4 months ago
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Posted On: June 26th 2026, 12:25 pm
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From Metaphor to Social Practice ii
this realization changed how i think about my mahjong ritual.
at first, mahjong had entered my work as a diasporic symbol. i imagined it as a participatory performance that might open conversations about memory and belonging.
i never seriously imagined making the mahjong ritual at all until i wandered into the energy field that @od.as.is @notorious.wednesdays notorious wednesday had already built. every wednesday, uncle chin’s lounge becomes something institutional language cannot quite hold. rappers, singers, djs, and artists return week after week. nobody waits for permission from gatekeepers. there is remarkably little hierarchy in the room. people come, simply, to witness one another. the people in it have folded themselves into each other’s growth.
only after sitting in that room for a while did i begin to imagine mahjong differently. perhaps the ritual was never about mahjong at all. perhaps it was about the longing of the diasporic body to enter that same ecology of celebration.
i now think the mahjong table is an invitation into a different social relation. competition is there, but competition is braided inseparably with companionship. the game moves through conversation and waiting, through the reading of gestures and the celebration of other people’s winning. the artwork, if there is one, is the social intelligence that gathers in the air above the table.
for some time, i have run a separate mahjong gathering on tuesdays, a table of its own, and i have decided to bring it into wednesday, alongside od @od.as.is and the world he has been tending there. it is an admission that my table does not need its own door. it needs to dissolve into a living thing already in motion, to become one more current in a river that was flowing before i arrived and will go on flowing. to merge the tuesday ritual into wednesday is to stop curating my own carnival and to accept the humbler, larger gift of joining someone else’s. no longer a performance about community but a chair pulled up to its actual table.
this realization changed how i think about my mahjong ritual.
at first, mahjong had entered my work as a diasporic symbol. i imagined it as a participatory performance that might open conversations about memory and belonging.
i never seriously imagined making the mahjong ritual at all until i wandered into the energy field that @od.as.is @notorious.wednesdays notorious wednesday had already built. every wednesday, uncle chin’s lounge becomes something institutional language cannot quite hold. rappers, singers, djs, and artists return week after week. nobody waits for permission from gatekeepers. there is remarkably little hierarchy in the room. people come, simply, to witness one another. the people in it have folded themselves into each other’s growth.
only after sitting in that room for a while did i begin to imagine mahjong differently. perhaps the ritual was never about mahjong at all. perhaps it was about the longing of the diasporic body to enter that same ecology of celebration.
i now think the mahjong table is an invitation into a different social relation. competition is there, but competition is braided inseparably with companionship. the game moves through conversation and waiting, through the reading of gestures and the celebration of other people’s winning. the artwork, if there is one, is the social intelligence that gathers in the air above the table.
for some time, i have run a separate mahjong gathering on tuesdays, a table of its own, and i have decided to bring it into wednesday, alongside od @od.as.is and the world he has been tending there. it is an admission that my table does not need its own door. it needs to dissolve into a living thing already in motion, to become one more current in a river that was flowing before i arrived and will go on flowing. to merge the tuesday ritual into wednesday is to stop curating my own carnival and to accept the humbler, larger gift of joining someone else’s. no longer a performance about community but a chair pulled up to its actual table.
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