The sound of hard plastic pieces colliding on a table.
Clack, clack, clack.
The shuffling of tiles, clinking of glasses. Laughter from groups of women huddling at small, square tables. Wine in hand, they stare at little cards and rearrange the colorful plastic pieces on racks in front of them.
“Mahjong!” someone calls out above the noise.
It’s a sleepy Monday evening, but inside 1808 Craft & Vine in Greensboro’s Friendly Center, the vibe is electric. Dozens of women crowd the space for a Mahjong 101 class.
In recent years, the Chinese game has seen an incredible rise in popularity. Sets go for anywhere from $25 on Amazon to more than $60,000 for Prada, Hermès, and Louis Vuitton editions. There’s even a new, controversial Hallmark Channel movie coming out featuring the game.
Mahjong is having a moment—not just in North Carolina, but across the country. While there are approximately 40 different forms of the game—including Japanese riichi, Singaporean style, Taiwanese, and Vietnamese—its roots are Chinese.
Many are coming to mahjong for the first time, sometimes without knowing its history, at a time when tensions around race and heritage, gender and class, commercialization, and community are clashing like tiles on a table.
More on Mahjong
The spelling of mahjong, like the different versions of the game, varies across communities and cultures. In this story, we use the spelling the most common spelling for the Chinese version of the game.
Mahjong is a tile-based game typically played with four competitors. The goal is to be the first to build a complete winning hand by drawing and discarding tiles. In Chinese or Hong Kong-style mahjong, there are 144 tiles, including three suits numbered 1-9. The suits are characters (wan), circles (tong), and bamboo (suo). There are also honor tiles, known as winds (East, South, West, and North) and dragons (red, green, and white). There are four of every tile, plus eight bonus flower and season tiles.
American mahjong is played with 152 tiles, including the addition of joker tiles. The characters are called “crak” tiles, the circles called “dots,” and the bamboo tiles are called “bam.” Flower tiles are also used differently.
“It’s like you’re opposed to Chinese influence, but you’re consuming all of our culture and profiting off of it,” said Ricky Leung, co-founder of North Carolina Asian Americans Together, a statewide community advocacy group.
And it’s not just Asian Americans who feel conflicted about mahjong’s recent popularity. “I have mixed feelings,” said Sheryl Hirsh, who is Jewish and has played for three decades. “It’s really become trendy.”
When mahjong was first brought to America almost exactly 100 years ago, it stirred some of these same dynamics. Now, similar questions are resurfacing: To whom does mahjong belong? Who gets to benefit from it? And perhaps most importantly, what is mahjong for?
The Making of an ‘American Game’
Mahjong was first introduced to the U.S. by Joseph Park Babcock, a Standard Oil Company representative who discovered it while stationed in Suzhou, China. When Babcock returned to the U.S. in 1920, he brought a version of the game with him. Its East Asian roots appealed at a time when “Orientalist” products and fashions were all the rage among wealthy, white Americans.
Between the end of World War I and the stock market crash that ignited the Great Depression, upper-class Americans draped their living rooms in patterned fabrics and bought silk kimonos, incense, and chinoiserie figurines. Macy’s and other department stores staged elaborate showrooms with mahjong sets sold by white salesgirls in Chinese-style hairdos and embroidered dresses.
“Mahjong was marketed and advertised as an exotic game,” said Nicole Wong, creator of The Mahjong Project and author of Mahjong: House Rules from Across the Asian Diaspora. “And there were people dressing up in Asian costumes, treating Chinese culture as an aesthetic, as something to try on.”
The game spread among middle-to-upper-class white women, becoming a phenomenon that charted “the fraught relationship of leisure in American culture, particularly along the lines of class, ethnicity, and gender,” writes historian Annelise Heinz, author of Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture.
Just a few decades earlier, President Chester A. Arthur had signed the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act into law, the first broad restriction on immigration based on race. Mahjong’s rise stirred further racist and xenophobic sentiments, as some feared it would supplant bridge, a popular national pastime, or that American women would become lazy or be seduced by Chinese men.
“We’re talking about a game that was hugely popular in the United States that represented Chinese culture at a time when Chinese people were restricted from moving here,” Wong said.
Echoes of those dynamics can be felt today. While the current administration’s immigration crackdown centers on the Latino community, Asians, particularly people from China, have been affected. Asian-Americans also faced heightened bigotry and racism during the pandemic, and in turn formed tighter bonds within the community—which can feel threatened as a cultural trend suddenly becomes popular.
For many Asian Americans, preserving mahjong is more about protecting that identity rather than gatekeeping.
“What I found as I started writing about mahjong was this groundswell with personal connection that mahjong had the ability to unearth,” Wong said. “The feeling is familiar with food culture … it reminds us of family and culture and traditions.”
By the end of the 1920s, the game was losing steam. Then a group of Jewish women in New York formed the National Mah Jongg League in 1937, outlining a standard set of rules and, most notably, creating a set of winning hands to be refreshed annually. These are represented each year on a card purchased through the national organization, which marked the birth of what is now known as American mahjong.
