From Shanghai to the Suburbs: The Surprising History of American Mahjong

Every time I tip a set of tiles onto a table in Milwaukee, I'm handling the end of a story that starts in Qing-dynasty China, sails through 1920s Shanghai, survives an American boom and bust, gets rescued by four hundred women in a New York hotel ballroom, and travels through generations of living rooms to reach us. My students usually just want to know what a crak is. But stick around after a lesson and this is the story I can't stop telling, because knowing where the game comes from changes how it feels in your hands.

So here it is, start to finish.

A game called sparrow

Mahjong is Chinese. Let's say that plainly at the top, because the game's American history only makes sense as a chapter in a longer Chinese one. The game emerged in China in the middle-to-late 1800s, during the Qing dynasty, most likely in the region around Ningbo and Shanghai. It didn't appear from nowhere: it evolved out of a family of Chinese card games played with "money-suited" decks: cards organized into suits of coins and strings of coins, which you can still see fossilized in our tiles. The dots are coins. The bams (bamboo sticks) are strings of coins. The craks are characters denoting tens of thousands. Every American player is holding currency from a nineteenth-century Chinese card game and mostly doesn't know it.

The name is my favorite part. In Chinese the game is maque, "sparrow," supposedly for the sound the tiles make when they're shuffled, a clattering like a tree full of birds taking off at once. Anyone who has washed the tiles knows exactly what those first players were hearing. Next time your table does it, listen. Sparrows.

By the early twentieth century the game was thriving in Chinese cities, played in homes and clubs and famously in Shanghai, which is where the American thread picks it up.

The salesman and the red book

Enter Joseph Park Babcock, an American working for Standard Oil in Shanghai in the 1910s and early 1920s. Babcock learned the game, loved it, and had a salesman's insight: Americans would love it too, if somebody sanded down the complexity. So he simplified the rules, added conveniences for foreign learners (including Western numbers printed on the tiles' corners, which our sets carry to this day), trademarked the name "Mah-Jongg" in 1920, and published his rulebook, known ever after as the "red book."

What happened next was not a fad. It was a mania. Abercrombie & Fitch (then a sporting-goods outfitter, if you can believe it) began selling imported sets and sold out completely in 1922, dispatching buyers to scour Chinese cities for more. By 1924, mahjong sets ranked among Shanghai's top exports to the United States. There were mahjong nights, mahjong-themed songs, women hosting parties in Chinese-inspired dress, newspaper columns, competing instruction manuals. For a few gaudy years in the middle of the Jazz Age, America was tile-crazy.

And then, almost as fast, it collapsed. The villain wasn't boredom; it was chaos. Every publisher had its own rulebook, every table played its own game, scoring was a thicket, and a party game that requires a rules negotiation before every party stops being fun. By the late 1920s the craze was over, sets went to the closet shelf, and mahjong in America looked like a finished story.

It wasn't. It was waiting for its second act, and the second act is the good one.

Four hundred women at the Essex House

In 1937, about four hundred women, many of them Jewish New Yorkers who had kept playing right through the bust, gathered at the Essex House hotel in Manhattan. They were led by Viola Cecil, alongside players like Dorothy Meyerson, whose instruction book "That's It!" would teach a generation. Out of that meeting came the National Mah Jongg League.

Consider what they actually did, because it's quietly brilliant. Problem one: chaotic rules had killed the game once. Solution: standardize them. One League, one rulebook, disputes settled. Problem two: even a standardized game can go stale. Solution: the League's genuine stroke of genius, the annual card. Every year, a new printed card of winning hands; every year, the game refreshes itself; every year, players everywhere are learning the same new puzzle together. It's the reason American mahjong in 2027 is a living game rather than a preserved one, and it's why I can teach the current card in Milwaukee to a student who'll play it in Florida at Thanksgiving. Nearly a century later, that card is still how the whole American game breathes.

And from the very start, the card had a conscience: proceeds went to charity, including wartime relief efforts in the 1940s. Every card sold, then and now, gives something away. The League that began with 32 founding members grew to more than 350,000, which means this game has been quietly funding good works through every card on every table for close to ninety years. I find that genuinely moving. Your fifteen-dollar card is a donation with a puzzle attached.

The game of the living room

Here's where the history stops being about institutions and starts being about kitchens.

Through the middle of the twentieth century, American mahjong became a pillar of Jewish-American women's social life, and "pillar" is not too strong a word. The weekly game was an institution: the rotating hostess, the folding table, the good snacks, the sound of tiles underneath decades of conversation. It traveled to the Catskills resorts, where summers meant mahjong on every porch. It organized itself through synagogue sisterhoods. And it left heirlooms: the Bakelite sets handed down from mothers and grandmothers, yellowed racks and all, that students still bring to my lessons, usually with a story attached and sometimes with a card from 1962 still in the case.

I want to be careful and honest about what this chapter is, because it's the part most often told carelessly. American mahjong becoming a Jewish-American love story did not replace or "improve" the Chinese game. Chinese-American communities played their own mahjong the entire time (Cantonese and other variants, in family associations and homes and Chinatown gatherings), a continuous tradition running right alongside the League's game, parallel tracks from the same source. Two communities, two traditions, one set of sparrow tiles. Both are still going. Neither needs the other's permission, and both deserve their history told straight: the game is Chinese in origin, American in this variation, and beloved in more than one direction.

My grandmother's table

Permit me the personal paragraph, because this history isn't abstract to me. My grandmother played a weekly game for longer than I've been alive, and the sound of it (the wash, the racket, the laughter with the volume of women who have known each other forty years, the specific clack of a called tile hitting a rack) is one of the foundational noises of my childhood. I wasn't allowed to touch the tiles with sticky hands and I absolutely did anyway. Her table taught me, long before I could follow a card, what the game is actually FOR: it's a machine for keeping people in each other's lives, one afternoon a week, decade after decade. When I teach in Milwaukee now, that's the thing I'm really passing on. The card changes every year. That doesn't.

The revival

Which brings us to today, because we are living in mahjong's third act. The last stretch of years has brought a genuine revival: younger players discovering the game in waves, new sets from small designers, tournaments and cruises, online play connecting far-flung families, and, the part I see firsthand, beginners' tables full of people whose grandmothers played and people with no mahjong in their family tree at all, learning side by side. Some come for the heritage, some for the aesthetics, some because a friend dragged them, and all of them stay for the same reason the Essex House women stayed: the game is simply that good, and the table is simply that warm.

The revival has also, encouragingly, come with better history-telling: more players who know the game is Chinese, who can name the League's founders, who understand they're holding a story and not just a hobby. That's the spirit I try to teach in.

Why the history matters at the table

Let me land this where I started. You don't need any of this to play; the how to play guide will get you to your first game without a single date attached. But I've noticed something in years of teaching: players who know the story hold the game differently. They hear the sparrows in the wash. They know the numbers in the tile corners are Babcock's fingerprints and the annual card is Viola Cecil's. They understand that the money going to charity isn't a footnote, it's the founding. And when they inherit a Bakelite set or sit down at a strange table in another city and find the same card waiting, they know they've joined something with almost a century of American afternoons behind it, and a longer Chinese story behind that.

That's what I'm handing you along with the tiles. If you'd like the rest (the game itself, taught patiently, history included at no extra charge), come find a seat at one of my lessons, book private lessons for your own crew, or just contact me and tell me about the set in your closet. Especially if it was your grandmother's. Those are my favorite students, and my favorite sets.