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Last February, my friend Fiona texted a question to me and two other friends: Who wants to learn how to play mah-jongg?
None of us - a group of millennial moms in our late 30s and early 40s - had ever played the game, often thought of as a retirement community pastime for Asian and Jewish grandparents. But we love a good pretext for cocktails and gossip. And we'd heard rumblings of a resurgence among women our age, won over by mah-jongg's combination of luck, skill and socialization. So Liz ordered a cheap set of tiles. We DoorDashed dinner from Chang Chang, then sat down to memorize a chart of Chinese numerals and watch a YouTube tutorial. A few rounds later, we were hooked, and before long, our group text had a new name: Momjong.
We were, it turned out, extremely on-trend. Interest in mah-jongg is surging in D.C. and nationwide, thanks in part to a coterie of coaches and instructors, social media influencers, and luxe spaces to play. New York hotels including the Ace and the Standard have hosted mah-jongg nights; mah-jongg influencers post videos of candy-colored tiles, over-the-top tablescapes, and games set up on floating tables in swimming pools, or girls' nights in floral dresses, with plenty of wine.
Celebrities have gotten into it, too: Meghan Sussex, née Markle, raved about her mah-jongg nights with friends - she calls them her "Maj Squad" - during her series, "With Love, Meghan." Actresses Julia Roberts, Sarah Jessica Parker and Amy Poehler have also discussed learning the game. Designer labels including Ralph Lauren and Hermes have designed luxury sets that cost thousands of dollars.
In our region, Joy by Seven Reasons in Chevy Chase hosts chic mah-jongg nights with instructors to help game newbies and a menu of mah-jongg-themed cocktails. And the new Chinatown-adjacent location of Lucky Danger has a backroom mah-jongg parlor with fancy auto-shuffling tables, decor inspired by the Jackie Chan movie "Rush Hour," and a special menu of overproof whiskeys. There are gameplay nights at the Capital Jewish Museum and the Martin Luther King Jr. library.
Lucky Danger chef Tim Ma grew up playing mah-jongg, and wanted to offer the game as a "culture passion project," he says. But the restaurant's mah-jongg classes, which are taught by his father, also named Tim Ma, have consistently sold out.
"It feels like the culture is being seen," Ma says.
• I won't turn this story into a mah-jongg lesson, but to outline the basics: The objective of this game is to form sets of consecutive or matched pairs, much like gin rummy. A good mah-jongg hand is both strategy and good luck, because deciding which pairs to pursue is informed by the random draw of tiles you are dealt and calculating your odds based on which tiles other players have discarded. The first player to form a winning combination gets to declare "Mah-jongg!" and reveal their hand with a victorious flourish.
Mah-jongg was invented around the turn of the 20th century, an evolution of an older Chinese card game. In her book "Mahjong: House Rules From Across the Asian Diaspora," Nicole Wong, founder of the Mahjong Project, writes that the first documented appearance of a mah-jongg set in the United States was at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. The game trended in the U.S. in the 1920s after an executive who had lived in China introduced it to well-to-do friends in California. A group of Jewish American women who were fans of the game created the National Mah Jongg League in 1937, developing an American style of the game and creating a lasting affinity for it within a culture that, like the Chinese, was othered in America.
Mah-jongg had another resurgence with the 1993 film "The Joy Luck Club." And the current one has been building ever since a pivotal scene in 2018's "Crazy Rich Asians," in which the protagonist uses a game of mah-jongg to best her snobbish, wealthy mother-in-law-to-be.
Wong's book, a glossy-pink instruction manual and love letter to her family's favorite pastime, outlines tips for Chinese-style gameplay and the more than a dozen regional variations from countries throughout Southeast Asia. (The transliterated word, too, has a number of accepted spellings; We've gone with mah-jongg, as per the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.) The styles that seem to be most popular here in D.C. are Chinese and American, which differ in their rules, scoring and number of tiles used. American mah-jongg is scored according to an annual card produced by the National Mah Jongg League. The card changes every year and is met with great anticipation and the occasional scandal: This year's contained a misprint.
After a few sessions of self-taught Chinese-style mah-jongg at home and an upgrade to a vintage Bakelite set gifted to Fiona by her mother-in-law, my friends and I wanted to level up. So Momjong headed to Lucky Danger's parlor, cocktails in hand - food isn't allowed in the mah-jongg room to keep the tables nice - for a lesson with DC Mahj Collective, led by duo Sallie Routh and Mary Kate Craven, who were drawn to the game as a way to build community after becoming mothers.
