of what I did learn. My dad is a second-generation immigrant to the UK, and my extended family are split between the UK and Hong Kong. My parents prioritized teaching me about my Chinese and British heritage, but I felt social pressure outside of the house to be either one or the other—not both. It took a lot of trial and error to figure out how to feel comfortable in my identity.

This also meant that I didn’t grow up playing any mahjong, the tile-based matching game that’s popular all over East and Southeast Asia. My parents played when they were young but gave it up when they had kids. It wasn’t until 2018, when I was visiting family in Hong Kong, that I learned some of the basics. My aunt had gone to play mahjong with her friends in the next room after dinner, and when my cousin found out I didn’t know how to play, she gave me a crash course.

I took to the game instantly. I was drawn in by the combination of skill and luck—I liked that you could come back from being dealt a bad hand but could also win by chance even if your gameplay was a bit shoddy. In mahjong, four players draw tiles and swap them into and out of their hands. You win if you’re the first to craft a full hand of matching sets and runs. And like all good board and card games, once you know the rules, it’s easy to chat while playing—it’s not so intense that you have to be locked in.

In 2021, a few years after my first game, I came across an ad for mahjong lessons at the Hackney Chinese community centre, which I’d heard about through friends. The city was coming out of lockdown, and I was fresh out of a relationship and eager to fill my free time. Doubly so because my job as a videographer had grown a bit stale. Doing formulaic work for corporate clients was hardly fulfilling, so I was in need of a distraction.

I went to a lesson, and it quickly became clear that I had a natural aptitude. I tried to hang back and let the other players at my table figure it out in their own time, but they could tell I already knew how to play and started asking me strategy questions when the instructors weren’t available. I tried to be helpful, and eventually one of the event organizers noticed and suggested that I help run the lessons instead.

Pretty soon, I was one of the coordinators for the Four Winds Mahjong Club. There were only about 20 people attending when I started, but that eventually ramped up to over 40. I helped out by teaching newbies and coordinating game nights for people who were comfortable with the rules. I loved it—it diverted me from my boredom and forced me to be more social. It was also the first time I had really felt like part of an East Asian community. Suddenly I was hanging out with people I shared so many experiences with; we could chat in our hybrid mix of English and Cantonese about our stereotypically chatty Chinese aunties or being forced to sit at the kids’ table when our families went for hotpot.

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In my professional life, on the other hand, I was ready for a change. I’d never lived abroad before, and the more I thought about it, the more I was interested in having that new experience. In 2023, I decided to move to Toronto. I’d never even been to Canada, but I liked that there was no language barrier and getting a work visa was simple. Plus, the city looked cool. I put the rational side of my brain, which was terrified to move to a foreign country, on pause and uprooted my life that spring.

It was a hard move—Toronto can be a lonely city. I was living in a shared sublet on Danforth, doing freelance videography and working in a café, but I wasn’t close with my housemates, so right away I had to try to work out that social muscle. I found Torontonians friendly, but most people seemed to have a set friend groups that could be hard to break into. It didn’t help that I was determined to make friends with Canadians and not just fellow Brits, which I thought would defeat the whole purpose of coming here. I knew it would be lonely—I had lots of international friends back in London who had warned me—but it’s hard to understand how omnipresent that loneliness can be until you’re faced with it. I’m an introvert, but it’s different when being alone is the default instead of a choice.

Luckily, organizing mahjong every week in London had made me comfortable putting myself out there. Shortly after I got to Toronto, my Instagram algorithm fed me a post about a mahjong meetup in the city. I’d missed the date, but I reached out to the organizer to ask about future events, and she put in touch with Hannia Cheng, an artist, musician and community organizer, who had helped set it up. Hannia had equipment—tables, chairs and a few mahjong sets—from running previous events. But, between their art and other commitments, they had no capacity to make it a consistent thing. I had no equipment or connections in Toronto but lots of free time, which made us a great team. We thought it would be fun if there were a Toronto chapter of Four Winds, like a sister club.

Our first event was in June of 2024 at the Chinatown Centre mall, where we set up eight folding tables in a hallway. We didn’t advertise the event well—I think it was mainly Instagram stories—but we managed to fill up all 32 slots and ended up having to turn potential players away. People walking through the mall saw the games going on and were naturally drawn in, especially once they found out it was free.

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There was clearly demand, so Hannia and I started hosting regular events. We were building up that same feeling of community that I’d loved in my mahjong club in London. Hannia and I became friends, and I got to know more and more people, slowly forming my own Toronto friend group. We hopped around venues, but last May we started weekly game nights at the Wong Association on Spadina, a historic family organization that has been operating in Toronto for over 100 years. We’re lucky to get to use their space for free—in exchange, we help them out with their events and run special mahjong events for their members. We host mahjong every Wednesday night on a pay-what-you-can basis.

The club just keeps growing. We’re up to 15 tables now from our initial eight, with an average of around 70 players per night. That number jumps to 150 or 200 during special events like Lunar New Year. The money we collect goes toward new tables and tile sets—and snacks for the amazing volunteers who keep it all running.

Mahjong has a reputation as an old folks’ game, but most of the crowd at Four Winds Toronto is under 40. That surprises people, and I get asked a lot why the game is so popular with younger generations. I think it has to do with community building. You play at a table with three other people, so you basically have to socialize. Toronto also has a glaring lack of accessible and free community spaces. In the winter, it feels like you can’t meet up with your friends without dropping at least $50. We’ve always tried to prioritize mahjong as a third space and keep it as barrier-free as possible. People tell me I could be minting money if I charged people to play, but I have no interest in commodifying the community we’ve built. All the money we collect goes right back into it, and we plan to keep it that way.

There’s also an important cultural aspect for a lot of people who decide to learn mahjong. During the pandemic, there was a new wave of racism toward Asian people in the West, and I think a lot of diaspora children who didn’t previously have strong ties to an Asian community started to seek them out. Playing a game with a rich cultural history like mahjong can feel like a way to reclaim one’s identity.

Because of my terrible Chinese, I have a hard time communicating with older relatives who don’t speak much English. But now I can play mahjong with them and still share a connection through the game. I hear the same from many of our players. I spend a lot of time lugging heavy mahjong sets up and down stairs, but it feels so worth it when people come back from visits abroad and talk about how the game helped them connect with their families.

The mahjong boom among young people isn’t just a Toronto phenomenon: clubs are popping up all over the world. Our players started asking me where they could play while they were travelling, so I’ve started pulling together a database, reaching out to clubs all over the world and adding them to the list. A lot of the organizers have been really into it, so we put together a group chat with mahjong club leaders from around the world. I’ve made friends who run clubs in places like the Netherlands, California and Vancouver. It’s amazing to connect with others who are also finding community through mahjong, and we hope to all play together one day.

I always knew that my time in Canada might not be permanent, so it’s been a goal from the start to have Four Winds be self sufficient. I’ll be moving back to London when my visa expires next summer. I’ll be sad to leave Toronto but happy to see the club live on. The idea has always been for the club to sustain itself if any of the organizers left. Since it has turned into its own thing, we’ve changed the name: All Flowers Mahjong. It’s our way of signalling that anyone is welcome to come learn how to play.