In the 1920s, Mahjong took the U.S. by storm, rapidly becoming a popular game to play and a household name. More than a century later, Mahjong’s popularity seems to be on the rise again, as Yelp data shows a nearly 4,500% increase in searches for Mahjong in the last year.
Annelise Heinz is an associate professor of history at the University of Oregon’s College of Arts and Sciences. She is also the author of “Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture.” She joins us to share the game’s history and why its popularity seems to be on the rise once again.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed using AI and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We are now essentially in the third wave of U.S. interest in mahjong. The Chinese game first became broadly popular here in the 1920s. It saw a new suburban and Jewish surge in the 1950s and ‘60s and in the last few years, it’s seen yet another explosion of interest. Yelp data shows a nearly 4,500% increase in searches for the term “mahjong” in just the last year. Annelise Heinz is an associate professor of history at the University of Oregon. She’s also the author of the book “Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture.” It’s great to have you on the show.
Annelise Heinz: Thanks so much for having me.
Miller: Before we get to the history of the game that you have explored and what’s happening right now, I thought we could start with the basics for people who haven’t played it or haven’t seen those clacky tiles. What is mahjong?
Heinz: So, mahjong is a game that’s traditionally played by four people with tiles, as you say, not cards. There is a very popular digital version of the game that sometimes people think of first. That’s actually a totally different game. They use the same designs as the mahjong tiles, but that’s basically a game of solitaire. So, digital version aside, the traditional game is played in person most of the time, with four people, and the very basic traditional version is a lot like the card game gin rummy, but there’s a lot more complexity, and today there are more than 40 variations of mahjong around the world.
Miller: So as I mentioned, we are now essentially in the third wave of the game’s popularity here in the U.S. How did the first wave, 100 plus years ago, start?
Heinz: Yeah, so mahjong originated in the mid to late 1800s in the area around Shanghai, the Yangtze River Delta, which is an area with a long history of game development. But it really emerged as one of many, mostly male, mostly gambling games, and wasn’t widely known outside of a few urban areas in China. And at the turn of the 20th century, it was becoming more popular in Shanghai and Beijing, and at the same time, after World War I, there were increasing numbers of Americans joining other foreigners in the area. And one of those Americans was actually a Standard Oil representative named Joseph Park Babcock, who was not the only person responsible for introducing Mahjong to the United States, but was the most influential. And so he and his wife and business partners actually intentionally marketed the game in the early 1920s to an American public.
Miller: What kind of marketing did they do? And when you say marketing, so as opposed to some version of a grassroots interest, but what was the marketing effort?
Heinz: Right. It was part of an era of new mass marketing techniques, and they really took full advantage of all of them. So that includes these graphic, ornate kind of visual advertisements in newspapers and magazines. They also started whisper campaigns, particularly to try to get more East Coast interest because they were introducing it first in California. They worked with this emerging Hollywood scene of these starlets. The first place they introduced it was Catalina Island, which is where all the LA elite would vacation during the summer.
Miller: It’s sort of like you might give products to influencers today…
Heinz: Absolutely.
Miller: …and have them talk about it on their podcast or on YouTube.
Heinz: Literally the same, minus the social media.
Miller: Minus that particular technology, but the same basic idea. Oh, these fancy people are doing this thing. Maybe I should too.
Heinz: Exactly.
Miller: How successful was it?
Heinz: Wildly successful, more than anyone could have possibly imagined. Almost overnight in the early 1920s, peaking in 1923 and 1924, mahjong became the kind of it-game and social pastime. It was played in the White House with the President and First Lady Harding. Like I said, Hollywood celebrities were playing it, but really also everywhere in between. Spanish language newspapers in Texas were talking about it. Small town newspapers in the Northwest were talking about it. Nebraska, right? Everyone was wanting to play or learn this game, and it had a measurable economic impact too.
Miller: One of the things that’s fascinating about that timeline is that this first huge wave of popularity you’re describing came at the same time that there were severe anti-Chinese laws in this country. The Immigration Act of 1924 barred the entry of Chinese immigrants. Other laws forbade existing Chinese immigrants from owning land, and there are other laws as well that we won’t get into here. But to what extent was the Chineseness, the Chinese origin of the game, emphasized or advertised when there were so many anti-Chinese laws on the books?
Heinz: Absolutely. It’s one of the deep ironies of the game’s popularity, not only despite it being a Chinese game in an era of anti-Asian and really xenophobic sentiment, but actually explicitly because it was a Chinese game. It was explicitly advertised and emphasized as a Chinese game, and that had a lot to do with its popularity at the time. And I think that the answers to understanding that irony are revealing, because they point to how Americans held actually contradictory – and I mean here, non-Chinese Americans – held contradictory stereotypes of China and there was, on one hand, really negative stereotypes attached to modern immigrants, but there was also stereotypes attached to this elite ancient royal Chinese court. So it’s intentionally advertised by marketers at the time as an ancient and elite game that was really rhetorically cut off from contemporary Chinese and Chinese Americans, even though it was in fact a modern game.
Miller: It had been invented 30 years before or something.
Heinz: A little more than that, but yes.
Miller: So, we call this a wave because my understanding is it’s sort of crested and receded a little bit in popularity, the game did in the U.S. among white people. But then there’s a second wave, and a piece that has always confused me because when I was young, my mom worked for a couple of years as a social worker in a Jewish nursing home and sometimes I’d go there. She’d take me there after school and I’d see all these old Jewish women, only women, playing mahjong, and it confused me. So what was happening?
Heinz: Yeah, this is the question that first started my research actually. So what happened is that Jewish Americans among, like I just said, many other groups of Americans, were playing the game in the 1920s as part of this huge fad. It dies out as a fad, but pockets of players continue playing the game and it becomes a really important part of Chinese American culture. Japanese Americans play it during World War II in incarceration camps.
