Betting Across Borders: A New Way to Read The Joy Luck Club and Other Immigrant Literature through the Window of Play

En Li Assistant Professor of History Drake University

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Betting Across Borders: A New Way to Read The Joy Luck Club and Other Immigrant Literature through the Window of Play1

Abstract

This article examines how literature involving games represents immigrants by focusing on the representation of the game mahjong in Amy Tan’s 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club. Providing a new way to read The Joy Luck Club through the window of play, this article also analyzes more broadly how games intersect with immigrant experience in other immigrant literature. Building on but further articulating the intersection between games and immigrants, this article uses three thematic approaches to demonstrate how games contribute to the public narrative of immigration in literature. First, games as an activity to describe immigrant experiences and convey characters. Second, games as a metaphor and a plot-driven device to reflect on immigrant experience. And third, games as an intellectual trend to create dialogue with mainstream culture to negotiate the public narrative of Asian American cultural identities.

Key words: immigrant, literature, games, mahjong, culture

1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Faculty Writing Group’s summer workshop at Drake University in May 2018, and a Mellon Seminar “Theorizing the Displaced in Asia,” organized by Dr. Lori Watt, at Washington University in St. Louis in June 2018. I wish to thank all the participants in these two workshops for their thoughtful comments, advice, and assistance. The structure and argument of the final draft have benefited from the constructive remarks sent by two anonymous reviewers. Any errors that remain are my own.

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And I am sitting at my mother’s place at the mahjong table, on the East, where things begin.2 – Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 1989.

Pachinko was a foolish game, but life was not.3 – Min Jin Lee, Pachinko, 2017.

Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly die for such limited imaginings.4—Benedict Anderson, Imagined Community: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2006.

How does literature involving games represent immigrants? In overseas Chinese communities, many men and women engaged in gambling games since the nineteenth century. Gambling was even once considered to be one of the reasons for racial discrimination against Chinese immigrants. While Chinese immigrants appeared in social history as either a hard- working minority or as participants in gambling-related crimes, the narrative surrounding games in Chinese American literature tells a different story. This article examines this issue through the game mahjong in Amy Tan’s 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club. Providing a new way to read The Joy Luck Club through the window of play, this article also analyzes more broadly how games intersect with immigrant experience in other immigrant literature.

In The Joy Luck Club, a novel usually depicted as a story of mothers and daughters and assimilation, the mahjong game serves as a form of community building for the first-generation Chinese immigrant cohorts to the U.S. It produced affective hopefulness and bonds of ethnic and social class cohesion across historical moments. Mahjong played a crucial role in building and maintaining the social fabric in the immigrant community, represented in the friendship among the four Chinese mothers living in the U.S. To the second-generation Chinese Americans in the novel, mahjong could recall memories of childhood and family life, even in the sounds and smells of the game. In general, mahjong gives glimpse of how immigrants and their descendants navigate transpacific identities and intergenerational relationships in The Joy Luck Club.

2 Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1989), 39. 3 Min Jin Lee, Pachinko (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2017), 412. 4 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 2006), 7.

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Building on but further articulating the intersection between games and immigrants, this article uses three thematic approaches to demonstrate how games contribute to the public narrative of immigration in literature. First, games as an activity to describe immigrant experiences and convey characters. Second, games as a metaphor and a plot-driven device to reflect on immigrant experience. And third, games as an intellectual trend to create dialogue with mainstream culture to negotiate the public narrative of Asian American cultural identities. By focusing on The Joy Luck Club and touching on other immigrant writings and documentary films, as well as secondary theoretical materials, this article shows mahjong as a key activity of cultural transition between China and the U.S. for immigrants of this era.

More importantly, when games travel across cultures, games function as a space of cultural negotiation that creates a social space for both the preservation of Chinese cultural traditions and ties and a way of navigating immigration to a new country and language. Surely, mahjong in China is different from mahjong played by Chinese immigrants in some ways. The core of this article is navigating cultural meaning. Tan uses the game metaphorically to represent Chinese immigration to the U.S. The success of her novel, along with all other evidence this article deploys, suggests that the games function allegorically for immigrants grappling with displacement in a foreign and often unwelcoming country. In her recent book about the settlement of Chinese migrants in Hong Kong during the Cold War, Laura Madokoro, a historian, questions how society could help make the transition from refugees to migrants beyond the existing labels and categories.5 From a humanitarian perspective, games can be useful tools to create dialogue with and from socially constructed labels, categories, and identities.

Drawing from literary sources and memoirs, the author is aware of the challenges and limits of scholarly examination of literature as historical fact, particularly in the case of memory, since the memory is not the memory of players, but, in most cases, of the next generation. To some extent, the authors likely romanticize, fictionalize, and sanitize their memories to fit their imagined audience in the West. As children, these authors, along with the interviewees in the documentary, were probably shielded from any of the possible negative sides of gambling as play, for example, losing money. Admittedly, there are other types of evidence that can inspire further research, for example, unpublished memoirs. Some Chinese American museums and archives in coastal areas in the U.S. might have more materials to draw conclusions from as socio-historical evidences. In the end, Asian American literature should be considered an important part of American studies that has influenced American culture. Through literary representation, the notion of gaming was modified and presented in a “safe” form for the cultural mainstream. 6 As a deliberate choice, representing games provides a different aspect from which to understand social history.7 In social records, people only saw what players did and judged

5 Laura Madokoro, Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 11, 220. 6 Tara Fickle, “American Rules and Chinese Faces: The Games of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club,” MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.) 3 (2014): 85; Michael Oriard, Sporting with the Gods: The Rhetoric of Play and Game in American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 379. 7 Douglas Anthony Guerra, “On the Move: Games and Gaming Figures in Nineteenth- Century U.S. Literature,” Dissertation (2012), 10, 14.

