In the past few years, mahjong tiles suddenly traveled overseas and became an export item. In European and American societies, many people learn to play mahjong; later the disease was also spread to Japan. At one time, mahjong became the most fashionable game in Western society: almost every table in the club was occupied by mahjong; bookstores published many brochures on mahjong, and Chinese students who had no money could earn money by teaching mahjong. money. Europeans and Americans are crazy about mahjong.
No one would have dreamed that the vanguard of Eastern civilization’s conquest of the West would be those 136 generals!
This time I traveled from Siberia to Europe, from Europe to America, and from America to Japan. In ten months, I only saw someone playing mahjong in a club in Kyoto, Japan. Mahjong is almost invisible in Europe and the United States. I once asked friends in Europe and the United States, and they said, "In women's clubs, you can occasionally see two tables playing mahjong, but that is rare." I often see mahjong in American homes. The boxes of the cards—with exquisite carvings and decorations—are displayed indoors, and sometimes a family has two or three pairs. But I never see the hostess talk about mahjong; they never ask me, the representative of the mahjong country, for the secrets! Mahjong has become an antique on the shelves in the West; its craze has subsided.
I asked an American friend, why did the mahjong craze pass so quickly? He said: "The ladies like mahjong, but the men are against it. In the end, the men won."
This is what we expected. The hard-working peoples of the West will never become believers in Mahjong, and will never be conquered by Mahjong. Mahjong is just a patented product of the "spiritual civilization" Chinese nation like us who love leisure and do not cherish time.
In the late Ming Dynasty, a kind of playing card became popular among the people, called "Ma Diao". There are only forty tiles in Ma Diao, ranging from one to nine, one thousand to nine thousand, ten thousand to ninety thousand, etc., which are equivalent to the tubes, ropes, and ten thousand zi of mahjong tiles. There is also a "zero", which is the ancestor of the "blank board". There is also a "ten million", which is the "ten million" of Huizhou playing cards. Each horse tag has a character from "Water Margin" painted on it. The "Wang Ying" on the Huizhou playing cards is the relic of the short-footed tiger Wang Ying. The complete collection of Wang Shihan, a native of Qianlong and Jiaqing, contains horse tags of several celebrities. (In "Cong Mu Wang's Series".)
Ma Diao was very popular in that day, and the scholar-bureaucrats beat Ma Diao all day and night, neglecting all official matters. Therefore, after the fall of the Ming Dynasty, Wu Meicun's "Sui Kou Chronicle" said that the death of the Ming Dynasty was due to Ma Diao.
Over the past three hundred years, the forty-card mahjong tiles have gradually evolved into five-card playing cards, and in the past seventy or eighty years, they have become four-card mahjong tiles. (There are three people playing Ma Diao against one person, so it is called "Ma Diaojiao" and the provincial name is "Ma Diao"; "Mahjong" is the pronunciation of "Sparrow", and "Mahjong" is the pronunciation of "Ma Diao".) The changes become more and more complicated. It is clever, so it can confuse people's hearts even more, making men and women in the country, no matter rich or poor, no matter whether it is cold or hot day or night, waste their energy and time on these one hundred and thirty-six cards.
The British "national opera" is Cricket, the American national opera is Baseball, and Japan's national opera is Kakuai. What about China? China's national opera is Mahjong.
On average, every four rounds of Mahjong takes about two o'clock. To put it bluntly, there are only one million tables of mahjong in the country every day, and each table only plays eight rounds, which takes 4 million hours, which is a loss of 167,000 days, money won and lost, and energy wasted. Still outside.
As we travel around the world, have we ever seen any advanced nation or civilized country willing to waste time and night like this? A friend who studied in Japan said to me: "The Japanese people are so hardworking! At night, when you climb up and take a look, every wooden house is full of lights; under the lights, either young people are jumping and reading, or old people are kneeling and flipping through books. , or an old woman kneeling to do her work. At dawn, the streets and trams are full of children going to school.
In fact, it’s not just Japan. All progressive nations are like this.
Only an unmotivated nation like ours regards "leisure" as happiness and "recreation" as an urgent matter. Men regard playing mahjong as a leisure, women regard mahjong as a daily routine, and old women regard playing mahjong as a big career for the rest of their lives!
In the past, reformers said that China had three evils: opium, stereotyped writing, and small feet. Although opium is not banned, it is still illegal. Although there are still those who practice "foreign stereotyped writing" and the more fashionable party stereotyped writing, the four-letter writing of stereotyped writing is a thing of the past. The little feet are almost gone. Only the fourth pest, Mahjong, is still flourishing day by day without any sign of decline. No one says that he is a serious danger that can destroy the country. Recently, Mr. Mahjong actually went to the West to show off once, and almost made opium and bayberry as a gift in return. But now he has withdrawn and returned to be the quintessence and national opera of a country with Eastern spiritual civilization!
Afterword
"Reflections on Traveling" originally had more than these six items. I plan to write forty or fifty items to make a travel note. But I was rushing to write "History of Vernacular Literature" at the time and was too busy, so I put the travel notes on hold. Now I keep these six items here, because it is probably impossible to write a special travel book.
Nineteen, three, ten, Hu Shi.