Cosmopolitan Roots in Shanghai

Mahjong had been spreading throughout China’s urban centers for four decades before the rest of the world began playing it. A new elite class of Chinese intermediaries eventually helped introduce mahjong to American businessmen and travelers, for whom it soon served similar purposes of community, entertainment, and posturing as it did for Chinese players. While expatriate male social circles were more visible, the growing numbers of both American women and Western-educated Chinese women helped create new patterns and places of interaction. The seeds of the gender shift from predominately male to female mahjong players originated in the expat world. Mahjong’s path through American social circles highlights the dynamics of leisure and domestic labor that underwrote the patterns of foreign life in semi-colonial China.

Introduction

The Introduction provides an orientation to the book and its key questions: What did it mean to become “modern” in the early twentieth century? How did American ethnicities take shape in the years leading up to and after World War II? How did middle-class women experience and shape their changing roles in society, before the social revolutions of the late twentieth century? How are these things related? The Introduction also covers an overview of mahjong’s trajectory in the United States. It examines background related to the history of leisure, gender, and consumerism in addition to introducing key sources and methodologies. The introduction sets up the book to tell the story of mahjong’s role in the creation of identifiably ethnic communities, women’s access to respectable leisure, and how Americans used ideas of China to understand themselves.

The Americanization of Mahjong

During the years of depression, war, and postwar expansion, mahjong evolved in the United States and abroad, creating discrete national, regional, and community forms. In the 1940s, the wives of Air Force officers created their own version, which continued to spread across postwar bases. The most influential community adaptation by far was driven by the National Mah Jongg League. Over the ensuing decades, eventually hundreds of thousands of players, mostly but not exclusively Jewish American women, played their “National” version of the international Chinese game. The changes to the game that the League initiated were enabled by their proximity to the small factories making the tiles. The locus of mahjong manufacturing for the American market moved from China to plastic fabricating shops in New York City. As factories developed in concert with distinctive regional and community-based forms of the game, American mahjong grew into a domestic industry.

The Paradoxes of Postwar Domesticity

At the height of the postwar domestic revival, a subset of women who fully participated in the culture of domesticity nonetheless claimed a unique space for leisure with their peers in the form of a weekly evening mahjong game. Although the culture of mahjong could reinforce their domestic roles as much as undermine them, the weekly mahjong ritual explicitly came at the expense of both household labor and their family members’ comfort. Despite their claims on autonomous domestic leisure, mahjong-playing middle-class women became emblematic of the trappings of stereotypical postwar domesticity. As Jewish mahjong players established their strong cultural norms in the 1950s and 1960s, they became embedded in the evolving stereotype of the domineering Jewish mother. This association signaled the waning of both postwar domestic norms and the patterns of leisured domesticity that thrived within them, as economic changes and generational shifts transformed middle-class home life.

Epilogue

From the twentieth century into the twenty-first, mahjong’s cultural meaning continued to evolve and diversify along with the social, demographic, and technological changes that marked each era. Today mahjong is once again rising in popularity. The game’s adaptability continues to undergird its evolving social meanings, from ongoing ethnic and gendered resonances to a new digital world and increasing diversification. A mahjong revival is being fueled by collectors interested in the game’s aesthetics and materiality, nostalgic baby boomers recalling their mothers’ forms of play and community, and younger generations looking for ethnic roots and undeterred by gendered stigmas, as an American gaze increasingly fixates on a China seen as, once again, both alluring and ominous.

Moderns and Mandarins

The mahjong fad, with its constant evocations of a mystical Chinese past, evidenced a larger reaction to change in the 1920s. Many Americans felt deeply ambivalent about the changes that came with increasing bureaucracy and urban anonymity, and they sought a connection to an ancient authenticity through mahjong. Marketers of the game shaped mahjong’s image and fought for turf over its authenticity. Chinese Americans asserted their own vision of Chinese authenticity. Some of these attempts were conscious, some were likely not, but all participated in creating what would become a dominant understanding of mahjong as an ancient Chinese game. Mahjong’s strengthening association with the ancient Chinese court had implications for how the game would be understood as either a gambling game or a respectable form of leisure. As in the larger history of authenticity, race and class were at the heart of these developments.

Asian Exclusion and Enforced Leisure

Despite their differences, Chinese and Japanese migrants and their American children occupied a shared location in an American racial framework that placed them outside the possibility of inclusion through cultural and political assimilation, regardless of long residence or native birth. The detention of Chinese Americans at the Pacific border and the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II were physical manifestations of exclusion. Even as social scientists challenged earlier fears about cultural and biological blending, most Americans consistently held Asian people apart as inherently foreign and often threatening. Detention as a measure of national defense, enacted at Angel Island Immigration Station and in wartime incarceration (or “internment”) camps, separated detainees from the norms of work, family, and sociability. Even as the United States screened working-class immigrants for their risk of becoming “public charges,” the government enforced leisure on those incarcerated. Unchosen leisure thus became a problem to be solved.

Making a Transpacific Game

As the American market developed a voracious appetite for mahjong, in 1923 Chinese and Western merchants launched new kinds of large-scale factories in Shanghai that standardized production with artisanal workmanship. Mahjong factories encompassed multiple paradoxes, implementing old-world aesthetics and “primitive” techniques in a factory model that advertised its modernity. The mahjong craze sparked the development of hybrid forms of production and helped shape a key period in the evolving economic and cultural relationship between China and the United States. Mahjong marked a significant change in Americans’ increasingly direct economic and cultural engagement with China. For the first time, Americans jumped on a Chinese good on their own, rather than in response to European tastemakers. Manufacturing mahjong presented one of the troubling challenges of modernity: how to translate the sensory and class-based satisfactions of artisanal and natural materials while still fulfilling modern promises of cleanliness, safety, and efficiency.

Inside and Outside Chinese America

By the 1930s, mahjong stood in both China and abroad as “the national game of China.” Many Chinese Americans embraced mahjong for both its perceived Chineseness and its perceived Americanness. Chinese Americans interacted with mahjong in ways that in effect helped navigate tensions associated with Americanization. Chinatown residents participated in commodifying and marketing mahjong as an aspect of Chinese culture for outsiders, while also using it to create separate ethnic spaces for Chinese Americans to engage with each other. The presence of mahjong—through the noises of the tiles and the language of game-play, through its visual presence in public spaces and in private homes—helped mark geographic spaces of ethnic community. For Chinese Americans, playing mahjong was not about assimilation in contrast to cultural continuity or vice versa. Rather, it was a versatile pastime that helped create spaces for a shared Chinese American experience.

White Women and a Chinese Game

In the 1920s, mahjong allowed middle-class and elite Americans to imagine, appropriate, or reject an exotic Asian sexuality while maintaining their own respectability. Gendered ideas of race, specifically of Asian cultures as feminine, also encouraged Americans to understand the game as a feminine pastime. In turn, Chinese Americans leveraged mahjong’s popularity for economic opportunities. The choices that these Chinese Americans faced, however, were fraught with pitfalls. As the game spread across the nation, mahjong unleashed criticisms of Chinese influence and women’s leisure that linked female mahjong players with neglectful and self-centered domesticity. The ways in which mahjong symbolized modern American culture, buttressed by Orientalist ideas of race and gender, allowed the game to stand in for debates over white femininity. Rather than merely a temporary foray into the exotic, mahjong came to represent the threats posed by changing gender, sexual, and racial norms during the 1920s.