“I think there’s some confusion between American mahjong and Asian mahjong,” said Aaron Wan, founder of the Triangle-based Chinese mahjong group, Pung Fu Hustle Social Club. “They’re both called mahjong, but they’re very different. And the people who are picking up each are completely different.”
There’s been a surge in Chinese mahjong clubs in recent years, but many classes and meet-ups tend to play American mahjong, particularly in the South, where Asian populations are smaller than on the West Coast or in bigger cities. That’s caused some friction among Asian communities who have been playing the traditional style for years.
For Wong, even using the phrase “American mahjong” felt strange. “I was really hesitant to refer to it as American mahjong,” she said. “Because what does that say about the way I play mahjong? I’m American, and I play mahjong.”
But as she conducted more research for her book, she began to accept the description as the most apt phrase for the form that’s gaining popularity now.
For Jewish communities, it’s also become interwoven with their cultural identity. “By the 1950s, Jewish Americans across the country recognized mahjong as ‘our game,’” Heinz writes in her book.
Hirsh has been teaching and hosting mahjong sessions at Greensboro’s Temple Emanuel for years.
“The game is built on socialization and making those lifelong friendships,” said Hirsh, who as a child watched her mother and grandmother play. Now in her 60s, Hirsh is wary of the commercialization of the game. While they charge about $15 per class at the temple, that’s just to cover the use of the facility and security. The open play sessions are free. She’s seen people charging much higher rates for lessons and open play sessions.
Wan started Pung Fu Hustle in 2024 as a way to share Chinese mahjong with the wider community. He hosts weekly, free open-play sessions at Namu in Durham and the occasional one-off, paid, Asian-themed mahjong events. Seeing others charge for mahjong lessons or play sessions makes him laugh.
“I would teach you for free,” he said. “Right now, it’s a labor of love. I don’t want to get to a point where I’m charging for every seat and counting every dollar. That’s not the point.”
Culture and Capitalism
But some see the game’s virality as a business opportunity.
Bridgette Clyne stood at the front of a cluster of tables inside Greensboro’s 1808 Craft & Vine and held up the 2025 National Mah Jongg League card, outlining the rules of the game and its origins.
She first learned how to play in 2024 and was immediately hooked.
“It just clicked for me very quickly,” she said. “It’s a game of pattern recognition.”
Soon she was teaching her friends and family. She began researching the game online and fell into a “rabbit hole on Instagram.”
Then she had an idea. She could marry her marketing and human resources skills to start a company to teach others. Clyne led her first class in October 2024 and incorporated Mahjong Mingle the next year.
“I had a little bit of imposter syndrome because I was new,” Clyne said. “But at the same time, I was teaching people who were new. And you know, I enjoyed it. So I thought, ‘Well, why not?’”
Now, there are dozens of classes—both free and paid—in Greensboro and virtually every other city in the U.S. She charges anywhere from $40 to $60, depending on whether the session is a class or open play.
On Instagram, Clyne posts videos with tips, explains the differences between casual and competitive play, and shows off new tiles and mats. Many of them feature colorful tiles that diverge from the traditional Chinese sets, which are predominantly red, green, white, and black.
Among the most popular brands of American mahjong is The Mahjong Line, a Texas-based company started in 2020 by a group of affluent white women. Their sets, which sell out online for upwards of $500, are cast in a colorful pastel palette with symbols that stray from the traditional aesthetic.
Their popularity helped spark the new wave of interest, leading a local magazine to laud the company’s founders as the “Magnates of Mahjong”—entrepreneurial disruptors who “survived cancel culture” to create an empire. Other outlets like Vanity Fair, Texas Monthly, and The Wall Street Journal have charted the game’s growth, particularly in the South’s moneyed enclaves. Mahjong’s resurgence speaks to a certain “white feminine American audience,” Heinz said. “It overlaps with a culture of hosting and southern femininity and country club culture,” Heinz said. Southern Living Magazine even launched its own mahjong set, sold at Dillard’s.
Last fall, the pair of Charlotte women behind Mahj in the City launched a nationwide league called the Bambird Scramble, which has now expanded to more than 30 cities.
Heinz notes that other forms of mahjong are growing too. But American mahjong tends to be the most visible. “Marketing and the reaction to them has fueled more attention to the game,” Heinz said.
Social media influencers are all over the trend, displaying colorful sets laid out on intricate mats they call “tablescapes.” Some have wholly decorated mahjong rooms.
Palmar Ortmann, who lives in Greensboro, learned how to play in 2022 and launched The Mahj Pal in 2024. She has “15 sets and counting,” and said part of the craze comes from all of the merchandising.
“The beautiful tiles, the beautiful racks,” she said. “I think that applies to women a lot. It’s all kind of filled into one. The social media, the marketing. There’s just beautiful stuff out there.”
Ortmann charges about $45 per person for a lesson, but says it’s not all about profit. In December, she hosted a mahjong fundraiser for diabetes research and advocacy, a disease that impacts her son. The event raised $53,000.