RASAALA, Volume 7: “Recreating Recreation” (2019) 20 their behavior as either virtuous or licentious. Literary texts, The Joy Luck Club in this article for example, realistic or not, in line with other accounts, serve as evidence and offer a more individual perspective to help to glimpse into a side of the story that social history does not convey.

Mahjong: Chinese Origin and Overseas Variations

Mahjong is a game involving multiple players, requiring skill, and is also partly a game of chance. The game is played with 140 tiles (or cards). The tiles are composed of three money suits: (cash [tongzi 筒子], string [suozi 索子], and myriad [wanzi 萬子]); four winds: (east [dong 東], south [nan 南], west [xi 西], and north [bei 北]); four seasons: (spring [chun 春], summer [xia 夏], autumn [qiu 秋], and winter [dong 冬]); as well as the special tiles such as center [zhong 中], wealth [fa 發], and empty planks [bai 白]. Mahjong requires four players to sit at four sides of the table. It is a game of taking turns to draw and discard tiles. The aim of the game is to create winning sets by discarding and picking appropriate tiles. Dice also are employed, but their use is limited to determine where the tiles are first drawn.8 In order to increase the chance of winning, players have to watch and memorize what tiles have been discarded. They also need to be careful of not discarding tiles that other players need to make winning sets. Therefore, mahjong involves a mastery of some skill instead of sheer chance, which gives players a sense of achievement and satisfaction compared to other gambling forms that depend only on luck.

Mahjong was a long-lasting practice in China and has been a symbol of an affluent, slow- paced, and traditional lifestyle. During the urban reform in the late-Qing (1644-1911), the last imperial dynasty in China, elites and local authorities regarded mahjong as a vice that wasted time and enticed money betting. Therefore, mahjong playing and opium smoking became the two major targets of the police, and the authorities continued to criminalize these activities in the first decade of the twentieth century. While the anti-opium campaign was relatively successful, mahjong persisted, especially in the private domain. Throughout the rest of the twentieth century, mahjong remained popular in both public and private spaces in China because the game had deep and solid cultural roots as private family leisure activity, as well as a form of public recreation.9

As a popular social practice in China, mahjong became one of the major recreations among overseas Chinese immigrants. Previous scholarship used mahjong to investigate immigrant communities. For example, Ellen Oxfeld, an anthropologist, argues that mahjong played an important role in family dynamics, ethnic identity, and ideological orientations in Chinese communities in Dhapa, India. According to the Dhapa Chinese, playing mahjong reenacted some of the central contradictions of the entrepreneurial ethics themselves, such as the

8 For scholarship on mahjong, see Chen Hsi-yüan, “Madiao and Mahjong in Popular Culture and Elite Discourse,” Journal by the Institute of History and Philology 80.1 (2009); Andrew Lo, “China’s Passion for Pai: Playing Cards, Dominoes, and Mahjong,” in Asian Games: The Art of Contest, edited by Colin Mackenzie & Irving Finkel (New York: Asia Society, 2004), 216-231. 9 Wang Di, “Mahjong and Urban Life: Individual Rights, Collective Interests, and City Image in Post- Mao China,” International Journal of Asian Studies 11 (2014): 187-210; Paul Festa, “Mahjong Politics in Contemporary China: Civility, Chineseness, and Mass Culture,” Positions 14.1 (2006): 7-35.

RASAALA, Volume 7: “Recreating Recreation” (2019) 21 balance to rely on one’s skill and hard work versus the undeniable factor of luck in one’s ultimate success or failure.10 On the one hand, mahjong provided an opportunity for players to practice self-control and discipline. On the other hand, it reinforced the idea of taking action, when self-determination was celebrated. Thus, from an anthropological perspective, gambling is not an addictive act, but an action freely chosen and a showcase for the actor’s capabilities and willingness to take the risks that might bring rewards.11 Oxfeld’s work shows this understanding about games is especially important among immigrants that had economic success coupled with lack of political power and social status, for example, the Chinese of Southeast Asia, the Jews of pre-WWII western Europe, and the Indians of East Africa.12

In addition to the experience among immigrants in general, women played an especially important role in the mahjong game especially since the 1950s.13 Few Chinese women immigrated to the U.S. before the 1940s. The change of immigration law altered the demographic composition of the overseas Chinese community by allowing the residence of female immigrants. In the 1940s, when the United States and China became allies during World War II, the U.S. government loosened the restrictions on entry into the country, naturalization, and mixed marriage among the Chinese. In 1943, Chinese immigration to the United States was permitted. The Act of September 11, 1957 further established a “confession” program. This program allowed the Chinese who obtained entry visas by fraud and misrepresentation to reside in the United States, as long as one of either their spouse, parents, or children was a citizen.14 During the changing of governing power resulting from the Chinese Civil War (1945-1949) and the series of political movements in the 1950s led by the Communist Party in China, many people immigrated to Hong Kong and then to the United States as political refugees. The percentage of women in the immigrant community significantly increased and overseas Chinese communities were made. These women played mahjong, and they further influenced the nature of the community in terms of gaming and gambling practices.

