For some, it’s a game. For Swampscott’s Amy O’Connor, mahjong is a chance to build a strong sense of community through a healthy, face-to-face outlet that strays from the increasingly digital elements of an age filled with social media and cell phones.
Through collaboration with Swampscott Recreation, O’Connor and her teaching partner Lytania Mackey have created a blossoming program: Mahjong Mondays. The sessions aim to educate community members about the game and to give them a chance to step away from the worries of daily life to make friends and learn more along the way.
Whether you’re a fresh-faced newcomer who’s a complete stranger to the game — or even a longtime player looking to polish your skills — community members are in good hands when it comes to O’Connor and Mackey’s step-by-step approach to the game.
“When I was a new mother, I was looking for a way to connect with other people and to have interests outside my role as a mother,” O’Connor explained. “It’s easy to become single-focused, and we wanted to be something more than moms.”
O’Connor remembered sitting by the pool at the Jewish Community Center with a group of moms, brainstorming new activities to embark on, which brought them back to childhood memories of seeing women hang around the pool and play mahjong together.
“I said, ‘I’d really like to learn how to play (mahjong),’ and some of the other women within earshot agreed. From there, we found someone to teach us, and it became a weekly ritual of getting together with friends to be face-to-face, not having any technology… It was really just a nice, old-fashioned way of building community,” she said.
O’Connor added, “It’s really exciting. Right now, my partner and I are running a program through the Swampscott Recreation Department. We teamed up with Mexacali (the restaurant in Vinnin Square) who gave us space, and we had 20 people who signed up in less than a day… It’s really social; it’s a great opportunity to sit around a table with three other people and have several hours together.”
Some of the classes have been held at locations like the Dockside Pub or Mexicali Cantina Grill, while other sessions have been held in places like Reading and Chelsea, O’Connor added.
She added that the game resonated with her almost immediately. In the 20 years since she’s learned how to play, she found that every time she introduces the game to a newcomer or group “that it has the same impact,” and that “rarely is someone completely disinterested in learning.”
“There will always be people who don’t want to play, but I found that people are very quickly drawn into the complexity of the game, but also the socializing that happens along with it… I think that we all play lots of games — particularly with our phones — so, to have something that’s so face-to-face is so tactile,” she said. “I think it’s a powerful connection between players.”
In order to make the classes appealing to everyone from hardened veterans of the game to fresh faces who have never played a round before in their lives, O’Connor covers the complexities of the game through a step-by-step process to help ease people into it.
“The sense of community that you build by sitting around a table and playing the game with other people is really a strong connection,” she said. She added that the game can help keep the mind sharp and help stave off cognitive decline.
She said the National Mahjong League, which produces the cards players use to inform them about the rules and way the game can be played, donates the proceeds of card purchases to Alzheimer’s organizations.
O’Connor said what she loves about teaching is that her community has expanded.
“There are people that I have known here in town that joined my class that I’ve gotten to know better… This has been a really wonderful experience for me,” she said.
She continued, “I’m doing something that I absolutely love. Both playing the game and being able to make a business out of it is really a dream come true. They say, ‘If you like your job, you never work a day in your life,’ and that’s how I feel.”
O’Connor said the program entails her teaching almost every day to a group that varies in size from eight to around 20 participants.
“I’m busy, but I love it,” she said. “It’s taught me that you can really make a go at something that you love, and that may have seemed like idle time… One of the other things that I love is that as I teach different people, there are different things to help it ‘click’ for them. There’s so many different ways to help them learn.”
