The Night I Got Banned: Writing 1200 Words of Quiet Confession on a Mahjong Table

I didn’t come here to win. I came because the tiles whispered when no one was watching.

That night, my account was suspended. Not for cheating. Not for spending too much. But for writing 1200 words in the quiet between hands—words that didn’t fit any algorithm, any reward system, any ‘honor’ they tried to sell me as a player.

I sat alone on the top floor of my Manhattan apartment, the gray-blue light bleeding through the blinds like dusk settling over an old book. My cat, ‘墨’, curled beside me—silent, observant, unimpressed by bonuses or streaks. She knew I wasn’t here for profit.

Mahjong taught me this: every tile is a memory. Every pause is a breath. The ‘golden dragon’ isn’t in the game—it’s in your hesitation before you risk another draw. The ‘bamboo breeze’ doesn’t come from mechanics—it comes from stillness after loss.

They called it ‘gamification.’ I called it grief disguised as joy.

I used to chase high-fan patterns—‘Thirteen Orphans,’ ‘Pure Flush’—believing if I waited long enough, I’d be rewarded. But rewards are not given; they’re earned by presence.

The RNG said it was random. But my heart knew better.

There is no such thing as fairness when your soul has been reduced to data points and your patience becomes a metric.

So tonight, instead of playing again—I wrote.

Not for clicks. Not for shares. But because silence remembers what algorithms forget: that we don’t play games to escape ourselves—we play them to remember who we were before the system tried to rename us.

You don’t need more tiles. You just need one moment—to feel what you lost.