Tiles have numbers and suits, which can be combined into winning hands through sets of either matching numbers or suited numerically sequential tiles, just like in gin rummy.
The goal of the game is to reach certain combinations of tiles before your opponents. The closest Western analog to Mahjong might be gin rummy. We got a mahjong expert - basically a gambling addict! - to help choreograph that game, to make it authentic.” But I wanted to intercut the game with the conversation, so it was critical for them to know exactly what they were doing at every moment. “I wanted it to be very specifically choreographed, and obviously, for it to happen that fast is almost impossible. When asked about the mahjong scene, Chu told me, “Never thought we’d have to explain it,” and laughed. (Mandatory disclosure: My son Hudson Yang plays Eddie on Fresh Off the Boat Crazy Rich Asians’ Constance Wu plays his mother.)
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Mahjong remains extraordinarily popular among Chinese immigrants and beyond, and it’s featured in both the film The Joy Luck Club and the TV show Fresh Off the Boat, both of which depict Asian-American post-immigrant life.
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Mao Zedong once said the game should not be underestimated - because “If you know how to play it, you’ll have a better understanding of the relationship between chance and necessity. Its origins are Chinese: All the way back in 1927, about a century after the game was invented, the Chinese scholar and essayist Hu Shi complained that mahjong was so popular that it had become China’s “national pastime,” calculating that the millions of games of mahjong played each day by Chinese were the equivalent of 4 million hours of wasted time daily.īut most Chinese don’t see the game as “wasted time.” In fact, despite his grousing, Hu himself was an inveterate player who spent many an evening tossing the tiles. A fast-paced, rummy-style game in which four players attempt to form sets of three or four matching or sequenced tiles, it’s hugely popular not only across Asia but around the world. Mahjong, explainedĪ quick primer on mahjong itself. Spoilers abound below, so if you haven’t yet watched the deliriously warm and funny movie, crawl out from under that rock and see it before reading further. So here’s a quick primer on the game of mahjong itself, as well as its significance to the film in that pivotal scene. This scene provides her with critical impetus toward her eventual redemption.īut it’s also true for people who don’t understand the complex rules of the game, which aren’t intuitive and are often different depending on the region of the world. It was inserted in part because Michelle Yeoh, who delivers an amazing steel-and-silk performance as the movie’s main antagonist, refused to play the stock villainous tiger mom from the book. That’s especially true for fans of the book, who won’t recognize it it’s original to the movie. But there’s one scene in particular that has been resiliently enigmatic to audiences of many backgrounds, both Asian and non-Asian … and it’s a pivotal one: the mahjong scene. The movie’s Singapore-specific local color and broadly Asian cultural nuances are indeed fairly Google-able, and can readily be contextualized through polite discussions with actual Asian people. Chu told me, “We didn’t want to give people an excuse to think of this world as some kind of obscure, exotic fantasyland - this is a real place, with real culture, history and tradition, and instead of just giving them answers to their questions, we want them to have conversations.” That lack of training wheels is intentional: As director Jon M. If you have questions about this game, please contact us using this form.One of the most beautiful things about Crazy Rich Asians is how it refuses to explain many of its most intrinsically Asian elements.
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