10 Ellen Oxfeld, Blood, Sweat, and Mahjong: Family and Enterprise in an Overseas Chinese Community (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 9. 11 Oxfeld, Blood, Sweat, and Mahjong, 112, 116, 117. 12 Oxfeld, Blood, Sweat, and Mahjong, 12. 13 Until the 1950s, overseas Chinese communities consisted mainly of men, due to immigration law that restricted Chinese immigration to laborers. For this reason, only men played the lottery. In overseas Chinese communities, lottery continued to be a popular activity among immigrants. See Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir on her father as a lottery shop runner in Stockton, California: Maxine Hong Kingston, “American Father,” in The Woman Warrior and China Men (with an introduction by Mary Gordon) (London: Everyman’s Library, 2005). There were photos in the “Online Archive of California” (OAC) about encounters between the police and lottery shops in California. All proved the continuity of popularity of lottery in China and its overseas communities between 1850s-1950s, for example, the image on “Raid on a Chinese Lottery” on LA Times. 14 Joann Faung & Jean Lee, Asian American Experiences in the United States: Oral Histories of First to Fourth Generation Americans from China, the Philippines, Japan, India, the Pacific Islands, Vietnam and Cambodia (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 1991), 5.

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The Joy Luck Club’s use of mahjong is distinctive. Amy Tan, a second-generation Chinese American writer who was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1950s, showed mahjong as playing a significant role to the plot: the game brings people together in China and San Francisco, and it is a way that the generations connect. The novel, first published in 1989, features the life stories of four women, Suyuan Woo, An-mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying-ying St. Clair, and their relations with their daughters, Jing-mei “June” Woo, Rose Hsu Jordan, Waverly Jong, and Lena St. Clair. The story starts in the 1910s and emphasizes the mothers’ status as refugees (Suyuan) and migrants (An-mei and Ying-ying) or both (Lindo) in Guilin 桂林 and Chongqing 重慶 during World War II and the Chinese Civil War (1945-1948). Tan then describes their migrations to the United States afterwards.15 Previous critics saw The Joy Luck Club mainly as a text about constructing the ethnic self through transcultural practices and providing a gendered and feminist perspective for cross-generation understanding among the Chinese immigrants.16 Building on previous scholarship that highlighted the role of mahjong, this article further uses this novel as an example to show immigrant authors representing games as a key element to negotiate cultural meanings.17 Supplementing with other non-fictional sources, The Joy Luck Club is useful to understand the nuanced mechanism of gaming practice

15 In the novel, An-mei and Ying-ying do not describe themselves as displaced by WWII or the Chinese Civil War. Ying-Ying describes marrying her husband, Clifford St. Clair, and how “Saint took [her] to America;” Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 250-251. An-mei does not narrate her immigration at all. Lindo does talk about being displaced by the war, but she brags to her daughter about taking an airplane and immigrating to study religion; Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 258. 16 Since it was first published in 1989, The Joy Luck Club has been widely interpreted in scholarship. Previous scholarship has focused on several main areas of the novel, for example, constructing ethnic self, see Bella Adams, “Becoming Chinese: Racial Ambiguity in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club,” in Literature and Racial Ambiguity, edited by Teresa Hubel & Neil Brooks (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 93-115, and Somodatta Mandl, “Ethnic Voices of Asian American Women with Special Reference to Amy Tan,” in Indian Views on American Literature, edited by A. A. Mutalik-Desai (New Delhi: Prestige, 1998), 141- 152, and also Zeng Li, “Diasporic Self, Cultural Other: Negotiating Ethnicity through Transformation in the Fiction of Tan and Kingston,” Language and Literature 28 (2003): 1-15. Another focus is the gender aspect, feminist perspective, and mother-daughter relations of the novel, see Bow Leslie, “Cultural Conflict/Feminist Revolution in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club,” in New Visions in Asian American Studies: Diversity, Community, Power, edited by Franklin Ng, Judy Yung, Stephen S. Fugita, & Elaine H. Kim (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1994), 235-247, and Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, “‘Sugar Sisterhood’: Situating the Amy Tan Phenomenon,” in The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions, edited by David Palumbo-Liu (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 174- 210, and also Bonnie Breadlin, “Mother/Daughter Dialog(ies)s in, around, and about Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club,” in Private Voices, Public Lives: Women Speak on the Literary Life, edited by Nancy Owen Nelson (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1995), 111-124, as well as Chen Xiaomei, “Reading Mother’s Tale-Reconstructing Women’s Space in Amy Tan and Zhang Jie,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 16 (1994): 111-132. Other scholarship addressed the rich transcultural references and translations of the novel, see Chris Boldt, “Why Is the Moon Lady in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club Revealed to Be a Man?,” Notes on Contemporary Literature 24 (1994): 9-10, and George Tseo, “Joy Luck: The Perils of Transcultural Translation,” Literature Film Quarterly 24 (1996): 338-343. 17 Ronald Emerick, “The Role of Mah Jong in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club,” CEA Critics 6 (1999): 37- 45; Fickle, “American Rules and Chinese Faces,” 58-88.

RASAALA, Volume 7: “Recreating Recreation” (2019) 23 among immigrants and offers a glimpse of first and second-generational Chinese American experiences and the relationship between them.

