More Mainers are learning to play mahjong, many from Melanie | Column

Maybe you read an article about how playing mahjong can help prevent dementia.

Or you saw actress Sarah Jessica Parker post about getting her 2026 American mahjong card.

You might have wondered how you could learn to play, or even Googled “Maine mahjong lessons.”

That likely would have led you to the Instagram account of Mainely Mahjong, run by Melanie Charest. The Saco native, who lives most of the year in Dallas, was introduced to mahjong by a friend who had been living in Seoul. Now, she plays a couple of times a week, which isn’t hard to do in the Texas city where there’s at least one game going every day.

When Charest, 52, started spending the summer in Maine after buying a house on Peaks Island in 2019, she missed her favorite hobby. So, she taught her relatives and neighbors how to play, hoping they’d help fill the void. She didn’t stop there.

“I wanted to share the game with more people,” she said.

And more people have wanted to learn. Since starting the Instagram account advertising lessons about a year ago, she’s taught more than 180 students, both at their homes and at events hosted by businesses that reached out to her, including Angoor Wine Bar and Mexican restaurant Lenora in Portland, Falmouth chocolate shop Mindy’s Munchies and Hurlbutt Designs studio in Kennebunk.

Charest is holding her first three-part lesson series in May at Eighteen Twenty Wines on Anderson Street in Portland. Although she was unsure how people would respond to the $100 price tag and multi-week commitment, she found out shortly after announcing it online.

“It filled up that afternoon,” she said.

THEN AND NOW

At a lesson at the Woodlands Club in Falmouth last month, Charest started with a short history of mahjong before getting into the playing pieces and rules, an amount of information that can feel overwhelming at first.

The game, which originated in China in the 19th century, consists of tiles that look like chubby dominos, with different characters representing suits and numbers. Their bright colors and designs are what Charest thinks might make the game more appealing to women, though she also knows men who play, including her husband.

The four players start with 14 tiles each, drawing and discarding them until their hand matches one of the winning combinations. In the American version of the game, developed by a Standard Oil employee who had been living in China, those combinations change every year — rules standardized by a group of women in New York City who formed the National Mah Jongg League.

Until it recently gained popularity in the U.S. among younger people seeking forms of social connection that don’t involve screens, the game mostly had been associated with older Asian and Jewish women.

There’s been backlash to that surge in interest. Some people take issue with what they see as wealthy white women co-opting the game — one such group started selling their own line of mahjong sets that removed the Chinese characters.

DRAWN TO PLAY

Charest learned the Chinese version first.

“The sounds the tiles make, the touching of the tiles is what really drew me to the game initially,” she said. (The name “mahjong” translates to “sound of sparrows,” a reference to the click-clacking of the tiles when they’re shuffled.)

Soon after, she learned the American version, which is now what she plays and teaches.

“I like order and structure. I like having to learn the rules and follow the rules and learn the sequences on the card,” Charest said.

Real estate agent and podcast host Elise Kiely, who arranged for Charest to teach clients and guests of her show at the Woodlands Club, plays on vacation in Florida and on Martha’s Vineyard.

“I love the intellectual challenge and strategy,” she said. “And it’s the one time I’m not looking at my phone.”

MAINE INTEREST

Charest said most people she teaches are middle-aged, and that was the case in Falmouth last month. The youngest students were around 40 years old, like Stephanie Mangum of Yarmouth who came because she has a lot of friends from going to college in North Carolina who play.

“I wanted to be able to partake on girls’ trips,” she said.

Charest has seen interest from younger people, too. She gave three private lessons to a group of women in their 30s who initially had signed up for a class at Back Cove Books in Portland that accidentally got overbooked.

One of them was Kaila McCracken, 33, of Portland, who had heard the host of a “Real Housewives” podcast talk about her love of the game and found the social aspect appealing.

“I feel like we’re all in a life stage where it’s easier to get together if you have an activity,” she said about herself and the two friends she convinced to come to the class.

They left the first lesson feeling like they were never going to grasp the game, McCracken said, but after the third, they were confident enough to start playing on their own and have continued to do so — including at a mahjong studio in New York City while they were in town to see some Broadway shows.

The types of mahjong parlors that have popped up in bigger cities have yet to appear in Maine, but libraries and community centers throughout the state host games and lessons, including the Waldo County YMCA in Belfast and the Jewish Community Alliance in Portland.

Evan Quintana, who has visual and mobility limitations that make it hard for him to get out of the house, has posted on Meetup and Facebook, inviting people to come to his Portland apartment to play, with some success.

Quintana, 36, learned the Japanese version of the game while living in Tokyo in his 20s and then joined a group of Filipino people who played Chinese mahjong when he moved back home to California. Now, that’s the style he prefers.

Every city where he and his partner have lived since — in California, Nevada, Florida — they’ve found games to join, often accompanied by potlucks, until they moved to Maine in 2022.

Although he doesn’t have a regular group yet, he’s seen a lot of enthusiasm from Mainers who want to learn to play, more for social reasons than competitive ones. He attributes the growing popularity here to increased interest in various aspects of Asian culture internationally, from anime to K-pop, as well as the trend away from doing things digitally.

“This day and age, there’s a lot of this desire to go back to things that are tactile,” he said, including vinyl records and VHS tapes.

He sees the hands-on nature of board games — the shuffling and dealing — as a reflection of that, and with mahjong in particular, the sensory stimulation from the click-clack of the tiles. He plays online sometimes but would prefer to find competitors here.

“Nothing beats playing in person,” he said.