The Mahjong Line is a startup that launched their company in late 2020. The brand is built upon wanted to give Mahjong a modernized look, and it was quick to receive criticism. I first saw the brand through a Tiktok by Philip Wang from Wong Fu Productions.
Along with a public apology, The Mahjong Line promised to educate themselves and give people a voice to speak up about the topic. The company also added a section onto their website about where mahjong originated.
Here is the problem:
The problem is not that “in the original website copy, we used words like “modernize” and “refresh” which can be associated with episodes of cultural erasure experienced by many Asian-Americans. It’s that the product line, itself, is whitewashing the Chinese & East Asian history behind mahjong. Changing words for synonyms cannot change what the very “business idea” that The Mahjong Line was for these business owners.
Looking into their story about how The Mahjong Line was built upon, it is rooted in the redesigning and profiting off of a Chinese game set. Choosing to redesign the board game takes away its roots and repaints the history of the game. It strips it of the cultural background and reproduces the game as a purely American game set. Viewing this redesign as a business idea, the brand charges over $300 per set of tiles, leading me to believe their goals are rooted in making a profit.
A common argument around this is that games are often redesigned and sold in new versions. An example of this are popular show or character themed monopoly sets. The argument fails to recognize that just because something has been going on for a long time, it does not automatically make it okay. As described in their own design process, “coins became dots, strings of coins became bamboo, dragons and jokers were added, and seasons [de-emphasized]”. This is completely different from what the designs are, especially when the different symbols themselves hold cultural value.
The Mahjong Line is by definition a whitewashed version of the original game. Although the creators did not intend to offend people, the redesign is very harmful to the historical roots of Mahjong. An example that comes to mind is the playing mat reading the phrase, “not your mama’s mahjong”. This phrase stuck out because it implies that this version of the game is newer and cooler. Looking into the designer’s perspective, it is clear that they were using the aesthetics and origin from the Chinese game but replacing what they did not seem to fit with what was trendy at the time. These changes to the design of the game gloss over the Chinese artwork and history that was put into the original. While the original design of the game is played all over the world, The Mahjong line, is another example of picking and choosing pieces of culture that is deemed acceptable and trendy.
The Mahjong Line cannot come back from the backlash because learning about the history is not enough to cancel out the damage to this cycle of whitewashing. When the creators simply put up a short apology and added a tab about the history of mahjong, their true intentions were revealed. This is only a trending business opportunity to them. They did not see the issue of cultural appropriation and learn from the mistake, otherwise they would have taken their products down.