"Chinese, American, Singaporean, whatever style of mah-jongg you're playing, it's a really sweet way to bring people together," Craven says. "I think connection is more important now than ever in a post-pandemic landscape."
When I looked at the mah-jongg card that Routh and Craven handed to me, I felt like I was trying to decipher the enigma code. It was filled with lines of letters and numbers in different colors, all representing different combinations of tiles that can win mah-jongg, and divided into categories like "Quints," "Consecutive Runs" and "Winds-Dragons." Some of the 55 lines on the card look like this:
FF 123 4444 5555 (Any 3 suits, Any 5 Consec. Nos.)
FF 333 D 666 D 999 D (Any 3 Suits w Matching Dragons)
NNNN EEE WWW SSSS
That last one caught my eye, of course. N, E, W and S represented the tiles called winds, and their cardinal directions - north, east, west and south - but also spelled out "news," which charmed this journalist. Wouldn't it be fun if I could win mah-jongg with NEWS? I thought.
Routh and Craven broke down American-style mah-jongg's peculiarities in easily understandable ways, teaching us the language and etiquette of calling tiles when discarded, and claiming other players' tiles ("Two bam." "Five crack." "Soap." "Birdbam." "Pung.") and deciphering the card so that we would understand how to build winning hands. Fiona won twice. We felt like we were finally beginning to understand both styles.
• The game can be strangely addicting, and everyone seems to have a different reason why they got hooked. For Wong, the author, it's nostalgia, as well as the tactile experience of playing.
"There's a real sensory part of this game, and so I do feel like memories kind of like, take hold in that," she said during a May book talk at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art. "You hear that sound" of the tiles clacking, "and you're just like, 'Oh my God, I'm 10 years old again, learning from my auntie how to play.'"
For Ma, it's the thrill of victory: "You're talking s--- to each other," he says. When someone calls mah-jongg, "everybody turns over [their tiles] and looks at each other's hands like, 'How close were you?'"
For the ladies of DC Mahj Collective, it's the intergenerational aspect of the game. They frequently teach 20-somethings, and also septuagenarians. Study after study has shown that mah-jongg has a positive impact on cognition and socialization for people as they age, thanks to the problem-solving and socialization the game promotes.
"We have people come who are like, 'I want to learn to play with my grandmother, or my aunt, or my mom,'" Routh says.
The mah-jongg resurgence has not come without a few cringeworthy moments. In 2021, a Dallas company called the Mahjong Line founded by White women was accused of cultural appropriation for selling redesigned American-style mah-jongg tile sets that replaced all the Asian references with other pictures that the founders said more closely reflected their personalities.
"Everyone can play it, but I think once it's being taken and kind of like, claimed to be something of your own without that broader acknowledgment," it crosses a line, Wong said during her book talk.
Respect for the game's origins is an issue that dates back to the very beginning of mah-jongg's history in America: White Americans who played the game in the '20s often perpetuated Orientalist tropes, sometimes even dressing up in Chinese attire. I couldn't help but notice that many of the American-style mah-jongg brands with big followings on social media appeared to be White, Southern and preppy, like a sorority.
"When we were building our business, we were trying to very much respect the fact that we did not invent this game," says Routh, who is careful to emphasize mah-jongg's history and tradition in her teaching. "It didn't start with us."
• The true test came two weeks later, when Fiona and I joined a mah-jongg night at Joy by Seven Reasons in Chevy Chase, where we were seated with two more advanced players. Allison and Blair, we learned, were regulars at this event, and had been taking lessons from longtime instructor Caryn Fagan, who began the evening with a quiz: "How many suits" of tiles are there?
Three.
"And the names of the suits are?" Crack, bam and dots.
"And the red dragon goes with?" Crack, and the green is bam, and the white dragon goes with dots, unless it's also a zero, and ... Fiona and I looked at each other with uncertainty.
But mah-jongg clacks, and then it clicks: Supervised by Fagan and her team of instructors, we were able to start pulling patterns out of our hands, making order out of chaos. Fiona won one round, Allison won another. Each new hand was a little puzzle to solve, a test of quick thinking and strategy, boosted by a little luck.
Mah-jongg is old-school, analog. When Fagan plays, she says, "I leave all my troubles at the door and focus on my hand. . . I love the camaraderie of it, getting together with my friends. We share good things and bad things. We support each other."
I looked at my hand, which was shaping up to be a good one. Two joker tiles, and several winds. I drew another E. Discarded a seven dot. Drew another W. A third joker finally made it happen: NNNN EEE WWW SSSS.
"Mah-jongg!"
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