Chinese New Year arrives on Friday, but with COVID-19 infections still a danger, the festivities need to be kept to a minimum. So there’s no New Year’s parade in Chinatown and probably far fewer dancing lions. (One suspects there might be firecrackers.)

At this time of year, I always think of mahjong, the rummy-like game popular in Chinese and other East Asian cultures. The game has gotten some glory recently in the film “Crazy Rich Asians,” where in the climactic scene, Rachel sacrifices a game to her nemesis Eleanor to show her who’s the better person.

Things weren’t so dramatic when I was a kid growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Our family’s New Year’s get-togethers usually involved having our cousins from across the Bay come over to play mahjong. There would be two tables going on, while players traded off playing mahjong or making jiaozi (aka gyoza, mandoo or potstickers), which we’d all eat at the end of the day. No sports on TV to distract us from the clacking tiles, the yells of “peng!” to claim the third tile of a matching set, or “chi!” when you’re filling out a run, or the dramatic “click” when you tipped your tiles over to show off your winning hand.

We didn’t know at the time that mahjong was a gambling game, held in seedy backrooms in Chinatowns, where fights and shady deals would happen at the same time. In fact, because of its sketchy reputation, we kids were allowed to play mahjong only during New Year’s. While baccarat was played by the cool, suave James Bond, mahjong was played by the sweaty manager of a sweatshop.

As we all got older, and we went off to college and beyond, mahjong got left behind the way a lot of things from childhood do. But in my mid-20s, I got the chance to spend a few months living with my grandparents in Manoa after they had undergone major surgeries. My grandfather, then an emeritus professor at the University of Hawaii, and my grandmother had been steeped in classic Chinese intellectual culture. They would invite a friend over to play, along with their housekeeper, an excellent mahjong player.

Though not playing for money — at least not very much — the four of them played an aggressive, almost vicious game of mahjong far beyond anything I’d played as a kid. A friendly game it was supposed to be, but there was a lot of conniving, manipulation and intimidation going on at that table.

“I’ll give you this one!” my grandfather would say, slamming a tile down on the table as he discarded it. He knew that someone, maybe the housekeeper, wanted it, but in giving it to her like this he was signaling that he wasn’t going to be doing her any more favors.

For her part, the housekeeper was good at “rubbing” the tiles. While waiting her turn, she’d pick up a tile from the neat rows stacked in front of each player. She didn’t look at it, keeping it face down, but she’d rub it with her thumb, feeling its etched surface to figure out what it was — 4 bamboo, 5 balls or East Wind, for example. Among friends, this was considered an amusing stunt, but it wasn’t something you’d want to do with strangers.

Once someone claimed victory, there would be a rather poetic tabulation of the winning hand. Unlike poker, where there’s continuous betting until a final showdown, in mahjong a player first builds a winning hand by creating certain combinations of tiles, then gets points (or money) depending on what those combinations are.

So it’s not just about winning, it’s about winning with style. Did you build your combinations around a common number, like a 5? You could have 5, 6, 7 in balls; a 3, 4, 5 in bamboo; a 4, 5, 6 in characters; and a pair of 5s in any suit. Did you have special characters, like one of the Four Winds, or the character “fat,” (short for “fat choy,” from the traditional Chinese New Year’s greeting “kung hee fat choy”).

My grandmother, in her perfect Mandarin and opera-trained voice, would list off the combinations as if reciting Tang Dynasty poetry: “dui dui hu” — everything in pairs; “qing i su” — all one suit; “i tiao long” — a dragon, meaning the numbers ran all the way from one to nine.

My grandmother would go on to have a bit role in the 1993 movie “The Joy Luck Club,” which portrays the lives of four older Chinese immigrant women who play mahjong together. She died before she ever saw it, but thanks to that film, I can still hear her voice.