Op-ed: Creators call out Hallmark's whitewashing of mahjong
A new Hallmark Channel film All’s Fair in Love and Mahjong has drawn criticism from multiple prominent Asian Americans in the media industry.
The promotional poster ... did not feature any visibly Asian cast members or Chinese cultural elements despite the movie title including “mahjong,” a game at least 200 years old played across Asia (and now globally) with Chinese origins.
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The poster features white romance leads, Fiona Gubelmann and Paul Campbell, and three side characters— only one is Asian, Yan-Kay Crystal Lowe who is Chinese on her father’s side.
The mahjong tiles depicted on the poster are non-traditional— colors deemed palatable to a demographic of White American women and reminiscent of recent heavily criticized rebrands of mahjong by White American companies.
Philip Wang (@wongfuphil) ... commented, “collective ancestral sigh,” and posted on his stories that he would soon share more of his thoughts about the movie.
Nancy W. Yuen, scholar and sociologist who has written extensively about the lack of AAPI representation in entertainment, ... commented “What in the appropri-asian”
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Former ABC7 news anchor Dion Lim commented, “At first I thought this was a late April Fool’s joke… 🤦🏻♀️”
For Chinese Americans, this white-washing of mahjong is deja vu, over and over again.
Earlier this year, the New York Times published a cover story on mahjong in their Sunday magazine—the cover featured two White American women, founders of the brand Oh My Mahjong, who “design” mahjong tiles to match a home’s style, reducing them to an aesthetic flourish rather than a design reflective of its roots and origins, embedded with meaning and part of a lineage of history.
... a wound for those of us who remember the same attempt to “refresh” the game to meet White tastes just five years earlier.
... harkening back to 2021 when another brand, The Mahjong Line, founded by three White women, already came under fire both for the expensive price point ... and release of re-designed mahjong tiles meant to satisfy the style preference of one of the founders.
... journalist Jeff Yang told NPR: “It’s obviously not the first ... in which something coming out of a ... non-Western culture has been reappropriated. Their other language talked about how they felt like the game did not really fit their personal style ... That’s the kind of thing that I think sets off red flags for Asian Americans and other people of color ....”
For any racialized culture that has seen their cultural elements enter mainstream while erasing the people and the historical context of said culture — this is a deeply entrenched pattern.
The game of mahjong has been growing in popularity across the United States the last few years especially after it was featured in the 2018 movie Crazy Rich Asians ...
... It resonates with Asian Americans and Asian diaspora communities looking for a connection to their cultural roots ... and there has been a more recent interest from young non-Asian Americans’ in Chinese culture, emerging from (or perhaps showing up as) a social media trend broadly known as “Chinamaxxing.”
These content creators on social media, not Chinese in heritage, have made videos of themselves engaging in customs associated with Chinese culture, sometimes stereotypically, using the phrase “I’m in a Chinese time in my life right now.” ...
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The resurgence of interest in some Chinese cultural elements has raised complex feelings in millennial and older Chinese Americans; many of us can remember being bullied or mocked for our customs during developmental ages — and having been encouraged to learn a pathway of assimilation to the dominant American culture to survive required relinquishing our heritage.
The movie poster feels like a continued slap on the face.
There are young mahjong players in China who have made changes to mahjong tile design, putting on their generational spin — and some brands like McDonald’s have created branded mahjong tiles, and those have received mixed feedback from peers, as well.
The Mahjong Line’s unsolicited “refresh” of mahjong in 2021 was in some ways, perhaps the canary in the coal mine, as one mahjong tile after another fell to a dominant “American” culture that refuses to acknowledge the origins of things that are melted into its pot.
And perhaps not unexpected, ... adds insult to injury, is that this film is releasing in May, AAPI Heritage Month.
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