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June 11, 2010
Exploring a game’s resonance
N.Y. exhibit explores the deep Jewish connection with mah jongg.
SHELLEY LIGHTBURN
Mah jongg, a Chinese parlor game of ornate tiles dating back to the time of Confucius, found its way to North American Jewish households in the 1930s. Popular with Jewish women, the game has come to symbolize an expression of community. Marking this unusual intersection of Jewish and Chinese cultures, the Museum of Jewish History: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust designed Project Mah Jongg, a multi-faceted, multi-sensory exhibition on the Chinese game and its relationship to contemporary Jewish culture.
The museum, located in New York City’s Battery Park district, is appropriately situated in view of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Also not far is New York’s Chinatown, one of North America’s largest, and the Lower Eastside, once known to Jewish (and other) immigrants as the “Gate to America,” with its tenements as home. With the museum seeking to explore Jewish history and culture as a living and breathing continuum, it seems about time that an exhibit exploring the shared experience of the Jewish and Chinese diasporas should materialize.
Entering the pentagonal exhibition room, visitors are confronted with a structure that fills the space, comprised of movable rectangular pieces with whimsical symbols, emulating various mah jongg game pieces. Reaching the sky-lit ceiling, the structure comes together into the Star of David, representing the coming together of the two cultures. In the centre of the structure, a game of mah jongg is laid out on a table with chairs, inviting visitors to play it as part of their experience. Each pillar of the structure features specific artifacts, including mah jongg sets, snacks and party favors signifying the atmosphere in which the game is played in households and community gatherings. To complete this interactive experience, visitors can listen to soundbites mounted on the corresponding walls that offer the clack and crack of the game’s tiles.
“It’s designed to echo the nature of the game itself,” said Melissa Martens, curator of Project Mah Jongg, of the exhibit’s spacial significance. “The exhibition responds both to the uniqueness of the space of our building, but also to the forms and the rituals of the game of mah jongg. Everyone who describes memories of mah jongg [says] it’s more than just a game. It’s about touch, it’s about gossip, it’s about the foods, it’s about bonding with your friends, it’s about relationships. And, so, we wanted the exhibit to have a lot of those different elements.”
Abbott Miller designed the central structure of the show to be moveable and adjustable like a mah jongg set. As a traveling exhibit, it has the added utility of fitting into a variety of spaces and using materials from the communities that house the show. In addition, MOCA (Museum of Chinese America) acted as advisors to the show. Many of the artifacts have been lent to the museum by people of the community, private collectors and other museums, making the exhibit a collaborative effort.
The exhibit also explores the hybrid nature of mah jongg, said Martens. “It is mostly a physical articulation that came out of the 19th century that evolved from Chinese card games and domino games of the ‘pay system’ – which means money-suit symbols that would decorate currency and indicate value – turned into things like the dot tiles that you see today. He [Miller] was working with those motifs. And then he was also thinking synagogue architecture meets pagoda meets giant tiles, so he was playing with that entire vocabulary,” she said.
A small Jewish Diaspora community can be traced in China as far back as the seventh and eighth centuries CE, but the population grew large during the turbulent times of 20th-century displacement, including the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust. However, that Chinese Jewish community aside, mah jongg seems to hold specific significance to the Jewish North American experience as part of contemporary culture.
Visitors to the exhibit can visualize the somewhat parallel lives of European Jewish immigrants with Chinese immigrants in the vibrant, bustling centres of tenement life, where to be the “other” was to be both exotic – and excluded. Not surprisingly, mah jongg would reach mainstream America at the height of Orientalism and the waves of immigration to America, in the 1920s. But just how did a Chinese parlor game gain such a beloved place in North American Jewish life? Was it just a question of the right place at the right time?
“Part of it was bringing people together in the 1920s, where people had been experiencing the Depression, the war years. It was a perfect compliment for people who wanted to come together regularly through cultural groups, such as Jewish Americans or Chinese Americans. A lot of those groups convened over and over again because they were in the same neighborhoods, vacationed in the same places, had the same neighbors and friends. It’s just one of those things that lends itself to the rhythms of Jewish life and communal life,” said Martens.
The popularity of mah jongg was helped along by American aficionado Joseph P. Babcock, who started importing sets to the United States in 1922. The North American craze particular to Jewish households could have also been brought on by the migration of European Jews to China during and after the Second World War, and then on to the United States, where they brought mah jongg as a reflection of their experiences as a displaced people. Whatever fueled this cultural phenomenon, it stuck. The National Mah Jongg League, formed in New York by a group of Jewish women in 1937, today counts more than 275,000 members across the country.
As New York-based pan-Asian historian and cultural activist John Kuo Wei Tchen explained, “The contemporary American relation to mah jongg is a legacy of this triangulated historical context. We have Jews entering the United States with all the trauma of the pogroms, and then the extermination camps, [then, in essence] ‘becoming white.’ And, finally, we have excluded racialized Chinese in the United States, who were just starting to be accepted as Americans in the post-Civil Rights era. The final twist of this gaming history [is that] such games have always circulated. So even ‘the boys’ playing poker was part of that longue durée of the circulation of cultural practices, east to west, west to east, which continues to this day.”
The act of building community in sometimes volatile cultural landscapes seems to have added to the tenacity of mah jongg in North America. However, Martens said, there also seems to be a very personal experience to be found in mah jongg, “through the artistic inspiration and the beautiful imagery it connotes, the fantasy that it connotes, and the social interactivity in the middle, which generates its own memories and sounds.”
Project Mah Jongg is on view until Jan. 2, 2011, at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, after which there are plans for the exhibit to travel to other cities. For more information, visit mjhnyc.com.
Shelley Lightburn lives and works in New York City.
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