Downtime
Breaking Down the Walls
Mahjong used to be a board game for Chinese grandmas. Now everyone wants to play.
Mahjong clubs have become a way for young Asian Americans to reconnect with their roots in a way that feels fashionable, entrepreneurial, and zeitgeisty.
Lynn Q. Yu
I first learned to play mahjong at an entertainment industry mixer. For years, the standard networking game had been poker, and I spent many a night around a velveteen table, losing $20 at a time to fellow WGA screenwriters.
But in 2022, I was invited to a casual meetup that was centered around mahjong. The game, which had always seemed mysteriously complicated, was in fact as easy to pick up as gin rummy. Conversation flowed over the clack of plastic tiles and the grooved edges of Chinese numbers. I found myself transfixed, locked in for hours at the table. In a way, it felt like a homecoming.
Like many first- or second-generation Asian Americans, I did not grow up playing mahjong. My parents didn’t play the game—they labeled it as mei yi si, a purposeless waste of time. For people of my parents’ generation, mahjong carried a stigma associated with degeneracy and gambling. Besides, they were among the so-called lost generation of mahjong players, too busy grinding out an American middle-class living to while away the hours with frivolity.
Soon after the industry mixer, I began to hear whispers of fledgling mahjong clubs in Los Angeles and New York. Private groups had started to sprout up, spurred on by a word-of-mouth network of Asian women. Then the pop-ups began. Celebrities like Ali Wong and David Choe threw mahjong-themed birthday parties. Even Janet Yang, the president of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, ran a mahjong-themed potluck for Asian women in power.
Soon, Mahjong Mistress, a Los Angeles mahjong collective, was throwing blow-out events at the Aster Hotel and Soho Warehouse. Chop Suey Club, an Asian lifestyle and design boutique in New York City, began hosting a monthly mahjong social at the Ace Hotel. Events range from the free to the ticketed, costing anywhere between $0 and 40. The parties were posh and glamorous, with DJs pumping out dance music and bartenders slinging sponsored liquors as young urbanites socialized over four walls of tiles.
These events were spaces to learn mahjong, but they were also places to see and be seen. Young people in their 20s and 30s were leading a growing revival for the centuries-old game, hungry for a piece of heritage that their parents had tucked away on dusty shelves. They were eager to reconnect with their roots in a way that felt fashionable, entrepreneurial, and zeitgeisty.
The Mahjong Renaissance was fully upon us.
Mahjong has been around since the mid-1800s, but the game has no standardized set of rules. There are Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Filipino, and American Jewish styles of the game;