Annelise Heinz
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​Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture
​Oxford University Press, 2021

How has a game brought together Americans and defined separate ethnic communities? This book tells the first history of mahjong and its meaning in American culture. 

Click-click-click. The sound of mahjong tiles connects American expatriates in Shanghai, Jazz Age white Americans, urban Chinese Americans in the 1930s, incarcerated Japanese Americans in wartime, Jewish American suburban mothers, and Air Force officers' wives in the postwar era.

Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture illustrates how the spaces between tiles and the moments between games have fostered distinct social cultures in the United States. This mass-produced game crossed the Pacific, creating waves of popularity over the twentieth century. Annelise Heinz narrates the history of this game to show how it has created a variety of meanings, among them American modernity, Chinese American heritage, and Jewish American women's culture. As it traveled from China to the United States and caught on with Hollywood starlets, high society, middle-class housewives, and immigrants alike, mahjong became a quintessentially American game. Heinz also reveals the ways in which women leveraged a game to gain access to respectable leisure. The result was the forging of friendships that lasted decades and the creation of organizations that raised funds for the war effort and philanthropy. No other game has signified both belonging and standing apart in American culture.

Drawing on photographs, advertising, popular media, and dozens of oral histories, Heinz's rich and colorful account offers the first history of the wildly popular game of mahjong.

Winner, Pacific Coast Branch Book Award: outstanding first book on any historical subject

Finalist, Oregon Book Award: Frances Fuller Victor Award for General Nonfiction

Finalist, Huntington Library's Shapiro Book Award: ​outstanding first book in American history


Reviews

"This expertly crafted material history asks what can we learn about the making of modern American culture from a parlor game? As it would turn out, quite a lot. Written in a style as engaging and lively as the subject matter itself, Mahjong investigates how the boundaries of social inclusion and exclusion evolved throughout the 20th century in complicated and often surprising ways. Ranging from the factories in which the tiles were produced to the parlors in which the game is played, Mahjong illustrates the ways in which seemingly peripheral spaces are central to the manufacturing of cultural history." – Elizabeth Rush, author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore 

"Annelise Heinz's Mahjong is a beautifully written, deeply researched history of mahjong. She examines the transnational history of this game and how it has moved across national, racial, cultural, and gendered boundaries while at the same reformulating and reinforcing some of these same borders. This is a history that combines the study of leisure with labor, consumption with performance, as well as race and ethnicity with class and gender. It offers fresh interpretations of modern America by focusing on the unlikely journey of a game." – Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, author of Radicals on the Road
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​"What could have been presented as fun and therefore trivial, the game of mahjong, in the capable hands of Annelise Heinz, instead emerges as a serious matter in cross-cultural history, linking China and the United States. This book makes women's history, American Jewish history, and the history of class and leisure subjects that inform each other. Through deep research and clear writing, Heinz drives home the point that it is not just a game."
​– Hasia Diner, New York University
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"In a work of dazzling richness and scope, Annelise Heinz reveals how multiracial makers, players, and marketers of mahjong negotiated and shaped social change in everyday life for a century. Comparing the rounds played by Chinese men detained at Angel Island with the tournaments held by Japanese Americans in World War II incarceration camps underscores the meanings of recreation in confinement. Evoking the delights of the game, this fascinating study also shows how Jewish women adapted mahjong, cultivating ties of female friendship and ethnic community, while also claiming Americanness and modernity." – Valerie Matsumoto, University of California, Los Angeles

"In this lively history, Annelise Heinz shows us that mahjong is more than a game. In her deft hands, it illuminates modern consumerism, Orientalist fantasy, ethnic identity, and women's self-fashioning across the twentieth century. A richly researched, happily readable book." – Joanne Meyerowitz, author of How Sex Changed

A "reader-friendly but fully footnoted account that leaves no tile unturned." – South China Morning Post
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Available for purchase in hard copy, ebook, and audiobook at: Indiebound, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Oxford University Press, local brick-and-mortars, and wherever books are sold.

Book Excerpts

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Oxford Academic:
"The Chinese Board Game That Transformed American Culture"

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Tablet Magazine: 
"How Mahjong Became American–and Jewish"

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Jewish Book Council:
"Bungalow Colonies and Mahjong Summers"


Related Articles

Saturday Evening Post:
"How Mahjong Laid Tiles for Chinese America"

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Many Chinese Americans began playing the game in the 1920s, swept up in an enormous international fad. But the game fast became a fixture in their communities — a versatile pastime that, through the sounds and the language of gameplay, and through its visual presence in public places and in private homes, helped create spaces for a new, shared Chinese American experience.

Wall Street Journal:
"How Mahjong Became American"

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On Mother’s Day in the 1950s, many Jewish women across the U.S. looked forward to one gift above all: their very own mahjong set. Mahjong, a game of skill and luck played by four people using domino-like engraved tiles, emerged in China in the 1800s, and in the 1920s it briefly sparked a global fad. By the mid-20th century it had become a hallmark of Jewish American culture. Today another mahjong resurgence is attracting new players, many of whom are learning a distinctive variation known as “American mahjong.” The game’s history offers an unusual lens through which to see the intersection of ethnicity and belonging in the U.S.

American Historical Review: 
​“Maid’s Day Off”: Leisured Domesticity in the Mid-Twentieth-Century United States​

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At the height of the mid-twentieth-century domestic revival, middle-class Jewish women created forms of “leisured domesticity,” marked by temporary female-only recreational spaces in their family-centered arenas. In contrast to other forms of recreation, with mahjong second-generation Jewish women gained an entitlement to peer-oriented leisure in the site of domestic labor: the home. ​
"Maid's Day Off"
File Size: 829 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

Frontiers, A Journal of Women Studies: 
​Performing Mahjong in the 1920s: White Women, Chinese Americans, and the Fear of Cultural Seduction

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In the 1920s, Americans did not just play mahjong; they built an entire performative culture around it, from galas to garden plays. As the game quickly became feminized, society pages featured mahjong matrons dressed in Chinese costume. While white women used mahjong as a tool to experiment with new boundaries of respectable femininity, Chinese Americans leveraged mahjong’s popularity for economic opportunities in a discriminatory economy. The ways in which mahjong symbolized modern American culture, buttressed by Orientalist ideas of race and gender, allowed the game to stand in for debates over white femininity. Rather than merely a temporary foray into the exotic, mahjong came to represent the threats posed by changing gender, sexual, and racial encounters during the 1920s.
Performing Mahjong in the 1920s
File Size: 624 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File


    Do you have mahjong memories?
    I am always interested in hearing what people remember about mahjong, especially memories that date before 1970. I would greatly appreciate any personal photographs or other mahjong memorabilia. Thank you for sharing your story and for helping make history!

    Please note that, unless otherwise specified, any communication may be quoted in my future writing and publication.

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