Mahjong, American modernity, and cultural transnationalism [electronic resource]
Keywords: History.

"Mahjong, American Modernity, and Cultural Transnationalism" is a socio-cultural history of how the Chinese game mahjong became American, and how in doing so, it helped create modern America from the 1920s through the 1960s. Its story takes us from its inception as a global phenomenon in Shanghai to its evolution as a marker of gendered ethnicity in the United States. Drawing from diverse archival sources, personal papers, print media, and over fifty original oral histories, this dissertation is the first scholarly history of mahjong in the United States. Mahjong reflected the larger processes of social change in which it was embedded, but it also served as a tool for diverse groups to shape behaviors and ideas that had consequences of their own. By examining its trail across ethnic groups and through expatriates, entrepreneurs, immigrants, socialites, and housewives, mahjong tells the story of an American reorientation toward the Pacific in the twentieth century, the tensions between assimilation and cultural continuity that created identifiably ethnic communities, and how women leveraged a game to gain increasing, though contested, access to respectable leisure. Its liminal position as both American and foreign, modern and believed to be ancient, domestic and disruptive to domesticity, allows us insight into often abstract concepts such as economics, culture, and ethnicity, and unites them with on-the-ground individual experiences. Mahjong reveals the intersections of capitalism with gender and sexuality, and with ethnicity and race, but the game has gone unnoticed or has been dismissed as an everyday, often feminized pastime. In fact, mahjong's integration into daily life gives it power to illustrate human-scale aspects of social, cultural, and economic history. From mahjong's migration in the bowels of steamships to its evolution at game tables across the nation, Americans used the Chinese parlor game as a tool to navigate modernity, build communities, and create ethnic identities. The mahjong craze that erupted in the 1920s symbolized key elements of Americans' heightened sense of the "modern, " especially America's global strength abroad and its commercialized, cosmopolitan urban life at home. In the subsequent decades, mahjong offered a powerful tool for creating ethnically defined communities. Chinese Americans and Jewish American women used it in very different ways through the 1960s. For Chinese Americans, mahjong quickly transformed from a lesser-known male gambling game to a more respectable marker of transnational Chinese identity. Jewish American women had been playing mahjong since the 1920s fad, but the Cold War era nurtured a flourishing and unique gendered mahjong culture. Mahjong's history charts the substantial diversification of American culture, as the nation became increasingly able to incorporate difference and even, at least rhetorically, to embrace it. It also highlights the ongoing contestation and fears generated by social change. Through the material culture of mahjong, players have been able to stretch both time and distance. By evoking ideas of China, the tiles' aesthetic symbolism offers a spectrum of meaning, whether giving shape to a sense of ancestral homeland, or an exotic otherworldliness, or a cosmopolitan American modernity. In their enduring physicality and sensory experience, the tiles also facilitate a physical connection across generations, as the sets carry memories of those whose fingers rubbed and clicked the tiles in years past. Mahjong continues to serve as a cultural tool for individuals and groups to build a sense of belonging in new and possibly anxious situations, to imagine a connection to China or what China represents, and to join with those who share heritage or are forming a common identity. It reveals the deeply American experience, sometimes desired and sometimes enforced, of simultaneously belonging and also standing apart.