My Descent Into Mah-Jongg

When my mom found out I was planning to travel to Dallas to play in a Lunar New Year mah-jongg tournament, she texted a reasonable query: “Don’t they require some level of competence?”

And yet, during the third week of February, I found myself first at a dazzling private home in Dallas, and then at a luxury hotel, sitting down with my more refined counterparts to play in a competition in the epicenter of the country’s American mah-jongg resurgence.

First, a bit about how I got here. One of my oldest friends, Catherine, who, like seemingly half of all women in my middle-aged-mom peer group, had suddenly become obsessed with the game, came over to visit one afternoon when I was back in my childhood home for a stretch last summer, helping my mom recover from surgery. Catherine brought her mah-jongg set, along with the promise that she’d teach us and we’d love it and it would be so much fun. Initially, it did not feel particularly fun; it felt like learning a confounding new language, with Chinese characters, complicated rules (and exceptions for every rule), and hard-to-recall new words: crak, pung, chow, bam (and birdbam, another name for one bam, and also an excuse for players drinking alcohol to clink glasses and take a sip). At one point, I realized my brow was actually furrowed, my hands were on my head, and I was having flashbacks to BC Calculus, brain fully engaged, answer still elusive.

“At some point,” Catherine assured us, with a sunniness I did not yet feel, “you’ll even be able to chat while you play.”

I wasn’t hooked, but I was intrigued. I liked the way the tiles, colorful and sleek, each the size of a chunky domino, looked and felt, slightly weighty in my hand. I liked how they clacked when I swirled them together or stacked them in neat rows. I liked that I hadn’t checked my phone, hadn’t been able to, such was the required concentration, as we played. And I liked the promise of the game: that if I put in the effort to learn the tiles and the language and customs and the rules, I could become privy to a subculture of sorts, an activity that connected me not only to my peers but to those who came before. I also realized that to get good, or even competent, I needed to play regularly and continue to be taught, and that is how I began my monthslong descent into the delightful rabbit hole that is mah-jongg.

In the stretch since Catherine gave me that first rudimentary lesson, I have played mah-jongg with one group that meets Tuesday afternoons in a small café in downtown Washington, D.C.; another that gets together Wednesday afternoons at a series of rotating locations; and yet another that plays Friday afternoons at the local Jewish community center; at a weekly mah-jongg night at a D.C. public library; at a fundraiser for my 7-year-old’s elementary school; in the kitchen of a mom’s home in my neighborhood; in the foyer of the home belonging to a woman I met through the Tuesday-afternoon group; in an airport bar with Catherine; with a group of college friends when we gathered at the home of one undergoing a particularly grueling regiment of chemotherapy; with Catherine and another childhood friend during a weekend getaway to Annapolis, Maryland; and at the office of a publicist I’d last talked to nearly two decades ago but whom I reconnected with once I learned she represents Oh My Mahjong, the company that hosted the Lunar New Year tournament. “That’s mah-jongg for you!” she said.

I have played American mah-jongg, Chinese classical mah-jongg, and various online versions. I have paid to play and played for free. I have played in casual games with fellow beginners, where lessons were part of the experience, and in more competitive games, where I struggled to keep pace. But what I found, almost everywhere I played, was an incredibly welcoming group of people. Unlike, say, joining a running club, where my postpartum body and slow pace would leave me self-conscious, I never once felt uncomfortable showing up solo to a group full of strangers and announcing, “I’m here to play mah-jongg.” The barrier to entry, I found, was almost always just an eagerness to learn. So I bought a $300 ticket for the tournament in Dallas, the equivalent of someone who has just discovered rec-league basketball deciding to show up at WNBA tryouts.

Mah-jongg has hit its loose sesquicentennial, and the game suddenly seems to be everywhere, all at once. Celebrities, too, have been gushing about the pastime. Meghan Markle featured her “Mahj squad” on an episode of her Netflix show, Amy Poehler spoke of her “Mah-jongg May” (presumably like Dry January, but more fun), and Kelly Ripa and Sarah Jessica Parker enthused about the game too. Blake Lively reportedly had her chauffeur bring her bespoke mah-jongg set to a long day of court during her suit against her former costar Justin Baldoni. And when Oh My Mahjong hosted a suite at the Super Bowl this year for the players’ wives, the Patriots’ Drake Maye and Hunter Henry both stopped by to play.  I was not entirely surprised, then, to see that designers have gotten in on the action, offering over-the-top sets ranging from $695 (Jonathan Adler) to $14,600 (Hermès). By contrast, a seemingly perpetually sold-out Costco set came in at roughly $100, and stores such as Target and Hobby Lobby offer sets for even cheaper.

