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The tiles that you can pair need to be open from the left or right. If there are no more moves left, in some versions, you can reshuffle the tiles, often a maximum of 5 times per game. Only the tiles you can see can be paired, which means that first you need to pair the visible ones on the top and sides. The game's goal is to remove the tiles from the playing area by matching identical tiles. With our Mahjong game, you can:įrequently Asked Questions (FAQs) How do you play Mahjong? The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.Play unlimited games of Mahjong. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at for further information. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Jeff Yang is an author and CNN contributor.Ĭopyright © 2021 NPR. And there's a sense in which the cultural transfer of even playing with tiles that feels that they have that longer connection is part of what makes the game a bridge, as opposed to something where taking it out of that setting and turning it into something that feels divorced in some ways from that history - that feels more like erasure to people. And I think people really generally see that as part of the process. And in fact, mahjong itself is a game that's mutated extensively over time, both in China and elsewhere. When games - and I'm thinking of backgammon, whose origins are in Iraq - gain popularity in another culture, can they not be reimagined? Do you have to be faithful to the culture that created them? - specifically because games are things that mutate over time. GARCIA-NAVARRO: But there is this other question. One of the things I called out was, if you actually use this English-language pun and call flower tiles - F-L-O-W-E-R tiles - flour tiles - F-L-O-U-R tiles - you're kind of doing the most white possible thing to this game and making it really completely incomprehensible to somebody who's Asian. But there's a real sense in which the erasure of the original Asian context of it and the lineage by which it's evolved was pretty apparent. And you're kind of making it perhaps more accessible, more open. You're elevating the original context and origins of that thing. YANG: When you're doing a respectful refresh of something, you're acknowledging that that thing exists. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah, there were also objections to the designs of the new tiles, which included neon colors, images of soap bars and palm trees, images of flour sacks. That's the kind of thing that I think sets off red flags for Asian Americans and other people of color when they encounter what is supposed to be a respectful refresh. Their other language talked about how they felt like the game did not really fit their personal style, and they wanted to actually make it fun in a way that it wasn't originally in some fashion. YANG: It's obviously not the first and will be far from the last incident in which something coming out of a long-standing, non-Western culture has been reappropriated. For instance, the website said the founders - again, all three of them white - quote, "decided the venerable game needed a respectful refresh." What did you think when you first read that? GARCIA-NAVARRO: So The Mahjong Line decided to market their own sets of tiles with nontraditional designs, and many people found the language used to do that insulting. It serves as sort of like this traditional cultural reference point for Chinese people around family gatherings and especially the Lunar New Year, which is going to be coming up for us in a couple months. It is essentially like the card game of rummy where you're trying to assemble sets of three or four matching or sequence tiles. YANG: So mahjong is a game played by virtually the entirety of the Chinese diaspora and many people beyond it. But for our listeners who don't know what it is, can you just give a brief description of the game? GARCIA-NAVARRO: So mahjong has been popular in the United States for almost a hundred years. CNN contributor Jeff Yang is someone who's followed this story and added his own criticism of The Mahjong Line company, and he joins us now. When a Texas company founded by three white women released sets of its luxury mahjong tiles, it ended up getting called out for cultural appropriation and apologizing. They feature images of Chinese characters and symbols. Traditional mahjong tiles are bone-white and elegant.
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