The Mahjong Line: A White-Washing of Heritage
written by Stephanie Fu and Jamie Geng
As responsible humans in the middle of a pandemic, many of the activities we used to schedule with our friends are out of the question. This newfound boredom has led to a flurry of new ideas to beat the quarantine, many of which have become real companies.
Some entrepreneurs, however, have crossed the line. In the newest occurrence of homogenous staff meetings and culturally-ignorant branding, The Mahjong Line is a small company aimed at painting over traditional Mahjong — a tile game already rich in symbolism and heritage — with an aesthetic more palatable to its white customers.
The creators of The Mahjong Line are self-purported fun, stylish girls who claim to sell 麻將 (májiàng) tiles in tones of Neon Purple, Paris Pink, and, as their homage to all of Asia, “Ceylon Blue.” With their tile sets, they sell visions of poolside lounging and velour-lined parties where attendees tout their worldliness by partaking in an exotic game cleaned up for the “stylish masses.” For those that worry 麻將 is too traditional and Eastern for a modern audience, fear not! The Mahjong Line tiles are “Not Your Mama’s Mahjong”- Annie, Kate, and Bianca are on a journey to give the centuries-old culturally-significant symbols a “refresh.” If any customer is indecisive over which set suits their fancies best, a handy quiz promises to divine the kind of girl they are — and therefore which $400 tile set to buy — with questions on Western interior decoration and ideal vacations to Paris, France or Austin, Texas.
To those unaware of the heritage of 麻將, The Mahjong Line’s tile sets and Eurocentric personality quiz might seem like the unfortunately-garish products of an innocent startup founded by a trio of eager entrepreneurs. In reality, every replaced symbol, every promise of girly, fruity fun drowns out the stories, communities, and lives behind the real 麻將 with cocktails and colonial intent.
Perhaps the creators of The Mahjong Line don’t know the history. Or maybe, the history of 麻將 is too littered with bittersweet stories to fit their tooth-achingly saccharine branding. Our parents and grandparents played on the crumbling balconies of grey apartment buildings, where the air was so dense with heat that the people and the walls surrounding them shone with a layer of sweat. Distinctly unglamorous. For them, 麻將 was a way to stay connected with their friends and pass along news of births and marriages and deaths when they had little else to do or eat. When they had nothing, they had their community, and they had 麻將. The Mahjong Line’s $400 tile sets are an insult — a mere commodity for bored, affluent wives who have everything and want more.
“Not Your Mama’s Mahjong”
Although those hot evenings passed watching or playing a lively game of 麻將 with family and neighbors were pleasant, much of life in 70’s and 80’s China was not. Food was carefully rationed, running water scarce. Far from The Mahjong Line’s description of $400 “minimalism”, families were truly living on almost nothing.
Our parents, each with their own reasons stemming from sacrifice, escape, and labor, decided to move to the United States. My mother, disillusioned by tragedy surrounding her parents and five siblings, was lured to the West with a high school education and promises of a fresh start. Instead, she has found — for the past twenty years — an inescapable routine of waiting tables for sub-minimum wage and caring for others’ children while pregnant herself. For her, the American Dream has ended in subservience to the American white. To this day, she thinks of 麻將 with her family in Yunnan, of the life she left behind. Yet she stayed in America, so we might have a chance at “a life well played.”
The Mahjong Line’s claim to be “Not Your Mama’s Mahjong,” posing as a promise of a new life for an old game, is a crude banality that disrespects our 麻將-playing mothers and their courage and sacrifice. These three women believe that their tastes and aesthetics are of higher value than a tradition steeped in history, hundreds of years old, and played by millions. Our mama’s 麻將 is more lively and colorful than The Mahjong Line’s appropriated, Barbie-toned commodities oozing Kate’s “style and personality” could ever be.