“If I did nothing else with mahjong, that made it worthwhile,” Ortmann said. “There are so many generous people that want to help, and mahjong is a great way to get people having fun while being philanthropic.”
Mahjong has been used as a fundraising tool since the ‘30s. When the National Mah Jongg League began charging for its annual cards, they donated a portion to a charitable organization, a tradition that continues today.
But the new wave of interest could be shifting that as well. Nancy Swanson, who hosts the Temple Emanuel sessions with Hirsh, has noticed more players creating their own cards and winning hands rather than purchasing the annual cards, including The Mahjong Line. Swanson fears this will diminish the league’s significance and charitable impact.
Jennifer Laiprasert first started playing mahjong last August, and assisted with Clyne’s recent Mahjong 101 class. Earlier this month, she hosted a fundraiser for breast cancer research.
As a half-Thai, half-Chinese American, Laiprasert said she feels the tension between longtime players and newcomers; she usually plays with white women.
“There are the traditional players who only like to play with the traditional tiles that are very comparable to the Asian sets,” Laiprasert said. “But there’s a whole other batch of players that are more American and more consumerist.”
Laiprasert understands the appeal. She has about 10 beautifully designed different sets herself. “It’s a way for artists to express themselves,” Laiprasert said. “There’s more themed sets, so people can pick ones that speak to them.”
Friends Lauren Gordon and Drew Arthur are leaning into the trend. Last year, Gordon, a visual artist, translated her High Point-themed paintings into a mahjong set. The pair also launched the first Greensboro-themed game: The Boro Tiles.
“I didn’t know a lot about mahjong until we started making this set,” Gordon said. “I was obsessed with the art on each of the pieces. As an artist, I was like, ‘This is so cool.’”
They considered different local landmarks as inspiration: denim jeans for the number tiles, native flowers, tigers as the dragons, and most notably, the Woolworth stools the A&T Four used during their sit-in for desegregation. “Especially right now, we talk about how we want mahjong to bring people together,” Arthur said. “And it’s a huge part of Greensboro and an important part of history.”
Both the Greensboro and High Point sets—which cost about $375—are currently available for pre-order.
But not everyone is moved by expensive, pretty sets.
“I don’t like it,” said Amy Johnson, a player at a free weekly meetup at Greensboro’s Leonard Recreation Center. “The sets are cutesy, pastel colors and with beach motifs; it’s just too trendy.”
Many American sets remove all traces of the game’s Chinese origin. “It’s happening in a context out of the longer-term cultural conversations that have highlighted problems with cultural appropriation but haven’t necessarily resulted in a way forward for what cultural exchange and appreciation can look like,” Heinz said.
But that, too, isn’t new. “We live in a highly consumerist economy and culture … so it does not feel surprising,” said Heinz. “In fact, it mirrors the game’s origins.”
The Next Move
Honoring mahjong’s origins and identity requires connection, Heinz said. “I think it’s incredible and beautiful that this game is so adaptable that it can create bridges of interest and connection across significant differences.”
Clyne said its rise is a reflection of what today’s society is lacking. “I think the timing has to do with the pandemic ending and people wanting to host again, have friends over,” Clyne said. “It has to do with getting back together with people.”
Wan agrees. “I think with technology we’ve strayed so far from what people should be experiencing,” he said. “People are coming back to, ‘What does raw social interaction look like and how can that be facilitated?’”
Wendee Cutler, who has been playing for 27 years and helps organize the open play at Leonard Recreation Center each week, knows that feeling. “We laugh, but we’ve also had deep conversations,” Cutler said. “We’ve gone through spousal deaths, illnesses. The only word I can think of is sisterhood.”
More and more people—including many who are not Jewish—are visiting Temple Emanuel to play mahjong every week. Swanson said she’s been happy to see more people join, including younger players. “There’s a great Jewish word for this,” Swanson said. “It’s ‘heimish.’ It means homey, and it’s comfy. Makes you feel like you’re welcome.”
Longtime players believe the popularity will eventually wane, just as it did in the 1920s. “I think the commercialization will calm down and meet a happy medium back to the socialization aspect of what this game was really meant to be,” Hirsh said.
Wong hopes that connection can help spur meaningful cultural exchanges. She doesn’t mind other communities playing; she just wants people to be aware as they do so.
“I think the game can be played and appreciated by everyone,” Wong said. “I think it’s specifically because of the role of racism in the United States that makes it feel so loaded. What I would hope people ask themselves is, ‘What responsibility do we have that this is being done sensitively?’ And, ‘What is the engagement with the communities that this game is originally connected to?’”
For Wan, mahjong will always be a Chinese game. That’s why he gets excited when people who have only played American mahjong come to Namu and try the original. Sometimes, they find they like the Chinese version better. Whichever they decide to play, he says, is less important than the value it brings to their lives.
“The point isn’t just to play mahjong,” he said. “Mahjong is a glue that is bringing people together.”