Tag Archive for mahjong

Recent research and … Star Wars (of course)

Since moving to Montana, I’ve come to the general conclusion that academics are like wolverines (well, at least academics in my fields): we like our space. We really, really like our space. One might say we’re ridiculously, fiercely protective of that & may in fact get pretty damn grumpy when we don’t get it. I’m currently knee-deep in a week that is making me want to crawl under a blanket and not come out – in the midst of a month that’s doing the same – mostly because my calendar app looks like someone else’s calendar got imported on top of mine. It’s forcing me to be really productive, which I appreciate (I’ve gotten TONS done in the past couple of days!), but I’m also realizing how loosey-goosey my week must look to a person on the usual 9-5.

In any case, amidst generalized work insanity & some personal nonsense, some recent stuff of import:

Jeff Wasserstrom (UC Irvine) was kind enough to think of me (well, more accurately, the Star Wars lianhuanhua) when the world was abuzz with speculation on the latest Star Wars premiere in China. While it’s a little weird to have a random purchase be my calling card since 2014, I’ve just gone with it – Jeff interviewed me for the Los Angeles Review of Books China blog, in the hilariously titled “Darth Vader and the Triceratops,” which came out a few days before my birthday (nice little birthday present, a new line on the ‘Press Appearance’ section of the CV. Thanks, Jeff!). There was also an amazing article in the Japan Times that a fellow UCSD Modern Chinese history-er pointed me towards, on the artist behind the lianhuanhua! Entitled “Red ‘Star Wars’: How China used pirate comic to promote science in 1980s,” I was a little sad to see no mention of a little post that went viral, but still – cool to discover more history about this thing that I will apparently be dealing with forever.

Shortly after that came out, my first academic article in eons came out – relating to stuff I’ve already yammered about a lot here in a much more casual format. “The Game People Played: Mahjong in Modern Chinese Society and Culture” is available at Cross-Currents (open access!). A quick plug: the Cross-Currents editorial staff were models of efficiency & great to work with, and the whole process was really pleasant. It’s not necessarily the article I dreamed of publishing, but for something that was mostly a hacked back version of a 3rd year grad school research project, I did OK. Thanks to Amanda Shuman, Chris Bateman, and Reed Knappe for a lot of good feedback while I was getting it ready for publication. And of course, that seminar from oh-so-many-years-ago – it makes me a little misty eyed remembering it!

I did want to include a couple of images I couldn’t in the article – paired below with the relevant portions of the article.

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The association between mahjong and baser social elements was not confined to Chinese observers alone. In 1925, the Japanese professor Aoki Masaru commissioned a series of paintings—later published as Pekin fuzoku zufu [Illustrations of Beijing customs]—depicting many aspects of life in Beijing. One series of three images illustrates some pleasurable (and morally suspect) pastimes: sandwiched between two well-dressed gentlemen inspecting beauties spilling out from behind a curtain in a “tea house” and opium smokers lounging while puffing on their pipes is a lively game of mahjong (Aoki 1964, unnumbered plate). It doesn’t seem accidental that mahjong is slotted alongside a teahouse of ill repute and opium. And yet, by the twentieth century, mahjong not only was attracting players from the upper echelons of Chinese society, but had fans in Japan and the West, as well. Despite being a trifling matter, mahjong was a concern for reformers because it cut across class, gender, and geographical boundaries.

And on one of my favorite cartoons:

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At the same time, some writers recognized that mahjong was merely a symptom, not the cause, of problems faced by urban residents, particularly women. In a compelling Women’s Voice article from 1947, the reader is drawn to a cartoon labeled “Still Comrades” (“Naiyi” 1947, 18). Four women hunker down over a mahjong game, complaining about their husbands. “My husband’s a refrigerator,” one says. “My husband is as cold as the snow of the Himalayas,” grouses another, while the next states that her husband is like a block of marble. “My husband is hot as a volcano,” declares the last, “but he only uses his heat on the body of his secretary.” Mahjong is simply a facilitator for the conversation happening at the table, and it is this social quality that the article takes up in discussing mahjong clubs.

Placeholder & recent writing

From Benjamin Breen's interpretation of a 1981 photo of Hu Zhifeng as Li Huiniang

From Benjamin Breen’s interpretation of a 1981 photo of Hu Zhifeng as Li Huiniang

As I’m currently in the frantic final stages of writing my dissertation (for a 26 July defense – grad school is almost over! I still can’t quite wrap my head around it) as well as trying to get my life in order for a big move to beautiful Bozeman, Montana to take up an assistant professorship at Montana State University (I really can’t quite wrap my head around that – even though I’ve known since December, it’s still baffling and quite wondrous, and I’m thrilled with how things panned out this year), I’ve had less time to write than I’d otherwise like. But I have cranked out two pieces I was rather pleased with & they have both appeared in the past month:

The first was a reworked excerpt on a Chinese proposal, c. 1904, to “reform” the game of mahjong. The piece was pulled from my third year research paper (on mahjong & its social/cultural standing from the late Qing through the Republican period), which I have written about a few times here already. I was delighted to be included in Zoya Street‘s new effort, Memory Insufficient, an e-zine that hopes to encourage high-quality historical writing on games. With Zoya at the helm, we can look forward to a lot of good material & I hope the effort really takes off (it’s off to a splendid start, so I can’t wait to see how it develops). In any case, my piece “Mahjong as edutainment” can be found in the second issue, which is on Asian histories in games.

