Mahjong Masquerade: Race, Gender, and Class in 1920s American Popular Culture

The parlor game mahjong swept American society in the 1920s, entering the US from Shanghai via California promoters and New York high society.  Mahjong was a national craze in the 1920s, yet the decade was also the era of “100 percent Americanism.”  The social competition between mahjong and bridge was framed in terms of a power struggle between the Oriental “yellow peril” and European old stock.  The central irony of the mahjong craze is the cultural obsession with an explicitly Chinese game, at the very moment many Americans sought to confirm exclusion of East Asian immigrants. 

How can we understand the paradox of mahjong’s popularity?  For the first players in the 1920s, mahjong helped define a specific moment in American history.  It provided a venue for negotiating modern American identities, exemplifying both the democratization of mass culture and the intentional exclusions leisure culture helped create 

Costuming was an integral and widely displayed element of early mahjong play in the United States.  Elite white women dressed in elaborate “mandarin” costumes, while men asserted their expertise about the game and the Orient.  The fantastical clothing enacted literal performance of racial, gender, and class identities, while simultaneously demonstrating the legitimacy of the wearer’s claims to exotic knowledge and elite status.  Racial performance combined consumption with aesthetic appropriation. 

As mahjong rose in popularity, it became increasingly threatening.  The initial fears, repeated over and over again, of mahjong supplanting bridge soon grew to include physical ailments, as well as anxieties over gender disruption and female obligations to home and race. 

On a broad scale, the game provided Americans a realm within leisure culture to negotiate hotly contested issues of social change.  Gendered representations of mahjong helped create racial categories and solidify a white American identity.