Let Me Put U On: To what Black women taught me about mahjong
In my family, game nights were serious business.
The basement of our Chicago home became game central on holidays and weekends when my parents gathered with friends for food and fun.
The party didn’t really begin until the card table came out. The sound of dominoes slapping the wood surface or threats to run a Boston in a round of Bid Whist mixed with the sound of Al Green’s falsetto flowing from the stereo. It was cacophonous yet soothing.
As a child, I understood that we were part of a community bonded by traditions that allowed us to unwind while enjoying friendly competition and deep connection.
Naturally, I carried that enthusiasm into adulthood.
While my favorite games are the ones I’ve played for decades, I have also generally enjoyed learning new ones. But years ago, when a friend invited me to play mahjong, I declined.
The Chinese game has been part of American culture for a century, but I only had a vague sense of how it was played. I thought it was too genteel, too boring and too complicated to satisfy my competitive spirit.
Then I discovered Kinsfolk Mahjong.
On a Saturday afternoon, tables lined the aisles of the home store at Dillard’s Atlantic Station. Each table was set with beautifully colorful tiles engraved with symbols that mahjong players would recognize as the three suits: circles (dots), bamboo (bams) and characters (cracks).
I was surrounded by mostly women (and some men), seated four to a table, sipping beverages, chatting and setting up for game play. The clattering tiles, spirited laughter rising from a table of experienced players and the occasional squeal (including my own) upon seeing friends lost to time, shifted something inside me.
In this room, filled with Black women, I was transported back to those childhood moments that left me feeling such a deep sense of community. One attendee turned to me and said, “We are bringing Bid Whist to mahjong!”
Now that’s the kind of game I can get down with.
Yvonne Hopkins founded Kinsfolk Mahjong with the goal of reconnecting to community.
An empty nester with a passion for teaching and coaching, Hopkins decided after learning to play that she wanted to help expand the game’s cultural influence.
Hopkins offers private lessons, teaches youth at the Boys & Girls Clubs of America and hosts mahjong events at local woman-owned and Black-owned businesses. She is also developing a league for first-timers who want to ease into league play.
The more I learned about mahjong’s history in America, the more I wanted to learn how to play.
Mahjong originated in China during the mid-to-late 1800s as a gambling game mostly enjoyed by men but it would eventually cross continents, cultures, genders and generations.
American expatriates in Shanghai first brought the game to the Western world in the 1920s and with savvy marketing, mahjong became a pop culture trend for several years.
This was during a moment of rising anti-Asian and anti-immigration legislation in the country but Americans didn’t see the paradox in embracing and profiting from the game while shunning the people and the culture that created it.
Despite all of the efforts to commercialize and capitalize off its popularity, mahjong’s arrival had a deeper resonance.
It also became a way for Americans to “create group identities and address issues of inclusion and exclusion,” writes Anneliese Heinz in “Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of American Culture.”
In the Black community, mahjong spread primarily through Black women’s social clubs. Segregation created barriers for Black women who wanted to learn the game because most mahjong instructors were white women.
Instead, Black women hired Chinese women to come to their homes for private lessons and credited them in the society pages of the Black newspapers for teaching them the intricacies of Chinese mahjong.
By the late 1920s, the mahjong fad faded. But pockets of players around the country continued playing even as the country descended into the economic chaos of the Great Depression.
In 1932 and 1935, the Chicago Defender, the most influential Black newspaper of the time, ran mentions of the Nu Wah Mah Jong Club, a group of Black women in Chicago who continued their annual dinner party tradition and kept playing mahjong long after the larger culture drifted away from the game.
That detail touched me deeply. I had grown up in Chicago watching Black families like mine gather around game tables.
Decades before I was born, Black women in my hometown were doing the same, using mahjong to sustain a kind of social ritual I knew so well.
By the late 1930s, mahjong was also becoming deeply rooted among Jewish women in the New York area. In 1937, a group of players founded the National Mah Jongg League, which helped standardize the American version of the game.
We are now in the third wave of mahjong popularity in America, and as Heinz explained, it remains a pathway to community building for marginalized groups including members of the Asian diaspora, Jewish women, Black women and members of the LGBTQ community.
At the Kinsfolk Mahjong meetup, I saw that community building in action.
“With everything happening in our communities, in mahjong we have found our way back to relying on each other again and we have found our safe spaces,” Hopkins said. “It has reconnected people in the Black community. I am working toward bridging the gap to make it more Atlanta looking.”
I came to Kinsfolk Mahjong thinking I was learning about a game that was unfamiliar to me.
But instead, I found something familiar: Black people gathered around tables, laughing, competing and building community, just as they had in the Chicago of my childhood and throughout so many generations before.
It’s time I added mahjong to my game night roster.
Bams, cracks and dots? Here I come.
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