In a more social area in the back of the hall, a square table situated mahjong in a crossover space where mahjong could be played for high or low stakes.īut behind their flashy exteriors, Chinatowns functioned as economic and cultural hubs that drew Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans from surrounding regions. They erected commercial facades that featured now-iconic curving pagoda rooflines, bright colors, and neon “chop suey” signs-all designed to appeal to outsiders.Ī gambling hall in Locke, a historic Chinatown in the Sacramento Delta, featured games of chance for a mostly male clientele. Struggling during the Great Depression, Chinese American merchants sought to make money by attracting tourists to their neighborhoods. Seen as perpetual foreigners, they remained barred from most forms of employment and routes to upward mobility, even after many in the second generation earned high school diplomas and college degrees. But Chinese Americans did not achieve equality. At the time, Chinese immigrants and second-generation Chinese Americans were finding a tenuous sort of acceptance in the United States as anti-Asian discourse shifted its focus to Japanese Americans and China was seen as an increasingly sympathetic and struggling nation. When mahjong’s worldwide heyday came to an end at the close of the 1920s, people continued playing in Chinatowns, where communities were undergoing significant change. As white Americans engaged with the game for its glamorous appeal, Chinese Americans began to consider mahjong as a tie to their heritage, even if it was not yet rooted in family traditions or homeland memories of most players. But, as its image changed in China and as American society adopted the game, respectable and relatively well-off merchant families began to welcome mahjong into their homes. In Chinatowns, many people knew that wasn’t the case if Chinese immigrants had heard of mahjong at all, they tended to associate it with women of ill repute. Mahjong came to be known as “the national game of China,” both in China and abroad, in the context of the global fad, which advertised the game as an exclusive pastime of the ancient Chinese court. Within Chinatowns’ private and civic spaces-homes, shops, gambling halls and association halls-mahjong helped Chinese Americans further community. It was never only a game for the wealthy, however, as players from across the social spectrum-and across lines of gender, race, and region-embraced the game. Soon the most elite Americans, from President and First Lady Harding to Hollywood celebrities, were playing mahjong, as were throngs of fans in Europe, Japan, Australia, elsewhere in China, and beyond. A number of these players-most famously a Standard Oil representative named Joseph Park Babcock who brought mahjong to California in 1922-marketed the game in the U.S., promoting it as an exciting and “exotic” new pastime. Mahjong tables were settings for forging friendships, building community, or demonstrating power moves of posturing and strategy. The rhythms of the game, its mix of luck and strategy, and the satisfaction of the tiles’ heft and feel propelled its spread. After World War I, mahjong became popular in Shanghai’s social clubs thanks to a rising class of Chinese intermediaries and the growing number of Americans who frequented these clubs. By the turn of the century, it was played mostly by men for both high and low stakes in Shanghai’s courtesan halls, before it swept the Empress Dowager Cixi’s Beijing court in the last years of her reign. Mahjong first evolved as a gambling game in the area around Shanghai in the mid-to-late 1800s. Courtesans and their clients play mahjong in Shanghai, likely on a river “flower boat” at the turn of the 20th century, when both mahjong and courtesan culture had become increasingly pervasive in the city.
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