Joy Luck Club members meet for a pre-lunar new year dim sum and a game of mahjong.Handout
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The following is a personal piece from Julia Chung, co-founder and chief executive officer of Spring Planning Inc. in Vancouver and president of The Financial Planning Association of Canada, in commemoration of the Lunar New Year on Sat., Feb. 10.
Canadian women with backgrounds from and connections to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and China didn’t have a seat at corporate board tables until recently. We know how valuable it is to be present in situations in which we can springboard important conversations, build relationships and make decisions. So, we decided to create our own seats through a game that started in China more than 150 years ago.
I first met Stephanie Sang, CEO of Granted Consulting, to discuss how clients of my financial planning firm would benefit from her expertise. Through that conversation, we discovered many common relationships, including Bonnie Foley-Wong, founder of Pique Ventures, an impact investment company, and Tania Lo, CEO of Tandem Innovation Group, a fractional financial and accounting services firm.
Recognizing the potential synergies between our enterprises, we initiated the idea of starting our own Joy Luck Club, regular meetings over a game of mahjong. The club provided us with an avenue for social interaction, business discussions and the metaphorical “seat at the table” that was not always available to women and people of colour. We decided to create our own table.
“Joy Luck Club is an exploration of self,” Tania Lo explains. “It gives us the opportunity to collectively share and seek stories from our ancestors, experiencing them today with friends and close colleagues. We are braiding together new and old experiences.”
Our inaugural meeting took place six years ago at Vancouver’s Terminal City Club, which, to our delight, had a beautiful mahjong table in storage. Although Bonnie Foley-Wong’s relocation to Toronto and the pandemic momentarily halted in-person gatherings, we found solace in online mahjong games.
In 2021, as the world reopened, our mutual colleague, Tara Landes, founder of management consulting firm Bellrock, learned about our initiative. “You play?” she asked. “That’s a Jewish game too, you know. I want in.”
Tara’s entry to the club sparked the expansion of our club beyond Asian roots that has continued to grow to this day. Suzanne Siemens, co-founder and chief operating officer of Aisle, who joined in 2023, sees intergenerational healing in the games we play together.
“As a child among the noise, food and chatter, I recall feeling a slight sense of abandonment from the adults while they played late into the evening,” she recalls. “Mahjong was their happy social escape. Now, thanks to the Joy Luck Club, I uncovered another way to engage with my mom.”
We come from diverse linguistic backgrounds, with varying degrees of proficiency in our parents’ language. Some of us speak it fluently, some received language lessons, and some are beginning to learn how to read the characters on the tiles.
Most of us have children, and many of these children are – like me – of mixed racial heritage. For me, growing up in a small town in British Columbia, there were limited ways for my brother and I to access our Chinese culture. Mahjong was always a mysterious thing I associated with my grandmother, and our Joy Luck Club is a way of connecting with her.
Our monthly discussions at the mahjong table cover the intricacies of mixing cultures and, of course, delve into our professional lives as consultants and business owners. The bonds forged at this table have evolved into a robust network in which we rely on each other for problem-solving, pathway development and connection-building. We’ve supported launches of new jobs, businesses and books. We’ve helped each other find financing and coached each other through tough decisions.
Our Joy Luck Club, now boasting 18 members and growing, offers a unique space for collective storytelling, the exchange of ancestral wisdom, and the strengthening of community and business ties. The learnings we glean from these gatherings reverberate through our families, our businesses, and our communities, ensuring we each have a seat at the table.
The sound of the smooth mahjong tiles gently bumping up against one another is familiar, and oddly soothing. What’s different now is I can understand the language being spoken, and my hands are among those moving the tiles and building the walls.
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