The second is a piece I’m particularly pleased with, on an important subject of my dissertation: the literary figure of Li Huiniang. I hardly ever say I’m happy with a piece of my own writing, but I’m really tickled with how well my recounting of the tale of Li Huiniang – moving from 1981 all the way back to 1381 – came out in “The Woman in Green: A Chinese Ghost Tale from Mao to Ming, 1981-1381.” Ages ago, Maura Cunningham put me in touch with Christopher Heaney, one of the founders & editors of a new journal of experimental and narrative history out of UT Austin (The Appendix). Chris was fantastic to work with, especially considering I was in a particularly flakey period, and the whole staff is putting out such a fantastically creative publication (I absolutely adore Benjamin Breen‘s take on one of my favorite photographs of Hu Zhifeng as Li Huiniang – a bit of his version is seen above, the original is below). I hope the piece was worth it in the end, and just like Memory Insufficient, I am really looking forward to seeing how The Appendix develops – they have already gathered some really impressive, very creative pieces in their first two issues. I hope I’ll have more fun things to contribute in the future. Getting out of the formal “academicese” box is so very valuable for us (and a blessed break from the dissertation for me).

And with that, it’s back to the grindstone. Where has the time gone?

Hu Zhifeng胡芝風 as Li Huiniang

Hu Zhifeng胡芝風 as Li Huiniang

The cosmos is a weiqi board. A fair one, dammit.

Kris Ligman had a nice piece over at Pop Matters on class and games (RPGs, more specifically) – the class-blind, wonderful lands of opportunity that they are:

Is there any ludonarrative dischord greater than the capitalist, white, middle-class attitudes of unrestrained play coming into conflict with issues of class and race so utterly failed by these biases? The class- and race-obliviousness of these pastoral, easy, and free game worlds don’t reflect the lives of the serf characters that we so often assume but reflect their lords instead.

(The essay is worth reading, so go take a look; however, it’s just sort of the tangential jumping off point for what follows)

From Romance of the Fruit Peddler (Laogong zhi aiqing, 1922); baddies of Shanghai's dirty underbelly playing mahjong at an all night club

This got me thinking about the subject of ‘fairness’ in games, at least in the few that I’ve dealt with directly.  I’ll say off the bat I’m more interested in perceptions of fairness – how people have talked about it – versus technical definitions of whether a game is fair or not.  Mostly because the world that Ligman talks about, the ‘middle class’ world we inhabit in RPGs regardless of a character’s origin story, is a ‘fair’ world, right?  Limitless opportunity, bounded only by your own playing.  The deck isn’t stacked against you from the get go, no matter where you come from!  It’s a meritocratic fantasy.

The meritocratic bit is what turned me to my own research.  I tackled the subject of mahjong (sort of) for my third year research project.  The paper certainly could have turned out worse, but mahjong was an unexpectedly tough topic to handle in two quarters.  For a game that is so quintessentially Chinese, mahjong is everywhere – and nowhere at once.  Everyone was playing it, and no one was leaving a written record.  Which reminds me: people who whine and moan about the ‘enthusiast press’ and blogs and a lot of ‘noise’ in the game community ought to take pity on future historians, ’cause they (the PhD students of Ivory Towers future) are going to want all that stuff, no matter how poorly written – I promise.

In any case, in half of the paper, I hamfistedly blundered around grappling with old school scholars like Huizinga and Callois (both of whom loved to trot out “ancient China” as an example); in the other half, I attempted to analyze the shifts in discourse surrounding mahjong as related to class and gender.  Mahjong is descended from madiao, a game that Wu Meicun (a famous Ming-Qing scholar-official) claimed “lost the [Ming] dynasty.”  Wu’s meaning was that officials were too engaged in things not related to their job (which would include a ‘frivolous’ game like madiao) and ignoring the barbarian hordes agitating on the northern border (and worse).  It was a game that was beneath the scholar elites to talk about and write about, but it seemed everyone was playing it.  Mahjong retained the decadent overtones of its predecessor (a symptom of moral decay – and harbinger of terrible things, like dynasties being toppled) – and like madiao, everyone played it, and few wrote about it, except in high-handed, pedantic tones.

