Mahjong: Tiles And Traditions

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Sasha-Ann Simons** (0:39)
Hey, Chicago, I'm Sasha-Ann Simons and this is In the Loop.
Stick around till the end of the episode to get a rundown of the top local stories of the day. But first, how about a little Mahjong? You know, the game with all the colorful tiles with Chinese characters on them? That's all about skill, strategy, and luck? Well, Mahjong seems to be everywhere these days. New clubs are popping up, social media is full of perfectly curated and fun game nights, and more young players are discovering a tradition that's been around for more than a century. But behind the colorful tiles is a much deeper story. The game dates back to 19th century China before eventually making its way to the US, where it was embraced by different communities in sometimes very different ways. In this episode of the pod, we'll dig into the game's complicated history, and we'll hear from people working to reclaim its cultural roots.
At the table was Michael Wang, co-founder of 144 Tiles Mahjong Club, Luisa Jurado, who's co-founder of Mahjong Chicago, and Annelise Heinz, who's professor of history at the University of Oregon, and the author of Mahjong, A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture. Now, for people who haven't played or seen the game, I thought we should start with a description of Mahjong. So here's Michael giving it his best shot.

**Michael Wang** (2:01)
So Mahjong is a tile-based game similar to dominoes. There's four players, usually depending on which variant you're talking about.

**Sasha-Ann Simons** (2:09)
Right.

**Michael Wang** (2:10)
And it's played with drawing and discarding to form patterns. In the Hong Kong style, you'll have four triples and a pair.
No one knows what you have until you take a tile. And it's a lot of fun.

**Sasha-Ann Simons** (2:25)
And the tiles, I mean, describe them for folks who haven't seen them. They're very colorful. They've got different pictures on them, Luisa. What would we see on these tiles?

**Luisa Jurado** (2:32)
Yes. So there are versions that are made of bone and bamboo. And sometimes they're handmade and painted, while others are commercially made of plastic. And they're very colorful, like you mentioned. On the back side, you could have multiple colors, multiple designs. And then the front side, where the actual symbols are, there's different suits that we could see. So there's the balls or dots, as we call them, as well as Chinese characters, and then the bamboo sticks.

**Sasha-Ann Simons** (3:06)
Perfect. And so I want to hear from all of you how you were introduced to this game, because I know there's a story there. Annelise, you first. When did you first start playing Mahjong?

**Annelise Heinz** (3:16)
I first learned how to play the game when I was living in China before beginning my graduate work, and I was taught how to play the very basic traditional Chinese version by a friend whose grandfather from Shanghai had taught her.

**Sasha-Ann Simons** (3:30)
Oh, Michael.

**Michael Wang** (3:32)
I first learned at this event that I attended last year. I saw it in Crazy Rich Asians, and I was like, wow, this is so cool.

**Sasha-Ann Simons** (3:37)
Wait, you just learned last year?

**Michael Wang** (3:38)
I did, yeah. I did not go up with it. It was banned by the Chinese Communist Party for gambling reasons. So my parents didn't teach it to me. They didn't really know about it. And when I first played it last year at an event, I was like, this is the coolest thing ever.
Beyond that, there was a message, which is how do Asian Americans who don't quite fit in with the snapshot of the homeland that their parents gave them, nor necessarily this American culture that we've been plopped onto. How do we kind of like reclaim certain aspects of both? And Mahjong is one of them. How do we reclaim it for community?

**Sasha-Ann Simons** (4:13)
And you're touching on some of that deep history that we're going to talk much more about in a moment. Tell me your origin story with Mahjong, Luisa.

**Luisa Jurado** (4:21)
So I learned when I was 11

**Sasha-Ann Simons** (4:23)
Oh, OK.

**Luisa Jurado** (4:24)
And it was my parents who taught me.
So my father had brought back a set of tiles from his visit to the Philippines. And when I saw these tiles for the very first time, I was just blown away.