By Jessica Xiao
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, which was shared on Instagram on Friday, 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.
The film synopsis summarizes its plot as “A school nurse turns her love of the game Mahjong into a new path, inspired by a jovial contractor fixing up her home, who encourages her to take a chance on the future.”
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) known to Asian American millennials as one of the earliest AAPI entertainers on YouTube and co-founder of Wong Fu Productions 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, notably, as the author of Reel inequality: Hollywood actors and racism published in 2016 just ahead of #OscarsSoWhite movement, commented “What in the appropri-asian”
Comedian Jenny Yang joked about what a culturally authentic depiction of mahjong might look like in film, “Excited to see them play mahjong wearing white undertanks and flip flops with a cigarette in their mouth and a single foot hiked up on their own seats.”
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.
But this story re-opened a wound for those of us who remember the same attempt to “refresh” the game to meet White tastes just five years earlier. The fashion and culture commentator Instagram account Diet Prada posted, “Didn’t we do this already?” 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 (out of touch with the working class accessibility of the game) and release of re-designed mahjong tiles meant to satisfy the style preference of one of the founders.
At the time, writer and journalist Jeff Yang told NPR: “It’s obviously not the first and will be far from the last incident in which something coming out of a long-standing, non-Western culture has been reappropriated. Their other language talked about how they felt like the game did not really fit their personal style, and they wanted to actually make it fun in a way that it wasn’t originally in some fashion. That’s the kind of thing that I think sets off red flags for Asian Americans and other people of color when they encounter what is supposed to be a respectful refresh.”
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, with Eventbrite searches for mahjong going up 365% between 2023 and 2024, and the number of events available rising 179% in that time.
There are several convergent explanations for the trend. It resonates with Asian Americans and Asian diaspora communities looking for a connection to their cultural roots or who have long established practices of mahjong — 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.” For example, they will depict the subject drinking hot water instead of cold water, keeping their feet warm indoors, or eating traditionally Chinese meals.
Although interest in mahjong by White Americans has existed before (Jewish American women are credited with being one of the first communities to socialize the game outside of Asians in the United States in the 1920s), there is a renewed interest in mahjong with this new more sympathetic lens of Chinese culture.
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, even if it adds insult to injury, is that this film is releasing in May, AAPI Heritage Month.
“When you’re doing a respectful refresh of something, you’re acknowledging that that thing exists. You’re elevating the original context and origins of that thing. And you’re kind of making it perhaps more accessible, more open. But there’s a real sense in which the erasure of the original Asian context of it and the lineage by which its evolved was pretty apparent,” Yang said at the time to NPR.
There are many movies in the 2000s from Hong Kong cinema that feature mahjong in context, from Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love, to comedies like Fat Choi Spirit starring international star Andy Lau, but this will not be one of them.
All’s Fair in Love and Mahjong is so far removed from its Chinese origins, the original players of mahjong would not recognize it.