It wasn’t that games were bad.  Mahjong and madiao had and have a foil, that being the ancient and eminently respectable game of weiqi.  Weiqi is also quintessentially Chinese, although it’s known widely in the West by its Japanese name (go).  Legitimately ancient where mahjong and its forerunners were not, weiqi has an entire genre of poetry dedicated to it, and skill in playing was something “real gentlemen” were expected to cultivate alongside ability in painting, calligraphy, and playing the qin (a type of zither).  Frankly, I’ve never been terribly interested in weiqi, important a game as it is.  However, my interest was piqued as I picked up an article on weiqi poetry by Chen Zu-Yan.  As Chen argues, weiqi poetry relies on three major metaphors: “[it] approximates war, offers paradigms for social order, and teaches lessons about humankind’s moral stake in the cosmic game” (643).

A few samples.  One by Liu Yuxi 劉禹錫, on watching a talented Buddhist monk play:

First, I perceived dotted stars in the dawn sky;
Then, I saw soldiers fighting in late autumn.
Your deployment was as wild geese in flight-nobody understood it,
Until the cub was caught in the tiger’s den, and all were shocked. (646)

Another by Fan Zhongyan 范仲淹:

One [weiqi] stone is precious as a thousand ounces of gold;
One line on the board as crucial as a thousand miles.
Deep thought infuses the spirit;
How can the vicissitudes of the scene ever be replicated?
Success and failure depend on character;
I should compose a [weiqi] history. (647)

and my personal favorite, a painting inscriptions by one Cha Shenxing 查慎行:

The cosmos is a [weiqi] board,
The battlefield of Black and White —
Trivial as worms and ants,
Great as marquises and kings. (650)

A Qing dynasty (1644-1911) version of the bureaucratic promotion game

All of which is to say, weiqi was serious business (it still is in many respects, with weiqi results appearing on sports pages!).  I was intrigued by this approach to weiqi, an abstract game that had a wide variety of meanings read into it.  Mahjong, too, is a reasonably abstract game, and also has a wide variety of meanings attached to it – primarily negative ones.  In fact, some dour literati lambasted mahjong for the same qualities that weiqi was praised for.

While on a trip to use the UCLA collection, I idly mentioned to my advisor a type of board game (often called shengguantu 升官圖) I hoped to write a paper on someday.  Based around the civil service system and bureaucratic promotion of the Ming and Qing dynasties, these games played like snakes and ladders and were based on a roll and move mechanic (the image at right was taken from the page here, which has more images and descriptions in English).  My advisor asked a bit about how the game was played and remarked that it perhaps indicated that people already felt success in the civil service system was a matter of luck – something like getting a good (or bad) roll in promotion games.

This was an interesting thought, because one of the ideas behind the civil service examination system we are most familiar with in the present day is that anyone – assuming you were male, of course – could succeed in the system.  All you had to do was prepare yourself to sit for the exams, take and pass said exams, and off you could go on your way to fame and glory as an official.  In theory, this wasn’t far off the mark.  In practice, the financial resources (among other things) required to support exam candidates as they crammed for years on end meant that Farmer Zhang’s eldest son chances of success were almost certainly inferior to Magistrate Lu’s kid.  The system wasn’t fair, even though it was an improvement over systems that were more rigid.  There was the potential for social mobility.

I came to feel that this potential is one of the things that biased the literati elites against games like mahjong.  The yarns spun around weiqi upheld the potential for mobility.  Weiqi, in theory, was all about self-cultivation.  The ideal wasn’t a naturally talented player who intuitively grasped strategy and was just plain good at the game.  The ideal was someone who cultivated the skill of playing, just as one cultivated playing the zither, or painting, or writing poetry.  Ability in weiqi is nested in beliefs in a meritocratic system where “anyone” could succeed.  It’s not based on luck.  The game isn’t biased against you from the start.  Ability is up to personal virtue in cultivating a skill.  Despite the fact that it’s a game for two players (and a great number of poems and paintings depict bystanders hanging around a game), it’s often presented as a very solitary activity.  Consider the following quote from a Song official waxing rhapsodic on the acoustic qualities of his quiet tower:

It is a good place to play the [qin], for the musical melodies are harmonious …; it is a good place to chant poems, for the poetic tones ring pure …; it is a good place to play [weiqi], for the stones sound out click-click. (644)

Weiqi fantasy land!

Games like mahjong and madiao require skill, of course, but have that dastardly element of luck (enemy of meritocracies?  Perhaps that’s too strong a statement) and multiple players.  It is possible, though unlikely, to win a mahjong game simply by the luck of the draw.  I don’t recall reading a specific critique of mahjong or madiao in this vein, but my advisor’s statement about luck and the shengguantu games got me thinking.  The question of how people talked about the bureaucratic promotion games remains for another day, but I do feel comfortable at least speculating that at least part of elite discomfort with mahjong is the fact that it confronts the lies of the meritocratic fantasy.  Personal cultivation and hard work isn’t enough, wasn’t enough, and never had been enough: a healthy dose of luck and besting your competition were required to claw your way to the top.  Sitting alone in your lovely tower listening to the click click of weiqi stones wasn’t going to secure an appointment as an official.