I understood the appeal. The beguiling combination of strategy and luck. The state of flow, for a phone-free hour or two. The mental stimulation, not unlike jigsawing a puzzle or inking a crossword. The sensory delight of the tiles and colors. The excuse to gather, and sense of community, because four people are required to play (though you can improvise your way through games with three, or even play “Siamese mahj” with just two). The joy of a book club, without the stress of reading a book. But I also wondered: Why now?

Mah-jongg started sometime in the mid-to-late 1800s around Shanghai’s Yangtze Delta area, a part of China known for its rich history of game development, before slowly spreading to the country’s urban centers, where it gained popularity as a mostly male, mostly gambling pastime, according to Annelise Heinz, a historian at the University of Oregon. In the early 1900s, an American Standard Oil representative named Joseph Park Babcock became instrumental in introducing the game to other Americans living in China. Along with his wife and business partner, he kicked off mah-jongg’s U.S. debut with a massive advertising campaign in 1922. The game was so successful that by 1924, Congress passed a law that included a specific duty category for mah-jongg sets.

“It’s hard to overstate how big of a fad this was,” Heinz, the author of Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture, told me. Like most fads, mah-jongg slowly began to fade. It was still played in some pockets (in Chinese American communities, among the wives of Air Force officers), but its next resurgence did not come until the late ’30s, this one driven by a group of enterprising Jewish women. As Jewish families entered the middle class and began moving to the suburbs, Heinz told me, these women did not need to work outside the home, but they found themselves bored and isolated in their new communities, looking for ways to connect. So, in 1937, they founded the National Mah Jongg League, which still exists today and has become the unofficial governing body for American mah-jongg, and began tweaking the game, which came to include joker tiles and a changing card that players must purchase anew each year for $14 ($15 for large print).

Until recently, mah-jongg was mainly played by older Chinese Americans (both men and women) and Jewish women. But as I started dabbling in the game, and as my social-media feed mysteriously filled with mah-jongg content, I noticed what I began to think of as the Lilly Pulitzerization of mah-jongg. Or, put more bluntly, Bougie White Woman Mah-Jongg. I was flooded not just with images of mah-jongg mats and tips on how to best deploy my flower tiles (never pass them during the Charleston), but with mah-jongg luxury: beautiful tablescapes of bright pastels (dainty glasses of rosé alongside dusty rose tiles), sun-kissed tableaus of “AquaMahj” (floating mah-jongg tables in glinting private pools), offers to upscale mah-jongg retreats, and gauzy photo upon gauzy photo of jauntily dressed, gel-manicured, and, yes, almost always white, women playing mah-jongg. (I should note here that I am white, nominally Jewish, and also partial to gel manicures.)

Although all versions of mah-jongg use, broadly, the same set of tiles, and involve four players around a table forming sets and sequences to try to complete winning hands, variants of the games diverge significantly from there. Many Asian versions more closely resemble gin rummy, and the strategy rests in the much more elaborate scoring. In American mah-jongg, much of the real strategy comes before official play ever begins, when players engage in the “Charleston”, named after the Roaring ’20s energetic dance, by passing tiles around the table up to six times. This pregame swapping allows you to begin to make your hand, discarding tiles you don’t need, while simultaneously sussing out which tiles your opponents might be hoarding.

The American version of mah-jongg has prompted a backlash, especially against white-owned companies, whose tiles are sometimes unrecognizable to a traditional player familiar with the three main suits, craks (the Chinese characters for the numbers one through nine), bams (short for bamboo), and dots. Even more confusing, the American version’s popularity has spawned regional varieties; a “New England” set, for instance, has lobster buoys for dots, sailing boats for craks, and yes, lacrosse-stick and cranberry-bog jokers. When the game has changed so much that a longtime aficionado can’t simply sit down and play, then perhaps it is time to reconsider how we got to a moment where some people are claiming to have just discovered an amazing new game that Chinese people have been playing for nearly two centuries, and that, in fact, has already been appropriated at least once.

