The Hand You Hold
Reflections from the Mahjong Table
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
After the Last Hand
The tiles are cleared.
The table is still.
What remains is presence.
This isn’t a book
about how to win.
If you’ve played long enough,
you already know:
the wins come and go.
The wall shifts
whether you’re ready or not.
And the hand you hold —
is never quite
what you expected.
But I wrote this
to sit beside you.
To say:
I’ve felt it too.
The rhythm.
The waiting.
The hesitation
before a discard.
The hand that fits.
The one that doesn’t.
Not every lesson
came from a win.
Some came at 2 am —
when the table was silent
and the round had just slipped away.
Some came in a folded hand.
In a tile passed over too soon.
In the grace
of letting someone else win —
because you saw
what they needed
before they did.
Mahjong doesn’t teach loudly.
It doesn’t ask for reflection.
But if you stay long enough,
it mirrors you
when you’re not looking.
So maybe
you’ll see yourself somewhere
in these pages —
in a discarded tile,
in a risk you didn’t take,
in a hand you never finished
but still remember.
And if not —
maybe you’ll just remember this:
You sat down.
You played.
You stayed.
And that,
was enough.
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
On the surface, The Hand You Hold is about mahjong — the tiles, the walls, the table, and the players. But beneath that, it’s a meditation on rhythm, patience, and presence.
Each chapter takes a moment from the game — the pause before a discard, the quiet after a win, the stillness between rounds — and turns it into a reflection on life. The book explores how we play, wait, lose, and begin again, revealing that mahjong, like life, is never just about luck or skill, but about character.
Written in spare, lyrical prose, The Hand You Hold is not a manual on how to win. It’s a companion for anyone learning to sit well — through change, through chance, through every wind — and a gentle reminder that what matters most is not the tiles we draw, but how we play the hand we hold.
About the Author
Goh Siang Han is a senior business leader whose work has spanned aviation, food solutions, and organisational transformation. Away from his professional world, he has spent years observing the quiet rhythms of people at play — especially at the mahjong table. The Hand You Hold is his first book, written to capture the lessons of patience, timing, and presence that the game has quietly taught him. He lives in Singapore and continues to write about rhythm, change, and what it means to sit well — both in work and in life.