Have We Reached Peak Mah Jongg?

Fads come and go, and in a high end shopping center just outside of Minneapolis, a once empty barre studio has reopened as a mah jongg space. I’m watching about a dozen tables of women playing mahj in two rooms: the former lobby of the studio, light filled and visible from the street; and the former barre classroom in the back, dark and cozy, the kind of space that might once have been called a mah jongg parlor — but with mirrors and a ballet barre on the wall.

The owner, Abbe Blacker, has watched the rise and fall of mah jongg firsthand: Growing up, she watched her mother and her friends, who were all Jewish, play regularly, but didn’t pay much attention. Decades later, she had mostly forgotten about mah jongg when a friend asked if she wanted to learn. Ten years after that — around 2015 —  someone asked Abbe to teach them how to play, and she started teaching professionally. At one point, she offered to teach a mah jongg class through the local parks and rec department, but no one had heard of the game.

That’s no longer the case.

As of right now, 75% of the mahj classes at Abbe’s space, MPLS Mahjong Club, are sold out through the entire summer. And she’s not the only game in town — I know of two other mah jongg-centric game spaces opening near me. The moms in my neighborhood are scrambling to find someone with availability to teach them how to play. My favorite stationery store is hosting Hong Kong mah jongg nights, and I just learned about a mahj summer camp for kids. The Twin Cities — and, it seems, the rest of the country — might be hitting peak mah jongg.

“I’ve been trying to explain to people what this game is,” Abbe told the podcast “Who the Folk.” “And now it’s arrived and it’s explaining itself.” 

This new wave of interest in mah jongg started picking up steam around 2020, fueled in part by a buzzy new brand of mah jongg tiles based out of Dallas (more on them later). When I first wrote about this new wave of mah jongg in 2024 after seeing it in my social media feeds, I thought it was completely out of left field. Why were people dressing up in their country club finest to play a game that feels like it should be played in, as comedian Jenny Yang described in a comment on an Instagram post about a Hallmark mah jongg movie,  “white undertanks and flip flops with a cigarette in their mouth and a single foot hiked up on their own seats.”

But the more I read, the more I understand that this white American iteration of mah jongg is actually very similar to how American mah jongg came to be in the first place.

Join us for the biggest Jewish mah jongg festival ever! June 28-29 at the Museum Jewish Heritage in New York. 

Why is mah jongg so popular right now?

Mah jongg is having a moment, but so is pickleball. Arts and crafts are having a moment, too — needlepointing, scrapbooking (though we’re calling it junk journaling), knitting. It seems obvious, really: We’re all so, so sick of our phones. And after the isolation that came with the early days of the pandemic, once we could hang out in person again, we were all desperate for human connection. We’ve even invented a term for the lingering effects of our isolation: The Loneliness Epidemic.

It makes sense, then, that this intimate game that requires full concentration and can only be played in small groups, is flourishing — especially when you add in the unique sensory experience that comes with a mah jongg set: the feel of the smooth tiles, the satisfying clacking as you shuffle them.

A scene in “Crazy Rich Asians” helped propel the game back into the mainstream, but the specific style of this current wave may have been helped along by some controversial, let’s say… “rebranding” of the game. In 2020, a group of Dallas women with combined interests in business, mah jongg and design saw a hole in the market: relatively affordable mah jong tiles with a certain aesthetic. They started The Mahjong Line and their website copy explained that the game’s original tiles — which many took to mean the Chinese tiles — didn’t appeal to the founders’ sense of style. This wasn’t well received, especially in a time when the Asian community was experiencing an uptick of hate and violence in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

On her Substack “Golden Hour,” writer Laura Zhang says, “Mahjong is meant to be shared, but it still needs to be handled with care. It’s oral history, a bridge between generations, a sanctuary, and an inextricable part of Asian and Asian American identity.”

Despite the backlash and discussions of cultural appropriation (which continue to this day as more and more white women embrace mah jongg without considering its history) I suspect that exact “rebranding” might have been the thing to propel mah jongg into its current fad status. 

100 years ago, something very similar happened

In the 1910s, Joseph Park Babcock, an American businessman in Shanghai, learned how to play mah jongg and saw a business opportunity. He combined several styles he had learned, designed tiles with English letters, printed English rules and taught the game to a group of wealthy Americans in 1920. The game caught on in a big way.

Why? Perhaps it was Babcock’s business acumen — just like the founders of The Mahjong Line, he saw a hole in the market. Maybe a post-Spanish flu pandemic flapper era desire for fun fueled the craze. It might have been the reverence and fascination at the time for all things “exotic” and “Oriental” (though, it should be noted, the reverence didn’t carry over to actual Asian people in the United States). Whatever it was, mah jongg became a full fledged fad in the mid 1920s, and if you think cultural appropriation today is bad, back then women were dressing up in full Asian costumes. Yikes. 

What’s Jewish about mah jongg?

After a few years, the mah jongg fad of the 1920s faded. Americans moved on to the next fad of the era (probably dance marathons), but one group continued to play: Jewish women, who were experiencing upward mobility and felt the struggle of integrating into white American society while maintaining a distinct identity. 

Mah jongg — at once familiar but also distinctly foreign — became a perfect bridge. As Jewish families were able to move up economically, they moved to the suburbs and women began staying home. Mah jongg offered a way for them to stay connected and hang on to a closer knit community feeling. 

Eventually, it  became a way to separate the Jewish American experience, Anneliese Heinz, professor and writer of the book “Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture” told Kveller in 2020. “Those things are subtle and subliminal but as it spreads along Jewish women’s networks, mah jongg becomes a powerful and important community marker.”

It was a group of Jewish women who, in 1937, wanted to standardize an American version of mah jongg after multiple variations of the game made their way to the United States. They created the National Mah Jongg League, and their version spread quickly through their networks, keeping a flash-in-the-pan fad alive for decades in the Jewish community.

The rules created by the National Mah Jongg League are the same rules that dominate my Instagram feed, transformed into shareable graphics or recited as part of reels that tease Mahjong 101 classes at local boutiques. 

Back at MPLS Mahjong Club, Abbe Blacker is surprised by the sudden interest.

“There is a piece of me that thinks ‘wow, how did that happen,’” she says, adding: “Maybe in the same way people in Asia wondered why Americans started playing all of a sudden in the 1920s.”

But ultimately, she says, “I just love passing down the tradition of the game.”