I was initially apprehensive about my mother’s invitation to attend her Mahjong group over reading week.
What was supposed to be a restful week of family time and sleep quickly became a period of existential floundering. Sitting in my high school bedroom “resting,” I felt increasingly like I was wasting precious minutes I could have been spending researching summer internships or declaring a major. In a moment of particularly heightened panic, my mother implored me to stay with her for the afternoon.
“You have to meet Sharon,” she told me.
And let me tell you, this Mahjong group was nothing like the dingy church basement I imagined it to be.
I’ll never forget my first steps into Sharon’s apartment. Stunning panoramic views of Midtown Toronto were displayed through floor-to-ceiling windows surrounding two sides of the corner flat, creating a moody blue and white backdrop for the overcast afternoon. But impossibly more astounding was the graceful appearance of a woman in my immediate foreground. Dressed all in flowy black, accented by her sharp silver pixie cut, Sharon’s eyes sparkled while she spread her arms wide as if she’d known me forever.
I was hooked.
For context, my mom met this enigmatic woman at a new volunteer position she had taken up at Ronald McDonald House, a charity organization housing the families of seriously ill children in hospital. As a newly established empty nester, my mom’s checklist for the future is majorly up for reconstruction. Though we occupy opposite spheres of life — she just left the formal workforce and I have yet to determine where I will enter it — our experiences are similar. People like Sharon are important figures for us lambs needing a shepherd’s guidance.
Roughly ten ladies my mother’s age or older gathered in the heart of Sharon’s open-concept nest and I was quickly sorted into the beginner group — my knowledge of the game was limited to what I’d seen in Crazy Rich Asians. I decided from the moment I met Sharon I needed to gain as much information about her as possible. Retrospectively, I apologize to the other members of the beginner table for taking time away from the Mahjong instruction to pepper Sharon with life and career questions, but I couldn’t resist!
Sharon’s life in a gorgeous condo spending her free time teaching other women to play Mahjong and volunteering to help families in need didn’t exactly line up with my assumptions about aging; she struck me as an anomaly.
So much of popular culture rejects the natural aging process, with celebrities injecting themselves with Botox and ingesting pharmaceutical youth serums. Recently, I’ve wondered how Hollywood will manage to cast realistic-looking elderly people in films and television shows with the rise of Ozempic-esque drugs.
Maybe I lack the perspective to comment on this as a young person, but this obsession with maintaining a youthful appearance has to suck a good chunk of energy that could be spent enriching one’s life with the self-assurance you gain having lived and learned. My parents have always said they wish they could return to their 20-year-old bodies with their 50-year-old brains.
Truthfully, I have no idea if Sharon has taken any measures to youthify her appearance. Frankly, that is none of my business. The point I’m trying to make here is that she doesn’t let her age deter her from trying new things and continuing to diversify her life experiences. I deeply admire that, and I know my mom does too.
When I asked her why she enjoys this complex game of strategy and luck, she quoted an interview Julia Roberts did with Stephen Colbert on The Late Show. Roberts said the purpose of Mahjong is “to create order out of chaos based on the random drawing of tiles.” For Sharon, and now for my mom and me, this is quite a profound insight, and something that can perhaps be extrapolated to life outside of Mahjong. The chaos of a period of life lacking clear direction can be terrifying, and it can also be beautiful.
Not once in my two hours of playing Mahjong that day did I think about school or my future. It was impossible to think about anything other than those intricate little ivory-coloured tiles and how they would fit into my chosen combination.
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