Games as Activity: Describing Immigrant Experience

In the novel, the Joy Luck Club itself is a mahjong club that brought women together. It was founded by Suyuan, Jing-mei’s mother, with a group of women with different social status in China in the 1940s. Suyuan reestablished the club with a different group of women after she migrated into the U.S. in the 1950s. The first Joy Luck Club was founded when Suyuan was a refugee in Guilin.18 This club was founded under harsh living conditions. It was a summer night “that was so hot even the moths fainted to the ground.” There was “no room for fresh air,” “unbearable smells from the sewers rose up,” and “screaming sounds were everywhere.”19 Suyuan came up with the idea of forming a mahjong club to cheer herself up under such depressing circumstances.

In the story, Suyuan gathered a group of four women, centered on the mahjong table, to seek and maintain a sense of dignity. For this reason, Suyuan put in a lot of thought into whom she selected as club members. “I knew which women I wanted to ask,” she said, “they were all young like me, with wistful faces.” Those women turned out to be an army officer’s wife, just like Suyuan, a girl with “very fine manners” from a rich family in Shanghai, and a girl from Nanning who had the “blackest hair” Suyuan had ever seen. The black-haired girl, according to Suyuan, came from a low-class family, so she was not initially qualified to join the club. But she was pretty and pleasant and had married well - to an old man who died and left her with a better life - so she was recruited.20

Under the pressure of war, starvation, and the threat of death, mahjong was a little escape for Suyuan and her friends, who had little control over the battles and their own fates. Once they started to play, Suyuan said, “nobody could speak, except to say ‘pung’ or ‘chr’ when taking a tile.”21 They agreed to play with seriousness and think of nothing else but adding to each other’s happiness through winning.22

Mahjong became an important social space for these women to continue their daily lives. Suyuan and her friends usually stopped playing and started to feast after six rounds. “It was time to celebrate our good fortune,” she said, “and then we would talk into the night until the morning, saying stories about good times in the past and good times yet to come.”23 Gathering for mahjong became a way to maintain hope and connect to the past, by creating the New Year atmosphere in a time that no one had the mood to celebrate festivals. To them, having fun seems to be even more important than eating enough and dressing warmly. Suyuan explained the symbolic meaning of their mahjong gathering in wartime China:

18 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 20. 19 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 23. 20 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 23. 21 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 24. 22 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 24. 23 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 25.

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It is not that we don’t have pain; so we decided to hold parties and pretend each week had become the New Year. Each week we could forget past wrongs done to us. We weren’t allowed to think a bad thought. We feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. And each week, we could hope to be lucky. The hope was our only joy. And that’s how we came to call our little parties Joy Luck.24

Therefore, in the novel, mahjong was more than a form of gambling, but rather an activity for displaced people to stick with each other and keep faith. Joy Luck became an image that Suyuan remembered about the days of her first marriage in Guilin, before the Japanese came. Later on Jing-mei, Suyuan’s daughter, equates the Joy Luck Club to her mother’s “Guilin story” probably because of all the narrative and memories that got retold in years.25

If playing mahjong among refugees in China was a way to remain hopeful by establishing an alternative reality during harsh living conditions, playing mahjong in the United States helped immigrants to make friends in a new country. In The Joy Luck Club, leaving China after the war, Suyuan started a new mahjong club in 1949 when she immigrated to San Francisco. As a periodic social gathering, the club was like bible study class every Wednesday night.26 Suyuan came up with such an idea to transcend the different origins, backgrounds, and dialects among her new friends. Suyuan realized that “the women of these families also had unspeakable tragedies they had left behind in China and hopes” but “they couldn’t begin to express in their fragile English.”27 When she suggested the idea of founding a mahjong club, they were all willing to join.28 The weekly mahjong gathering became a social fabric to link these new immigrant families together. Suyuan migrated to the U.S. alone. During the war, she even lost her twin daughters, whom she always searched for. Playing mahjong became one of the few consistencies between her two lives in China and the U.S.

Going to the weekly club gathering was a central event and highlight in these women’s lives and served as a reminder of a luxurious lifestyle those migrant women used to enjoy. In Tan’s novel, those women dressed up nicely and used valuable mahjong tiles for the game. Jing- mei described the fancy furniture that they used to play mahjong. She remembered that the table was made of “a very fragrant red wood”: “not what you call rosewood, but hong mu.”29 The table had a very thick pad, so that when the tiles were spilled onto the table the only sound was the ivory tiles washing against one another.30 Food and friendship played important roles. Mahjong was also an excuse for them to come together and eat. All the food had symbolic meanings related to Chinese culture. Jing-mei recalled, “dumplings shaped like silver money ingots, long rice noodles for long life, boiled peanuts for conceiving sons, and of course, many good-luck

24 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 25. 25 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 20. 26 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 20. 27 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 20. 28 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 20. 29 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 24. 30 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 23.

RASAALA, Volume 7: “Recreating Recreation” (2019) 25 oranges for a plenty, sweet life.”31 Jing-mei was surprised by how little the mahjong game itself mattered to the club members. Anxiously waiting to play the game, she finally brought up question to one of the Joy Luck aunts: “weren’t we going to play mahjong tonight?” she questioned. “Later,” the aunt answered, “after midnight.”32

Despite all of the talk about money and prosperity, the women in the Joy Luck Club did not seem to think that winning and losing of money were big issues in the club gathering. The winners did not even take the money home. Every year, they saved the mahjong winning as a special fund for big banquets at fancy restaurants.33 After Suyuan’s death, the aunts used the winning fund to sponsor Jing-mei’s tickets to fly to Hong Kong and Shanghai to reconnect with her Chinese sisters that were left behind in China by their mother.34 Mahjong not only provided the means for Suyuan’s happiness when she was alive, but also the means for her redemption after her death.

