From Mahjong to Matcha

To Making Culture Accessible

I woke up to an Instagram DM from a friend: three white women in Dallas were reinventing mahjong (variant spelling: mahjongg). “I’m so angry,” said my friend. And I shared her sentiment. The first thing I did was to check the company’s Instagram and website. I don’t feel like mentioning this brand’s name, because the best way to boycott, for me, is to not drive more traffic to them by linking their handle. Internet culture has made it incredibly easy for people to capitalize oppositions: through the course of one day, ironically, their Instagram has gained new followers. However, it’s hard to collectively strive for the silence treatment because the Internet has also made expressing a personal opinion incredibly easy and important. Naturally, people went off. Many called it “textbook cultural appropriation”, a “colonial mindset” for personal gain. The brand is selling mahjong sets that look vaguely like traditional Chinese mahjong for $325-$425. Their Instagram has archived or deleted all posts with human faces in them, most of which looked like sorority group pictures.

Behind the inviting colorful palette in their so called “refreshed” design is indeed abrasive cultural appropriation, whether intentional or not, and the language they use, whether verbal or visual, eerily resembles a short-lived Chinese restaurant, Lucky Lee’s, opened in the spring of 2019 by a white couple. The restaurant sat on University Place, was branded with a Tiffany blue, and advertised “feel-good” Chinese food, where “the lo mein wouldn’t make people feel ‘bloated and icky’ the next day, or one where the food wasn’t ‘too oily’ or salty”, as one of the founders said, according to the New York Times.

In my memory, mahjong is a great excuse for people to get together and gossip, a way to socialize, network and even subtly bribe your boss (by intentionally losing), a game played probably in every household during the Chinese New Year. I even played mahjong pyramid Jenga when I was a kid. In Ang Lee’s exquisite 2007 movie “Lust, Caution”, a mid-century Shanghai espionage thriller, majong appears in many scenes. Rich government and merchant wives carelessly showcase diamond rings acquired from the black market on the mahjong table as they chat in subtle passive aggression. The female protagonist, Wong Chia Chi, basically uses mahjong games to ease her way into the social circle surrounding the wife of her assasination target. Sadly, these cultural nuances went widely unnoticed, while the racy sex scenes caught most of the press attention. (To understand more about the mahjong scenes in this movie and learn about the terminologies, here’s an amazing blogpost.)

The recent popularity of mahjong in the US, mostly among white women, is perplexing. I remember seeing Julia Roberts play mahjong a couple years ago and post it on her Instagram. She even got on the Colbert show when promoting a movie in 2018 and talked about how she played mahjong every week with girlfriends to “stay calm”. She said on the show that “the concept of it is to create order out of chaos based on random drawing of tiles”, which I think is an elegant takeaway. Chinese people mostly play it for money. “It’s not a drinking game,” she also said as Colbert asked her if there were cocktails involved. This is also true. Typically, tea, nuts and liquid desserts are served on the table corner of each player, never alcohol. The set she was playing on the Instagram post, however, sells for a whopping $1,500. Designed by Crisloid, the set, quite frankly, bears the same idea of adapting the traditional table game for an American audience, with manuals written in the nortroious “chopstick font” (many call it the “oriental” or the “wonton” font) and tiles, like “the joker”, that don’t exist in Chinese mahjong sets. I wonder why this never caught the Internet’s eye as much as this new mahjong company did? Do we live in a significantly different world after 2020? Or is it because the Karens’ tone-deafness is too hard to ignore? Is there a way at all to share culture and make it more accessible?

Only a couple of days ago, I was invited to a social distanced matcha ceremony. It was a simplified version of a traditional one. The lady who introduced the rituals had been fairly active in the Park Slope tea community. In the middle, I asked her if anyone, say a white male, can learn about hosting matcha ceremonies. (Asking the host questions as a second guest during a formal matcha ceremony isn’t common. But she was kind enough to give me a pass.) She said her teacher was a white man. In fact, many matcha masters in the city were. Coming from Shanghai, she resisted learning about Japanese tea culture given the tormented history between China and Japan, until it felt like a missing piece in her pursuit of knowledge in tea. What really matters, she said, is the heart and the intention you take into experiencing another culture.

Cultures adapt and evolve. Was it also a matter of cultural appropriation when Japanese monks brought green tea seeds from ancient China back to Japan and made powder out of them in 1191 A.D.? I doubt it. Nevertheless, I do wonder how Japanese folks feel about Cha Cha Matcha. The company was founded by two white men, clearly not with the intention to find and share the philosophy in this ancient art. Instead, they branded it with millennial pink, blended it with oatmilk, and added some Cuban accent in their shops because of the dance form “cha-cha-cha”. (The company was recently under fire for late payments to employees and cultural appropriations.) Many Japanese Ameicans interviewed by Nylon magazine were fine with the idea of matcha being adapted to American consumers and even happy that it was gaining popularity, while some felt more comfortable supporting Japanese owned tea shops.

No one can speak for an entire culture. And yet, I have been asked again and again in life why Chinese people were so sensitive. It’s bittersweet for many Chinese, or perhaps Asians in general, to see our culture “trending” in the western world, because on the one hand, we are conditioned by colonialism to seek white approval, and on the other hand, it’s hard to sit with the shame that we have to compromise the authenticity and the essence in our culture to reach commercial success, even harder when it’s popularized by someone else. What happens to ownership when a culture enters the global arena? Where is the intellectual property here?

Theoretically, cultural exchange can happen without either party feeling offended or taken advantage of. Of course the Internet has somehow made it harder for productive conversations to happen had one party made a mistake in this process. But the answer is yes, there is a way to make culture more accessible, and that is through respect. If one doesn’t understand what that means, a different kind of conversation needs to be had.