Heavenly Hand

What a surprizing gem!

I did not know what to expect going into this drama but I did not expect it to be so heartwarming and as touching as it turned out. I am only 5 episodes in and already I really like it. No joke, this might be the best TVB drama of 2025 and it is about Mahjong. What is going on?

The story is about Si Tou Kau played by Shaun Tam, running a Mahjong den in Wanchai called “Big Dragon Phoenix” or just TLF. His dad opened it and passed it down to him, but in doing so also passed down many problems that Shaun had to deal with. Shaun’s wife hated being linked to the Mahjong den because of how many lives it had ruined due to gambling, and Shaun promised her he wouldn’t take it over. For some reason he went against his word and took over the den from his father, forcing his wife to leave him and travel to the US. 20 years later, through a number of random brown box deliveries with USB pens, Shaun learns that he has a daughter his wife never told him about and that his wife had died of cancer, really ripping him apart inside as he had remained faithful and hoped she would return in those 20 years. He made it his mission to find and look after his daughter, who he does find. The daughter is played by Rosita Kwok and she is so cute in this drama. Shaun doesn’t want her to know she was his daughter so spends the entire drama acting trying to be a doting father without telling her why and it makes it look really sus to everyone around him. Great times!

You can tell the character Shaun was portraying was a great guy but with a few insecurities. He understands the effect his Mahjong den is having to the locals who gamble there and he does what he can to help them because he know it can ruin lives, but he keeps it running out of filial piety since it was handed over to him. Shaun plays this role very well and is also very funny, which is a huge change from his usual slow-motion quiet pace he has in his other roles. Here is is more dynamic and I feel it proves the guy has range.

We also find out more about his family. He had two younger “siblings” but they aren’t really his blood relatives. They were victims of abandonment after their mother lost all her money and secretly ran away, leaving them both at the den. Shaun took pity and decided to raise them as the older brother (even though he could actually stand in as their father. Weird!)

We also meet Shauns best friends, Willie Wai and Stephen Ho. It is so rare to see this guys in good guy roles and also being such great friends as well. Willie is a triad but a good guy, and Stephen is a cop but doesn’t mind associating with a triad and a Mahjong den owner. We get some great scenes of all 3 interacting and basically being best buds. The best character of them both has to be Willie as someone tried to bribe him to get him to help in taking over Shaun’s den, but no matter what amount was given, he refused and walked away. The scene where Willie called Shaun crying and saying it was all his fault he lost money was hilarious and also very touching.

We also get to see Ali Lee back on TV. She plays the younger sister of Willie and also the personal assistant of Shaun. She is secretly in love with Shaun - which is so obvious - and yet Shaun pays it no attention, treating her like a sister. The scene where she wants to quit because she thought he was wasting money buying an orchestra that had Rosita in it made him grovel and reveal the truth was very funny, but it was a great scene because Ali stayed behind after realising he was just trying to make up for all the years he had missed being her father. Buying the orchestra group was his way of being closer to Rosita. I found that rather strange though, why not just tell her immediately and show her the video clips her mom sent to Shaun? But hey, this at least gives us a reason to see Rosita hug her cello onscreen.

The big bad is - no surprize - played by David Chiang. In the past, Shaun’s dad and David gambled for the right to open a Mahjong den in Wanchai. Shaun’s dad had the better skill and won, so he opened TLF. David left and he kept his promise to not open a Mahjong den in Wanchai for all those years. He had opened many dens around Hong Kong but still was unable to do business in Wanchai, so started to plan methods to get in. His first approach was to become a shareholder of TLF, but Shaun refused. He then tried to bribe his best friend Willie, but that also failed. His last move was to bring all the people in the Mahjong association over to TLF to force Shaun to join the association, with hopes to slowly infiltrate it while it was beholden to the association rules, and yet again Shaun refused. David then indirectly threatened to steal all his business before saying it was just a “what if”. David is still on-form as the bad guy and I love it.

Episode 5 ends hilariously as Shaun’s daughter moves into his home at the same time as Ali, so I expect the next few episodes to get even crazier as they are al under one roof. Bring on the next episodes!

After watching all episodes: man what a ride. The drama gets a lot better with a lot of funny scenes especially with Shaun in them. I never thought I would ever see Shaun in this light, but there I was laughing my butt off at his interactions with everyone in his family and his 2 best friends. You also get to see him show his serious side when things get heated with David Chiang stepping up his attempts to get a foothold of TLF, and it does get very interesting when they face off against each other.

David Chiang is such a great character in this drama. Sure, he acts like this passive-aggressive old man with his veiled threats every now and again, but as the drama continued you get to understand that he had brain cancer so was trying to get into Wanchai via TLF because that was his only regret in life after losing to Shaun’s dad in the past. But we do get to see how Shaun and David’s interactions have a complex love/hate relationship that ultimately ends amicably since they do show periods of caring for each other. I ended up not hating David at all in this drama and feeling rather sympathetic, he was that good in the role. Also, he helped expedite Rosita finding out that Shaun was her father. This point was being kept a secret for ages and it was dragging on a bit, so David dropped a huge hint to Rosita that her mom had sent various USB pen drives to Shaun with interesting information about her father. When he did that, I thanked the writers for putting this in so we could get that subplot out of the way.

