And yet, during the third week of February, I found myself first at a dazzling private home in Dallas, and then at a luxury hotel, sitting down with my more refined counterparts to play in a competition in the epicenter of the country's American mah-jongg resurgence. First, a bit about how I got here. One of my oldest friends, Catherine'who, like seemingly half of all women in my middle-aged-mom peer group, had suddenly become obsessed with the game'came over to visit one afternoon when I was back in my childhood home for a stretch last summer, helping my mom recover from surgery. Catherine brought her mah-jongg set, along with the promise that she'd teach us and we'd love it and it would be so much fun. Initially, it did not feel particularly fun; it felt like learning a confounding new language, with Chinese characters, complicated rules (and exceptions for every rule), and hard-to-recall new words: crak, pung, chow, bam (and birdbam, another name for one bam, and also an excuse...
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