Amy Lo

The book of Mahjong/an illustrated guide, is presented as the only book that deals with Cantonese, Taiwanese and Shanghainese rules of the game. True? True is: more than twenty years after The Chinese game of Mahjong (Perlmen/Chan), almost 25 years after The Complete Book of Mah-Jong (A.D.Millington) and nearly forty years after Mah Jong for beginners (Kanai/Farrell) there is, at last! a new book on mahjong that deals with the modern insights about the game as it is played nowadays.
Author Amy Lo ('born in Canton, China, divides her time between Hong Kong, Tokyo and the United States', she has played mahjong for thirty years) claims that in the last few decades, the migration of Asians to the West has increased dramatically. 'As a result, mahjong has become more popular in Western societies, a trend that has heightened the need for a good English-language book on the game'.
The book of Mahjong is a must-have for mahjong fans. Hong Kong mahjong Old Style and New Style are by now rather well known in the West; thanks also to the software Hong Kong games that are available. She explains quite clearly the rules and the pre-game preliminaries of these variants. She also gives the Cantonese and Shanghainese terms of the situations. The 'Cantonese game' she deals with is what in the West is mostly called Hong Kong mahjong Old Style; the Shanghainese game is 'Hong Kong mahjong New Style'.
Very little is known about the Taiwanese game (with sixteen tiles) and the 12-tile game. The latter is played exactly as the 13-tile game, except that each player draws 12 tiles instead of 13. The 13th tile is the invisible tile, which can be any matching tile a player wishes to designate in his winning hand. This greatly increases the possible winning combinations.
It is just too bad the editor of the book has been a bit careless. In some cases. the text refers to situations that are erratically illustrated. E.g. the winning hand of eight flowers is illustrated with a hand that contains a number of winds. And, on the opposite page, the illustration of an example of a winning tile after a Gong (Kong) does not contain a Gong at all.