And there are other pockets as well, there’s a country club in Virginia. But one of these pockets is different individuals who all happen to be Jewish women in the New York area, and they come together in the late 1930s, an era of major anti-Semitism, and their vision is not that they’re going to become a Jewish organization to spread it among Jewish women. That is what happens. Their vision is that they’re going to help bring this game back into the kind of popularity it saw 15 years previous. And they were all relatively wealthy women who not only didn’t have to work to support their families, but actually would have lost status if they had worked for wages.
But they were very entrepreneurial individuals and so mahjong became their project and they launched the National Mahjong League in New York, and over the following 20 years they continued to experiment with different changes to the game. And so it really didn’t stabilize into the game that we know today as “American Mahjong” until the early 1960s. And they spread it through social networks and philanthropic networks and community networks that were rooted in Jewish communities that were themselves also rapidly changing during the era after World War II.
Miller: And I was, I guess, seeing maybe their 80-year-old daughters or maybe some of them in the ‘80s.
Heinz: Yes, you would have seen that generation, many of whom were young mothers at the time in the 1950s and ‘60s, who then continued to play and continue to play it, for decades.
Miller: OK, so let’s zoom forward to now. I mentioned that enormous increase in searches for mahjong in the last year, but there have been tons of articles in the last couple of years about this being the new it-game. It’s the new pickleball. It’s the new third place game outside of your living room in some public-ish place to play with people. Why do you think mahjong is so popular now?
Heinz: Yes, well I think whenever you have a mass phenomenon like this, there’s never just one reason. We’ve definitely reached critical mass where it is now a full-on fad, but there were different seeds planted that helped start it. And so one of those seeds was a retiring generation of baby boomers, oftentimes started by the daughters of those Jewish American women who first created the National Mahjong League’s culture of the game, who they themselves as growing up in the 1960s and ‘70s often did not want to play this game of their mothers.
Miller: It was sort of an old fuddy-duddy game.
Heinz: Yes, the kind of Jewish womanhood that many of them intentionally rejected, but now later in life have a very different relationship with their mothers, with sometimes their relationship to a Jewish identity. But they’re also moving to new communities, and Mahjong has always been a powerful way to build relationships and make community. And that was true for their mother’s generation and increasingly suburban moves, and this is true now in more retirement communities. And in those communities, they were often teaching people who were not Jewish or who were Jewish men who hadn’t previously played, so that’s one important seed.
Another important seed is a rising generation of Asian American entrepreneurs. Particularly people who are coming of age in a time of, again, rising anti-Asian sentiment, that really particularly virulent rhetoric and violence during COVID, a younger generation of Asian Americans is turning toward symbols as well as cultural pieces that are points of connection, and really mahjong is so powerful because it is a point of connection across the Asian diaspora. So definitely it’s rooted in Chinese culture, but there’s also Vietnamese mahjong, Filipino mahjong, Taiwanese mahjong, Hong Kong mahjong, in different regions in China.
Miller: And these have different tile images and different rules?
Heinz: No, no. It’s really a spectrum of variation, and what has kept mahjong recognizable across the spectrum of change has been a shared tiles design. That is something that is a point of contention right now, with some American Mahjong manufacturers. That is new. But historically, the recognizable tiles are what keep the game connected as a form of Mahjong.
Miller: How much is the new resurgence in U.S. interest across race still gendered? Because you were talking earlier about sort of the middle wave being very much women playing and you did talk more about women just now in the 2020s. So is this, do you see this still being gendered?
Heinz: It really depends on the slice. So mahjong has always been far less gendered in Chinese context. And so there are actually, again, it started as a mostly male, though never exclusively male game, but one of the most quickly growing segments of mahjong culture today is out of the South, and that is driven largely by non-Jewish white women who are part of also an entrepreneurial rise of these U.S. based distributors and designers, and they’re really tapping into a kind of lifestyle and aesthetic that is connected to hosting and really Southern femininity.
Miller: And I was poking a little bit, very expensive sets. I mean, $700, $800, or $1000 for sort of Hermes versions of sets. And then that ties into another American piece of this, which is that my understanding is that for the American game, every year you have to buy or you’re supposed to buy a new set of rules/what the legal hands are. It almost seems like a kind of pay to play, super American version of a game. Is there any other country where you have to pay every year to play the newest version?
Heinz: Well, so what you’re referring to is purchasing the newest card, which is produced by the National Mahjong League, and that is connected to this very idiosyncratic, specifically National Mahjong League style of playing that’s connected again to that 20 years of evolution in the mid-twentieth century. No other form of Mahjong in the world requires a card. So the card is what’s different and new, and to keep it fresh, they change it every year, and that’s been true from the beginning.
The card is connected to philanthropy where they donate part of the earnings. Initially, they donated all of the earnings. Now that’s changed, but they are in part then connected to these kind of philanthropic cultures. But the sets themselves, it is, I mean, there’s a huge range of prices, and that’s just like it was in the 1920s fad when you could buy very, very cheap tiles that were made out of cardboard that you could cut apart, all the way up to tiles made out of precious materials, and they were super elite status items.
Miller: What can you learn as a historian? This is an unfair question to ask with one minute left, but what can you learn about a culture from the games that people play?
Heinz: Yes, well, culture is history and people make culture. I think one of the things that stands out with Mahjong is that what we do in our everyday lives actually shapes how we interact with the world and it is reflective of our values, how we want to connect to each other and the ideas that we spread.
Miller: Annelise, thanks very much.
Heinz: Thank you.
Miller: Annelise Heinz is an associate professor of history at the University of Oregon and the author of “Mahjong, A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture.”
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