“It’s the capitalization of it. American mah-jongg is the Americanization of mah-jongg, because they’ve found a way to monetize it,” Tim Ma, the chef and owner of Lucky Danger, a Chinese restaurant in D.C., told me. (The game’s annually changing card and its required fee, Ma said, are “like Amazon Prime.”) Lucky Danger features a red-lantern-lit “hidden” mah-jongg parlor in the back, inspired by the illegal mah-jongg parlor in Jackie Chan’s Rush Hour 2.  Ma, a Chinese and Taiwanese American,  grew up playing Taiwanese mah-jongg, and along with his father, the elder Tim Ma, began hosting weekly lessons at his restaurant. As I sat with Ma at one of the self-shuffling mah-jongg tables in “Lucky Club,” his gaming den, he explained that he and his dad “are a bit of purists,” and personally teach only the Taiwanese and Chinese versions of the game.

Ma was surprised at how quickly their class offerings, which, at one point, included a partnership with a group providing American-mah-jongg lessons, became popular, initially with (again, mainly white) moms from the D.C. suburbs. Ma told me that his dad was born in China, lived through the Communist Revolution, and now “brings all of his Chinese trauma into his class.” “He says it in a nice way, but he says, like, ‘Why would you do that? Are you not smart?’” Ma said. “People think it’s endearing, but I’m like, Can you imagine growing up with this guy?”

Ma described how, when he and his friends play, they put down a bottle of bourbon and click-clack-click until 6 a.m., smoking and drinking and chatting, almost instantaneously calculating their odds and only occasionally glancing at their tiles, when it’s their turn to discard. He was amused to see how newbies played: “They’re only looking at their tiles and they just keep looking at them, and that’s all that happens,” he said.

Nicole Wong, the author of Mahjong: House Rules From Across the Asian Diaspora, grew up in Santa Monica, California, the daughter of New Zealand immigrants of Chinese descent. She came of age in the ’90s and aughts, when, she told me, being Asian was not considered cool, and she connected with her culture mainly through food. Then, the summer after she graduated college in 2009, Wong went to stay with her paternal grandparents in New Zealand, where they taught her the game. But house rules often differ by family or culture. When she went to a mah-jongg night with some Asian American friends a few years later, she was frustrated to realize that she didn’t understand their version of the game, nor her own well enough to teach it to them. And so the Mahjong Project was born, her effort to document her Chinese New Zealand family’s mah-jongg rules, which existed primarily as oral traditions, and to gather other variations from across the Asian diaspora.

Wong’s reason for learning was personal, but she offered me some theories for the current resurgence. She noted that in the wake of recent anti-Asian violence, younger Asian Americans, especially Gen Zers and Millennials, are eager to reconnect (or, in some cases, just connect) with a culture that they might not have fully appreciated or understood growing up. “What excites me the most about mah-jongg are the opportunities to meet new people, to sit down next to someone in their 70s and hear about their childhood memories of the game and therefore of their life,” she said.

And, like nearly everyone else I spoke with, she also mentioned Crazy Rich Asians, the wildly successful 2018 rom-com set in Singapore, which features a pivotal scene, a face-off between a would-be mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, at a mah-jongg parlor. Much like the mah-jongg scene in The Joy Luck Club more than two decades prior, the movie helped push mah-jongg back into popular culture. Following the coronavirus pandemic, Wong said, people were eager to leave their houses and connect with one another, and mah-jongg offered an affordable way to gather with existing friends or make new ones, at a time when this sort of connection was perhaps needed most. “You have to sit; you have to use your mouth to talk to people; you have to use your eyes to look at things, all those very basic human things that can feel woefully out of practice,” she said.

Ma grew up watching his family elders play, and was relegated to the kids’ table himself. Even now, he told me that he and his cousins, some of whom are in their 60s, have still not been promoted to the adult game. “As long as they have four old Chinese people, they play,” he said. “We still play at the kids’ table.”

