![]() The game’s wild popularity coincided with challenges to traditional white domesticity as more women gained economic opportunities and participated in urban forms of leisure such as boundary-crossing jazz dances and voyeuristic tourism to Chinatowns. In this instance, however, American consumers led the way for a smaller-scale European mahjong craze as the United States became more directly engaged with East Asia after World War I. 6 Americans had long followed Europe’s lead in importing specific Chinese goods as markers of refinement. 5 By 1924 mahjong sets were the sixth largest export to the United States from Shanghai, China’s largest port. 4 A number of individuals, most famously a Standard Oil representative named Joseph Park Babcock, successfully brought mahjong to the United States via California in 1922. Mahjong in fact was a modern game: it evolved in the mid- and late 1800s in and around Shanghai, spreading by World War I to other major urban centers in China. 3 Manufacturers and importers of the game capitalized on hand-carved Chinese images on natural materials to generate an impression of premodern cultural authenticity. 2 Americans discussed mahjong as a connection to the luxurious and powerful ancient Chinese court, brought into the light of modernity through American entrepreneurial intervention. Representations of mahjong combined commentary about white women and Chinese culture, illustrating the co-construction of race and gender.Įlements of Americans’ heightened sense of the “modern”: America’s global strength abroad and its commercialized, cosmopolitan urban life at home. This magazine cover references the practice of white women dressing in Chinese costume. The mahjong phenomenon inspired an outpouring of cultural production, including art, plays, songs, and poetry. Warner, “Cover Design,” Auction Bridge and Mah-Jongg Magazine, September 1924. The mahjong craze that erupted in the early 1920s further symbolized key Mahjong matrons symbolized social changes, including female independence and leisure, that destabilized traditional notions of white domesticity. Negative racial stereotypes used by critics of the wildly popular foreign game not only targeted Chinese American mobility but also responded to changing gender norms for white Americans. While white women used mahjong as a tool to experiment with new boundaries of respectable femininity, Chinese Americans leveraged mahjong’s popularity for economic opportunities and cultural authority. Mahjong was quite obviously-even desirably-Chinese, in an era when Chinese bodies were alien, exotic, and sexualized. ![]() Hundreds of thousands of Americans purchased game sets, and middle- and leisure-class women enacted representations of Chinese civilization through dress and entertainment. 1 It resonated with a specific historical moment in American life and generated an outpouring of commentary and representations. Mahjong, the Chinese game of skill played by four people with dominolike engraved “tiles,” swept the United States in the 1920s. In this image as in the culture at large, mahjong represented far more than a commodity sold for mass consumption. Exemplifying the massive American cultural output inspired by mahjong, the illustration highlights the performative possibilities the game opened in America, the fad’s ambiguous representations of China, and how the Chinese game and its accoutrements helped form a 1920s “Oriental” aesthetic. The woman, however, is not portrayed as racially Chinese, for the elegant tile-painter is clearly white. On the cover of Auction Bridge and Mah-Jongg Magazine’s 1924 September issue, a woman in gauzy faux-Chinese dress paints designs on a larger-than-life mahjong set.īehind the delicate craftswoman and her embroidered slippers glows a golden Chinese dragon screen, at once alluring and ominous.
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