The entire path of Rosita finding the USB pen drives and watching her mom’s video clips made her aware she was Shaun’s daughter, and the build up of when they would tell each other they knew was a great area of tension as they all had various grandiose plans on how they would reveal this. However, the reveal was made in a very ordinary dinner setting where they were both having dinner with everybody still out, then Rosita suddenly blurted out “Brother Kau. I’m your daughter.” And you can see Shaun’s eye well up with tears as he replied “Silly girl. Brother Kau already knew.” That was such a great scene and showed you don’t need anything grand, just an honest heart-to-heart moment to make a really great impact.

Shaun’s adoptive brother, played by Telford Wong, is now a beat cop and is always partnered with one of Shaun’s best friends played by Stephen Ho. I found Telford to be okay here, but there was a time when he had feelings for Rosita and it did feel rather creepy since technically he is Rosita’s uncle. Luckily, the drama doesn’t take this any further than that and there was no romance otherwise that would have been real weird for viewers. When he eventually found out about the situation, he treated her like a friend. He was extra protective of both Rosita and his sister whenever he thinks they were being bullied, which led to some really funny scenes when he kept stopping Brian Tse to ask for his ID and giving him lectures.

Brian Tse was also really funny in the drama. He plays a world renowned international orchestra conductor who happened to get pulled into conducting the amateur orchestra Shaun bought to secretly be closer to his daughter. David Chiang tried to use Brian as a bargaining chip to get into Wanchai, but ultimately failed, because as fate would have it, he bought a drink from a shop ran by Telford’s younger sister and didn’t have any money. He left a video clip proclaiming his crime and to repay after 3 days or she can go to the cops. The sister threatened him with this and yes, it worked! One thing led to another and Brian ended up in a fake relationship with the sister before it bloomed into a real one. What I found most realistic about the relationship was how the sister was always so timid and shy, but around Brian she was like an angry wife shouting at her husband, very true to life! Loved it!

We know how much Ali loves Shaun, and we get many scenes where we see how Ali is smitten with Shaun and imagines sometimes of hilariously stabbing Shaun with a knife because she imagined the worst reply he would give to her suggestions, but he would always respond in a different manner that was always surprising and touching. They have this old married couple vibe as they call each other insults with no real malice behind the words because they are close and are like family. The drama decided to introduce a perverted serial killer stalker to stalk Ali and make creepy phone calls and approach her at bars. He sees how Shaun jokingly calls Ali a bitch and gets really upset, so he decided to ruin Shaun’s reputation by planting drugs on his clothes and calling the cops, and then kidnapping Ali to force her to like him and for Shaun to apologise for treating her so badly. I thought this would follow TVB classic tropes of saving Ali and then Shaun deciding to be with her because he realised how important she was to him, but nope, bad guy gets hit by a car as expected and dies, Shaun saves Ali, but instead of showing us the immediate aftermath of her being rescued, we get a flashback and then… boom… a fast forward cut to 2 months in the future. This was treated so poorly I had whiplash watching it, why skip the important scenes of possible PTSD and Shaun helping her through it? Instead we get a future skip right after a flashback!

Talking of things being treated poorly, I have a few more to raise. David and Shaun do have a mahjong battle face-off, as is expected whenever gambling is involved. They have two of them in fact, one where it was a 1-on-1 mahjong battle to become chairman of the Mahjong Association and this was a great scene. Shaun could have won, but took the opportunity to save David’s face and say they could become co-chairman of the Association, to which David agreed. It was the 2nd match near the end that was treated poorly. It was a 2v2 match with Shaun and Ali playing together. They had to win by getting 5 specific hands, so the first to get all 5 hands would win. The pace of this was too fast and there was no tension at all. The stakes were not high enough to make it a high risks game, they were again playing for the role of chairman to determine the future of the Mahjong Association. In the end, David secretly let Shaun win so he could lead the Mahjong Association to a new future, and I thought that was so unearned it made me think what was the point of the gambling if you’re gonna throw the towel anyway?

And right after this, we find how Ali is depressed and drinking a lot because she realised Shaun will never be with her. This came out of nowhere, like she was fine and then boom, depressed. She tells Shaun she was going to move out and instead of begging her to stay, he goes “yeah sure, my place is too small for a CEO to stay at.” Like who would say something like that? Suddenly, we get another future cut, 2 years into the future infact, and apparently Ali has not contacted Shaun at all during this time, with Shaun only knowing how Ali is doing through her brother. We see Ali finishing a meeting, getting into a car with her boyfriend played by Edwin Siu when suddenly she spots Rosita with her cello case walk by. Ali orders the car be stopped and she chases after Rosita to an area where she is serenaded with Beethoven’s Ode to Joy by the amateur orchestra. Then we hear a piano playing and it is Shaun Tam playing The Moon Represents my Heart by Teresa Teng, a song that Shaun and Ali listened together with in the past. Shaun used this opportunity to ask if Ali would like to move back into his home as he has a cheap room to rent out and he needed the money. She agreed - to which everybody cheered and the drama ends. Now, I wasn’t 100% sure what this meant, was Shaun saying he wanted to date her with that line and her agreeing? Why would Ali agree after 2 years of no contact with Shaun? Why did Shaun know Ali would see Rosita and get out if the car to follow her to that area? In fact, how did they know her boyfriend’s driving route to kick off that plan to begin with in the first place? What about Edwin since she was dating him at the time?

Despite the terrible ending, the humor and the touching scenes of the earlier episodes make this an easy rewatch drama. Shaun needs to win an award for his role here, he was great!

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