Because of the food and people that were associated with the mahjong gathering, the Joy Luck Club served to connect Jing-mei to her mother, and then, to Chinese culture. Jing-mei was first skeptical about the game and the gathering. Jing-mei was not impressed by the Joy Luck Club in wartime Guilin. She never thought the Guilin story as anything but a Chinese fairy tale since the endings always changed.35 She mocked the funny Chinese dresses that the Joy Luck aunts wore to play mahjong, since those dresses were “with stiff stand-up collars and blooming branches of embroidered silk patterns over their breasts.” She concluded that those attires “were too fancy for real Chinese people” but “too strange for American parties.”36 She had no interest in finding out what they were playing but simply described the gathering as a “shameful Chinese custom” and “like the secret gathering of the KKK or the tom-tom dances of TV Indians preparing for war.”37 She even questioned the name Joy Luck since it is not a word, and it “doesn’t exist in English.”38

Being involved in the mahjong game and attending the gatherings provide Jing-mei a sensory space to make her mental transformation, which leads to her gradual acceptance of her Chinese identity. After Suyuan’s death, the Joy Luck aunts suggested Jing-mei to take her mother’s spot at the mahjong table. To Jing-mei, being her mother at the mahjong table was something very serious and almost signified the continuation of life and commitment to the Chinese identity.39 She imagined her mother “would laugh at her ignorance” by saying “you don’t even know little percent of me! How can you be me?” She kept asking herself, “how can I be my mother at Joy Luck?”40 Jing-mei’s feelings for Chinese culture were therefore

31 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 23. 32 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 29. 33 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 39. 34 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 39. 35 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 25. 36 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 28. 37 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 28. 38 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 41. 39 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 27. 40 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 27.

RASAALA, Volume 7: “Recreating Recreation” (2019) 26 complicated. Although she showed distance to the Joy Luck Club by making those sarcastic comments, she was curious about the culture and she admired people who seemed to know the culture well. For example, when she received the letter in Chinese from her half-sisters in Shanghai, she took the letter “with shaking hands,” marveling at “how smart her sisters must be to be able to read and write Chinese.”41 The Joy Luck aunts eased Jing-mei’s concerns: “You don’t know your mother. But she is in your bones.”42 When Jing-mei finally replaced her mother’s place at the mahjong table, she took the position of the east, where her mother used to sit, symbolizing the acceptance and even embracing of her mother and Chinese culture:

The east was where things begin, my mother once told me, the direction from which the sun rises, where the wind comes from.43

And I am sitting at my mother’s place at the mahjong table, on the East, where things begin.44

Tan places significant emphasis on mahjong as an activity in The Joy Luck Club. All four mothers were connected through the game in the U.S. initially and all four daughters, who were childhood friends through the mahjong gatherings, shared similar conflicts with their mothers in terms of cultural identities. The central message of the novel, the continuity of life in China and San Francisco and the understanding between generations, were conveyed through the game.

By using mahjong as a structuring activity to intersect with immigrant experiences and convey characters, the representation of mahjong in The Joy Luck Club challenges previous definitions about games and leads to different consequences. First, mahjong was beyond “gambling” in The Joy Luck Club. The way that immigrants played mahjong was beyond money making. They came together and enjoyed music, food, people and friendship, native language, and privacy in each other’s houses. Moreover, mahjong was beyond “playing.” It was a redemption, life consistency, and path to understand Chinese culture. Similar to women in China using mahjong to get together while discussing and building an informal credit union for future security, in a diasporic setting, mahjong was no longer simply leisure for leisure’s sake. It was not only a game of chance or a game of skill, but also, and more significantly, a recreational activity that provided a focal point for social gathering.

Games as Metaphor: Reflecting on Immigrant Experiences

The deliberate choice of selecting mahjong as a key activity for her immigrant story could be seen as a self-orientalism of Tan to raise attention among Western readers by taking advantage of mahjong as a highly recognized Chinese game in the West. Mahjong was brought to the U.S. by Joseph P. Babcock (1893-1949), a businessman, in the 1920s and quickly became popular among the Americans. Before the 1950s, mahjong was already highly accepted as form

41 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 39. 42 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 40. 43 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 222. 44 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 39.

RASAALA, Volume 7: “Recreating Recreation” (2019) 27 of play in the U.S . Mary Greenfield, a historian, argues that, although the popularity of mahjong in the U.S. imagination sheds light on increasing economic, political, and cultural presence of China within the U.S. since the 1920s, the mahjong craze marks a pivotal moment in the culture that shaped and justified U.S. imperialism. It was considered to be “an easy way to sample the culture of China” and incorporated Chinese Americans into a group of nascent national multicultural ideals while still marking them as an inassimilable “other.”45 In The Joy Luck Club, however, mahjong obtained new meaning: it became detached from the geographic concept of “China” in the U.S. and became attached to the Chinese in America. In this way, Tan turns mahjong into a meaningful activity that was previously criminalized (as gambling) and marginalized (as a trivial matter). Mahjong became a reflective way to signify Chinese culture, people, and life styles, and offered more positive representation of the Chinese American experience.