A critical look at weiqi proves that it was hardly the meritocratic fantasy land generations of poets had praised.  An important skill for aspiring officials to have was the ability to gracefully (and very subtly) throw a weiqi game in a superior’s favor.  That is, you had to know how to lose.  No one likes an upstart, even a virtuous and cultivated one (perhaps especially not a virtuous and cultivated one). The practice of purposely losing has roots elsewhere and is certainly quite common, but it raises questions about the element of self-cultivation. Who’s to say that “talented” official wasn’t just being lost to by younger, more talented officials who were hungry for success? This is another thread I never saw directly addressed, except in satirical pieces. Weiqi, at least in the sources I looked at, remained wrapped in a veneer of equality and potential.

The point of all this rambling is that setting aside 20th century Western, middle class, capitalist notions of free play, people in a non-Western, “non-modern,” non-capitalist society liked play to be safely nestled in the same fantasy that contained the more “important” facets of life (like securing a job in the civil service).  And a number of them really didn’t like it when they were confronted with the evidence that there was a lot to life that was unfair, both on and off the board game table.

 

Mahjong goes serious (1904)

Probably more directly related to Ligman’s original post is the gem above, one of my favorite finds.  This is a “serious game” from 1904, and deals with capitalism, imperialism, and modernization.  It was found on the pages of a radical Zhejiangnese newspaper, and was tucked in between news reports on the Russo-Japanese War and other Very Serious Subjects.  I’ll quote myself from elsewhere here, since I don’t have anything extra to say at 10 PM on a Thursday a year after I last looked at this paper:

The game dreamed up by the author bore little resemblance, either in tiles or in play, to any variation of mahjong, and the “educational” purpose is painfully obvious. The zhong, fa, and bai tiles were replaced with government types (autocracy, constitutional monarchy, and republic), while the directional tiles were mapped to four classes of people (farmer, worker, merchant, and soldier). The three suits were assigned one continent per suit (Asia, Europe, the Americas); each of the nine tiles per suit was assigned a country and corresponding government type (e.g., “China – autocracy,” “England – constitutional monarchy” and “Brazil – republic”). A variety of tiles replaced the traditional flower tiles: the five inhabited continents, the five major oceans, and technological innovations (steamship, railroad, telegraph, printing, and hot air balloon).

…[The] essence of the new rules may be summed up thusly: republicanism and technology ruled the day. Players facing a hand of autocratic nations or, worse yet, Australian and African tiles had a near impossible task in front of them, being placed at an automatic disadvantage in terms of “turns” (fan), or ability to draw new tiles. Dominance in this “reformed mahjong” … required the right government and the right technology: the player stuck with the “colonized people” tiles (Africa and Australia) had no hope of competing with the enlightened continent of Europe, and possessing technology alone would not save an autocratic China.

While the rules make some measure of logical sense … even the author recognized the complicated nature of the game, asking readers to offer up suggestions if they thought of any ways to simplify the game. Further, in the pursuit of “educating,” this reformed mahjong seemingly removed any semblance of fun, and it is difficult to imagine anyone willingly settling down for a thrilling game of “imperialism in action.” The obviously educational component seems off putting to the extreme, and there is no evidence that this reformed mahjong made it any further than the pages of the [paper].

The “imperialism in action” statement is perhaps a bit too much of my own opinion creeping in.  But I think this little ‘reformed’ gem points to the same problem that Ligman’s piece raised for me.  Namely, the sort of people who would appreciate a game of “imperialism in action” – or being taken out of the meritocratic RPG fantasy and forced to grapple with the injustices of discrimination and inequality – aren’t the sorts that the game(s) are being aimed at.  The anonymous author of the above mahjong set was aiming the theoretical game at the vast masses of people who he desperately wished were doing something productive with their mahjong time.  The people most likely to play the game were people like himself: the kind of people who didn’t need Imperialism 101 in mahjong form to take a look at the situation facing them and their country.  I suspect that for a great number of people, the very fact that the game wasn’t fair would’ve been an extreme turnoff.  And when I mean “not fair,” I mean that it was possible to find one’s self in a position that took away any hope of winning – by the very virtue of the hand dealt you.

Not so unlike the reality of class, race, gender, and education, eh?

(I’m sure someone’s written about perceived fairness in games; if anyone has any good suggested reading, please send it along.)

Chen Zu-Yan, “The Art of Black and White: Wei-ch’i in Chinese Poetry,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 117.4 (Oct-Dec 1997): 643-653