But now, he explained, the Americanization of mah-jongg has opened the game to everyone, and ultimately, he thinks more mah-jongg is a good thing. Laughing, he assessed the current moment with both praise and insult. “It’s not like, Go sit at the kids’ table,” Ma told me. “Every table is the kids’ table now.”

When I traveled to Dallas for the tournament, I finally got a sense of the true cult of American mah-jongg, and how the other half, the mah-jongg one-percenters, if you will, live. On my first night in town, Catherine and I ended up at an event hosted by the Mahjong Country Club, a group of 200 people (with a waiting list double that) who pay $500 a year for membership and play once a week at the estate at which we found ourselves, among other locales. The club also offers small group trips to places such as Aspen, Colorado, and Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. On arrival, the organizers encouraged us to “shop the shed”, a converted pool house featuring mah-jongg sets, mah-jongg jewelry, and Goyard handbags.

The next morning, we met Megan Trottier, the Oh My Mahjong founder, at the company’s warehouse, where a neon sign read Modern twist to a timeless tradition. Trottier said she wants her tiles to be recognizable to people who have played for decades, but also “updated and funky.” Her line first took off in what I began to think of as the SEC belt, small southern towns and suburbs that have a culture of aspirational hostessing. (The brand has even begun throwing “Oh My Sisterhood” events at sorority houses, and is now the largest American mah-jongg company.) “A lot of our customers are returning customers,” Trottier said, explaining that these aficionados swap out their sets, like china or crystal, depending on the season or crowd. A starter kit, which includes tiles, a mat, pushers, and a storage bag starts at about $665. I splurged, spending more than $300 on a solo set of navy “Gatsby” tiles (“classic, refined, and effortlessly sophisticated”).

The actual tournament was the extravagant culmination of an already over-the-top whirlwind, with nearly every decoration a shade of pink, an Oh My Mahjong twist on the traditional red for the Lunar New Year. That included a giant Year-of-the-Horse horse that had been assembled in the middle of the bar. Outside, two women in shimmering magenta-fringed cowboy jackets sat astride actual horses, welcoming the players.

I chose a table with three moms slightly younger than me, and we started to play. They all played socially in Dallas, and two also played in a competitive league, but our actual tournament games, we made it through four, were surprisingly chill. In our first game, when one woman realized she was a tile short, we simply let her pick up a new one. And in our second game, when I first incorrectly called a four dot to complete a run of consecutive numbers (you can’t call a tile to complete a run, unless it’s to win mah-jongg) and then later incorrectly used a joker to complete a run and falsely declare “mah-jongg!,” no one cared and we just played on. We kept up a polite patter, “I want to convert my children’s room into a mahj room,” one said, to which the other cooed, “That would be so perfect”, and I somehow, confusingly, won my table but did not advance to the final round.

As others have observed, the game, at its core, requires you to attempt order from chaos. To play mah-jongg, at least the way I have mainly played it, occasionally with close friends, but more often with casual acquaintances and total strangers, also forces you to pause and focus on something outside of your own life, if only fleetingly.

That I was in Dallas at all continued to surprise me. About a week before the tournament, my dad, who had been sick with dementia for more than a decade, was unexpectedly moved to hospice care. He died on Valentine’s Day, two days before I was set to fly out. I debated what to do, but his memorial service wasn’t for nearly a week, Catherine and I had already bought tickets, and I rationalized that it would be a good distraction. Finding myself playing mah-jongg in Texas in the period between my dad’s death and his memorial was purely coincidental, but what was perhaps less of a coincidence was that I had first learned the game when my mom was recovering after surgery. I had needed a forced break from my daily routine, work, kids, life, before I could even begin to learn the game that helps people slow down.

Once I learned how to pause, I found myself able to breathe during those few days in Dallas. Tears still periodically plinked down my cheeks, and I did not totally abandon myself to the gods of the tiles. But the distance and the distraction, along with an old friend, offered a welcome respite. I thought of my hands (Would it be crazy to go for all winds?) and, just as easily, I thought of my dad. And then, in the days after I returned home, Catherine, mah-jongg set in tow, stopped by my mom’s house yet again, for another few games as we waited for my dad’s ashes to be returned to us.