As one of the few scholars to point out the significant status of mahjong in The Joy Luck Club, Ronald Emerick suggests that mahjong influences the structure, theme, imagery, and characterization of Tan’s writing and that it informs the novel “at every level.”46 As a convenient starting point, Amy Tan not only wrote about mahjong in The Joy Luck Club, but she also organized the format of the novel like a game mahjong itself. The Joy Luck Club is divided into four equal sections with four chapters each. It starts with the four mothers’ life stories, followed by two rounds of the four daughters, then ends with the mothers, which is like the mothers and daughters taking turns to sit at the mahjong table to take in and discard tiles by telling their stories.

Another scholar, Tara Fickle, further suggests that the metaphor of mahjong created a set of terminology and facilitated meaningful dialogue on various issues centering around the game.47 Through games and discussion of this particular game, Tan articulates ideas about immigrant identity, as well as kinship organization, gender, class, and race. The accommodating nature of games resembles the alterative kinship relations among immigrants. In the mahjong club in Tan’s novel, there are no blood or marriage connections among “auntie” and “sister;” the game breaks down the current barriers and re-establishes alternative organization without blood ties among immigrants.

Tan’s fictional account resonates with autobiographical accounts of other Chinese immigrants. Mahjong was portrayed as the social fabric of daily life in many Chinese families in America. Denise Chong, the author of The Concubine’s Children who appeared in the documentary Mah-jongg: The Tiles that Bind, recalled that mahjong was played in all kinds of social gatherings regardless of blood ties, including festival banquets, celebration for newborns, and weddings. In her grandma’s time in a Chinatown of Canada, “Mahjong clubs were like social clubs,” she said, “like bridge club, or to play bingo.”48 Many migrant children admitted that they grew up in “mahjong families,” and mahjong was part of their childhood memories

45 Mary Greenfield, “The Game of One Hundred Intelligences: Mahjong, Materials, and the Marketing of the Asian Exotic in the 1920s,” Pacific Historical Review 79 (2010): 329-359, 329. 46 Emerick, “The Role of Mah Jong in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club,” 53-61. 47 Fickle, “American Rules and Chinese Faces,” 71. 48 Mah-jongg: The Tiles that Bind, 22:16, interview with Denise Chong.

RASAALA, Volume 7: “Recreating Recreation” (2019) 28 whether they participated or not. Another migrant child remembered his family’s mahjong gathering in Harlem, New York: “The main social activity for my family was mah-jongg, cigarettes, and Chinese food every weekend.”49 While the adults played, he recalled, the kids just ran off having a good time. Every weekend, his family would have friends over by noon, set up the tables, and play until late evening. And the kids would play in another room.50 One migrant child described the normalcy of the periodic mahjong gathering as “going out to have dim sum or dinner.”51

The socialized nature of playing games especially connected women in and outside of their homes. Though women were the major players, the game brought together other family members. While the Joy Luck women played mahjong, men played cards in another room, and children chased each other around the house.52 This was a homosocial activity, a feminine space for women, and written from a gendered perspective. Although there were other people around, the club still focused on women themselves. It was nonpolitical, irreligious, and nonfamily based. As Fickle argues, the mahjong-playing women presented an image of that relatable to middle-class American readers about how women should behave and connect with society.

In addition to mahjong, chess in The Joy Luck Club serves as another key element and presents a comparable story about games and immigrant identity, which further shows Tan’s unique understanding of immigrants through the lens of games. Waverly was one of the Joy Luck aunts’ daughters, and she was talented in playing western chess when she was young. In the novel, Waverly did not enjoy playing chess because she did not like the way that her mother arranged her life, including all the spare time and hobbies. Waverly also disliked her mother to brag about her achievement in chess games among other immigrants parents - immigrants were often competitive even through play and hobbies to strive for better social recognition. If Jing- mei’s mahjong story showed the harmonious and cooperative side of game playing, Waverly and her struggles with playing chess showed the competitive side. This type of gaming was not a tool to bring people together, but to distinguish immigrant children and parents from one another.53

Similarly, chess was not a tool to reconcile two generations of mothers and daughters, but to exacerbate the cross-cultural and cross-generational tension and different understanding of class and status. In Waverly’s eyes, her mother was like the queen game piece on the chessboard, with her secret weapons of sewing needle as her sword and a wok as her armor.54 Not all the games, then, can transcend boundaries and facilitate mutual understanding. Waverly stopped playing chess. In the end of the story, she did not reconcile with her mother either, but just came to realize that her mother was not as strong as she imagined as her opponent in the game for years. In this game, the daughter quit, and the mother did not win either.55 A “borrowed” game

49 Faung & Lee, “Interview on Tony,” 152. Tony is a twenty-five-year-old Chinese American who was born and raised in the U.S. 50 Faung & Lee, “Interview on Tony,” 152. 51 Mah-jongg: The Tiles that Bind, 8:55. 52 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 29. 53 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 37, 170. 54 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 183. 55 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 173, 179, 182.

RASAALA, Volume 7: “Recreating Recreation” (2019) 29 from western culture seems more antagonistic to the Chinese immigrant experience than mahjong. In this part of the novel, chess did not function as an effective tool because it is not “Chinese” enough in the author’s imagination.