“Wild, feral dragons”
In molding their Mahjong sets to fit their aesthetics, the creators of The Mahjong Line have more than erased our stories from the tiles. They have debased them. And through this debasement, their true opinion of the Chinese is clear as day.
Dragons are prevalent in Chinese culture as wise creatures that brought good luck and rain for thirsty crops. Graceful and benevolent, they are the ambassadors of China in the West. And yet, Annie, Kate, and Bianca call them “wild, feral dragons,” painting them as objects of fear and uncivilized otherness. The symbols of wisdom and strength that the Chinese people hope to live up to are recast as mere beasts with sharp teeth and claws. Is that what they see in our black hair and golden skin? If so, perhaps even more disturbing is the inclusion of Western knights on their tiles - famed slayers of dragons.
Other tiles traditionally feature culturally-significant flora: plum blossoms, bamboo, orchids, and chrysanthemums. These plants fill poems thousands of years old with praises of their beauty, and appear in traditional medicine and cuisine. The Mahjong Line has decided that these storied blooms are unpalatable, and have replaced them with nondescript, inoffensive daisies. On their “Cheeky” line, they take this obliteration of culture further with a “clever” pun - flowers replaced by flour.
In drowning our symbols in white dust, they have decided that our stories, not theirs to tell, are theirs to sell.
“We love Mahjong. Oh and we love color too.”
Throughout our discovery of The Mahjong Line, we held on to some vague hope that what we saw were products of well-meaning, if extreme ignorance rather than willful exploitation of another’s culture.
Yet every marketing choice, every action on social media points toward the latter. Whenever they are met by opposition, they wipe it out. They have disabled comments on their Instagram, and deleted posts on Facebook with too many criticisms. We hoped that they were merely ignorant, because ignorance can be lifted with exploration and conversations. But from their erasing of Asian voices, it is clear that they hope these conversations never take place.
On their website’s title page, next to scattered tiles and Japanese restaurant cards, lie British banknotes. Twice in the 19th century, British imperialists knocked upon China’s door and sold opium for massive profits, turning a blind eye to the devastation the drug caused on the native populace. When the Chinese decided to stem the flow of poison, the British turned their superior guns on their cities out of love for those banknotes. They occupied the ports and took what they wanted, from their precious banknotes to the lives of our ancestors.
The Mahjong Line claims to love 麻將. They claim to love color. Does that include us, too? Or do they only love green?
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This article is not an indictment of globalization and all attempts at varying 麻將. In fact, we hope that many players continue to derive joy and build communities around this game. Anyone who plays by the rules that their culture has adapted to, calls out a win in their native language, or logs into a virtual game built for remote players is enjoying 麻將 in a respectful manner so long as they acknowledge the game’s roots and refrain from painting over our symbols with bland, vapid daisies. And most players are respectful — the American Mah-Jongg Association website, despite containing photos peppered with white faces, retains Chinese characters in its logo and prints the Eastern Zodiac animals on its membership cards. This is what 麻將 should be outside of its country of origin: a way to bring communities and cultures together.
The Mahjong Line may claim that they sell “American Mahjong tiles!” And therefore, their business of commodifying our culture is somehow absolved of appropriation. We and our families are American too — American Chinese, yet this has not saved us from being followed around the park at night by men crying “Ching chong!”. Moving from China to the United States, like 麻將, has not stopped our fathers from being told to go back to their own countries when they take a little too long at the gas station or order coffee with an accent.
With one hand, they seize our “exotic” games and sell them for exorbitant prices, while with the other they point, accusing us of eating dogs and spreading disease. They, with their “About Us” photo filled with blonde hair and Western-approved aesthetics, do not question if, after every glare on the street and every rude word in the grocery store, their monolids or the language they were speaking was the offending factor.
They say that their adaptation is “respectful” and in the name of “fun.” We are glad the game our culture created has brought them — and those in their player profiles — joy. But let us be clear. What they have done is taken something from another people and exploited it for their own profit — without credit, without understanding.
