Changing the Game

Nicole Wong’s grandparents, like many in their generation of Chinese New Zealanders, were avid mahjong players. They taught the game to their four children, who competed to determine who would do the household chores, and hosted weekly sessions in which family and friends sat around a table strewn with clacking tiles, catching up over conversation. But when Wong’s parents immigrated to California in 1989, they had no one to play with. They never taught Wong and her brothers mahjong, a contest of luck and skill that derives from centuries-old Chinese card games. The family’s mahjong set sat in the garage, an unused relic gathering dust, for decades. “I lived a very Americanized childhood,” Wong said. “I knew that I was Chinese American, but I didn’t really have a super strong sense of what that meant.”

It wasn’t until the summer after graduating from Boston College in 2009 that Wong finally learned mahjong, while spending a month living with her grandparents in New Zealand. Today she is an expert, the author of the recent book Mahjong: House Rules from Across the Asian Diaspora, and a sort of ambassador for the game.

The modern version, in which four players (or teams) pick and discard tiles to form a winning hand (“Mahjong!”), was popularized in the US in the 1920s by the American businessman Joseph Park Babcock, who learned the game in China and then brought a simplified version to the States. Over the past couple of years, the game has enjoyed a huge resurgence, particularly with Gen Z and Wong’s fellow Millennials. “Mahjong used to be a board game for Chinese grandmas. Now everyone wants to play,” announced one characteristically enthusiastic Slate magazine headline last fall, reporting on a boom of mahjong nights popping up at trendy bars, restaurants, and hotels from New York City to Nashville. Around the same time, a clip of Julia Roberts talking about her weekly games with friends on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert went viral across social media.

In 2023, Wong began hosting mahjong events at venues around the San Francisco Bay Area, where she now lives, teaching newbies to play. As the game has exploded around the country, so has her profile. This summer, Wong was invited by NPR to discuss mahjong and her book before an audience of two hundred players at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, DC. For Vogue magazine, she wrote about the role the game played in reconnecting to her heritage, and she has been interviewed about the recent surge of intergenerational interest by outlets such as Axios.

Wong, a Gabelli Presidential Scholar who majored in English at BC and codirected the AHANA Leadership Council’s Women of Color Caucus, attributes the revived interest in mahjong to two primary factors: a craving for social interactivity in an increasingly disconnected society, and a renewed embrace of cultural roots within certain branches of family trees. “People are gravitating to it as an activity in the same way people went to trivia nights when I was in my twenties,” Wong said. “Plus, when it comes to younger generations in Asian American communities, I think there is a curiosity and pride about cultural heritage that is more celebrated now, in the wake of the anti-Asian hate we saw in the pandemic. Those years were an awakening. It’s very different than when I was growing up in the ’90s and early 2000s.”

Wong said that learning mahjong from her grandparents opened doors to conversations she’d never been able to have before, including about Chinese culture and family lore, like how her great-grandmothers were among the earliest Chinese immigrants to New Zealand in the 1920s. She also saw sides of her grandparents’ personalities she’d never witnessed before: “their cheekiness,” she writes in her book, “their competitive rapport, their smug pride in winning a hand—that cracked a little window into their younger days.”

In 2019, she embarked on “a creative side project to preserve my family history through the lens of mahjong,” she said. What began as a series of conversations with her parents about memories and personal traditions associated with the game morphed into The Mahjong Project, a website that explains gameplay and invites players around the globe to share their unique “house rules” and family stories about the game. The project, as well as the knack for storytelling that Wong developed as a former podcast producer for Spotify, formed a basis for Mahjong. The book offers tutorials, an overview of regional variations—including Taiwanese, Malaysian, Filipino, and American styles—and instructions on hosting mahjong nights, from choosing snacks to honoring superstitions (never tap someone on the shoulder!) to “the art of talking trash (like an elder).”

More than anything, Wong said, she wants to encourage others to treat the game as a gateway to conversation, connection, and community. It has certainly been exciting to her to see love and appreciation for the game grow in recent years, both within and outside of Asian communities. “There was a knowledge gap that needed to be bridged,” she said. “Now young people are playing it more, inviting friends over to play as they would any board game night. That was the goal.” ◽