In addition, the way the characters discussed the mahjong game provides an opportunity to articulate the nuanced meaning about race and ethnicity. The mahjong game was also popular among the Jewish community. Jewish people, especially women, were historically famous for turning Chinese mahjong into a tool to enter the American mainstream.56 Though mahjong provided a shared community for female immigrants in both Jewish and Chinese communities, the two communities were aware of each other, and they did not necessarily recognize the other party’s authenticity. Jewish women, however, seldom claimed that mahjong was a Jewish game. The Chinese players seemed to be aware of the white/Jewish players in the similar time period, and they made extra effort to articulate the Chineseness in their way of playing the game. In the aforementioned documentary Mah-jongg: The Tiles that Bind, several interviewees started their statements with “it’s a ‘Chinese’ game.” The Joy Luck Club also provided an example of what the Chinese thought of the Jewish mahjong. In the novel, when Jing-mei asked what the difference is between Jewish mahjong and Chinese mahjong, Suyuan, her mother, claimed that it was “entirely different kind of playing:”

She said in her English explanation voice. “Jewish mahjong. They watch only for their own tiles, play only with their eyes.” Then she switched to Chinese, “Chinese mahjong, you must play using your head, very tricky. You must watch what everybody else throws away and keep that in your head as well. And if nobody plays well, then the game becomes like Jewish mahjong. Why play? There is no strategy. You are just watching people make mistakes.” 57

Even Jing-mei admitted that she could not tell by her mother’s explanation if the game was really different, or it was because of her attitude toward Chinese and Jewish people.58

As a type of material culture, the unique tangible nature of the mahjong game helped to transcend the barrier of language and communication and created a sensory space. Tan’s novel resonates with her 2017 autobiography, Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir, which reflected on her family history in a more personal way. Tan’s memoir showed many similarities between The Joy Luck Club and her real-life experience, including her complicated relationship with her mother and her mother’s experience in wartime China and migration to the U.S. in the 1950s. Similar to The Joy Luck Club, Tan further stresses the non-linguistic connectivity in

56 In her work, Annelise Heinz summarizes three key periods for mahjong to become American culture: first, the enormous and mainstream national fad in the 1920s when wealthy women dressed up in Chinese costume to play the game; second, during the late 1930s and WWII, when a group of Jewish women founded the National Mah-jongg League and used it for patriotic fundraising; and third, during the Cold War era, the League’s game took on a life of its own in Jewish women’s networks. See Annelise Heinz, “Mahjong: Jewish Women, a Chinese Game, and the Paradoxes of Postwar Domesticity,” paper presented at the 75th annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, March 2016, Seattle. 57 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 33. 58 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 33.

RASAALA, Volume 7: “Recreating Recreation” (2019) 30 immigrant lives, and their desire to establish a non-linguistic and irreligious alternative space through tangible objects. Tan’s mother, just like Jing-mei’s mother Suyuan in the fictional account, has a complicated history of speaking. In Tan’s eyes, as an immigrant in the U.S., her mother was not articulate and witty anymore because her English skills were poor.59 Not only did Tan’s non-Chinese friends have trouble understanding Tan’s mother, but Tan’s mother also had trouble communicating with other Chinese immigrants, since most of the Chinese people she met in the United States spoke Cantonese, not Mandarin or Shanghainese.60 According to Tan, her mother spoke a mixture of Shanghainese, Mandarin, and English combined into unique pronunciation and surprisingly useful blended idioms.61 The impossibility of communication makes the alternative space through games and activities both unique and necessary. Without mahjong, The Joy Luck Club would have been a different story and would have lost many of the profound meanings that it intends to convey. To further illustrate this point, Tan questions the certainty of language to signify people’s hearts and minds:

I used to wonder what Chinese people perceived in my mother based on the way she talked. Language usage is an instant marker of age, education, regional habitat, and upbringing as reflected in the polite and nuanced ways that you speak. But language usage can also fool you. 62

Thus, mahjong as a game might be a deliberate choice to transcend the communication dilemma. Many personal accounts of second-generation Chinese Americans also preserved a special place for mahjong in their childhood memories by specially remembering the specific and sensory details about the game, such as the sound, the color, and even the smell, after decades. In the documentary Mah-jongg: The Tiles that Bind, one girl mentions the “clatter sound” and the “perfectly pedicured long and red nails” moving the tiles on the table, which created a “harmony of sounds,” as well as the “loud noise of winning every three or four minutes.”63 Hope Edelman, the author of Motherless Daughter, who was interviewed in the same documentary, described the smell of mahjong as “the smell from my childhood,” and it smells like plastic and wood. “God, just a particular plastic smell of it,” she claimed, “closely associated with my childhood, and giving it away will be like giving away the part of the memory.”64 Another woman said mahjong was the most sensorial memory of her early years. “The noise, the smell of the cigarette, the feel of walking around and being so small, looking over to the women who seemed so much older than me,” she said.65 With the accounts of mahjong, in Tan’s novel in particular, there resides a wealth of non-linguistic cultural continuities. Several accounts mention, for example, the importance of the sound of the tiles: a give-away in wartime to attract the attention of the Japanese soldiers, an ambient street sound coming from open windows in a hot Hong Kong night - these gaming experiences were repeatable in different contexts as this article

59 Amy Tan, Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2017), 83-84. 60 Tan, Where the Past Begins, 342. 61 Tan, Where the Past Begins, 348. 62 Tan, Where the Past Begins, 346. 63 Mah-jongg: The Tiles that Bind, 3:09. 64 Mah-jongg: The Tiles that Bind, interview with Hope Edelman. 65 Mah-jongg: The Tiles that Bind, 16:33.

RASAALA, Volume 7: “Recreating Recreation” (2019) 31 explores, despite being altered during re-contextualization. This non-linguistic cultural connectivity functioned both vertically (across generations) and horizontally (cross-culturally).

Game as metaphor, to some extent, also signifies the tensions of immigration itself: taking risk while controlling risk, understanding rules while breaking rules, facing uncertainty while remaining hopeful. The endurance of the unbearable life itself during wartime was like drawing different tiles on the mahjong table and dealing with losing and winning. When immigrants moved to a new society, they had to learn the rules, follow rules, break rules, and create new rules as if they were forming a new club and engaging in a game as newcomers. No matter what happened, they still believed in “luck” and hoped to feel the “joy.” At the core of the “game spirit,” immigrants had to learn to let go, since there is always the next game. In her personal memoir, Tan talks about one of her mother’s favorite things to say was “could not be help,” “no choice,” and “cannot prevent it.”66

This “game spirit” in the overseas Chinese population has been very important for Chinese Americans to construct cultural discourse. Migrants needed courage to go out of the country, no matter whether for short-term traveling, running business, or permanent immigration. They did, then, have to share in the “spirit” of gaming: to deal with uncertainty, to learn to be flexible, and to take risk. Julie Chu, an anthropologist, presents in her research a case about playing mahjong in Fujian province, a hometown for many Chinese immigrants. Chu argues that people cultivated their adventurist mind through taking turns to discard and replace tiles, tossing unwanted pieces, and taking advantage of chance.67 She indicates that success in both mahjong and emigration was premised on worlds in motion, in which one expected to be at the mercy of circulatory flows beyond one’s complete control.68 In Chu’s case, mahjong offered the Fujian villagers an important model for weighing loss and reward based on one’s fortune-in-hand, so they could practice losing and winning, and starting over again.69 This resonates with Oxfeld’s findings among Chinese immigrants in India, but is articulated more explicitly in immigrant literature.

Games as an Intellectual Trend: Reconsidering Immigration through Games

Games as an activity and a metaphor in literature further construct the gaming rhetoric: as a new cultural element reflecting social and intellectual changes. This section shows that, as a literary strategy, representing games not only acts as reflection of social history, but also pioneers a way to negotiate public narrative of Asian immigrants.

66 Tan, Where the Past Begins, 85. 67 Julie Y. Chu, Cosmologies of Credits: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 261. For other important scholarship about how gambling influenced people’s mindset in contemporary context, see Hans Steinmuller, Communities of Complicity: Everyday Ethics in Rural China (Dislocations) (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 32, 178, 192, 194; Deborah K. Philips & Vicki A. Wilson, eds., Gambling and Gender: Men and Women at Play (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 1, 21; Emma Casey, Women, Pleasure and the Gambling Experience (Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), 13, 14. 68 Chu, Cosmologies of Credits, 264. 69 Chu, Cosmologies of Credits, 265-267.

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This new gaming rhetoric was related to the broader context of how people conceptualize the world since the nineteenth century. In this view, work and life are no longer two separate issues. Michael Oriard, in Sporting with the Gods: The Rhetoric of Play and Game in American Culture, traces the use of the word “game” in nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature and argues that a work-centered culture increasingly granted play a vital place in human life.70 The late nineteenth century to the first World War, which Oriard considers the “Progressive Era,” was that moment when opposing principles of work and play carried more or less equal importance within middle-class American culture. Oriard argues that this period divided America’s “Century of Work” from its “Century of Play.” Oriard further defines this new phenomenon in literature as “work-play dualism.”71 In the past, “work” simply existed as “activity for an end,” and play as “activity as an end.” In the American literature that Oriard reviews, man was created to play, but he had to work in order to reach that promised end. That is why, once in the “Century of Play,” as The Joy Luck Club was, instead of describing the work life of immigrants, for example, laundry men and coolie workers as were discussed in previous works, the focus shifted to the mahjong table instead.

Moreover, representing games in literature shows the changing intellectual and moral component of a speculative economy. Scholars argue that the rising gaming rhetoric created models of “ economic rationality” in the early age of stock market speculation.72 Gaming discourse, as Ann Fabian points out in her groundbreaking work Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops: Gambling in 19th Century America, reflected changing economic behavior in the nineteenth century, especially the changing moral and intellectual component of the economy and the acceptance and evolution of speculative economy.73 People had different conceptualizations of consumption and non-productive activities and debated about whether it was a threat or not.74 Taking risk and rapid gain became more acceptable, which was against the rationality of the previous republican ideal, but resonated with a capitalist society.75 Gaming rhetoric was both an expression of change and also a force to drive the moral value of the society to match the reality. The Joy Luck Club’s “economic alternative” centering on games granted new opportunities for women, minorities, and immigrants. It is also worth mentioning that the Joy Luck Club in the novel’s present (i.e. after Suyuan’s death) has moved from private gambling to speculative investment as well. George Hsu, one of the Joy Luck uncles, writes a letter to the group describing their capital account of $24,825 or $3,103 per person.76 Fabian argues that play created a world of small dissident pleasures to be found in the waste, risk, and chance of gaming, in exchange for the traditional work and leisure, which might have been governed by the cultural or spiritual logic of the previous world.77

70 Oriard, Sporting with the Gods, xi. 71 Oriard, Sporting with the Gods, 379. 72 Ann Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops: Gambling in 19th Century America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 2, 67. 73 Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops, 67. 74 Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops, 10. 75 Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops, 2-3. 76 Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 28-29. 77 Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops, 111.

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Building on the rationalization of speculative economy, American literature has a trend to present life as a decision-making process with a single actor. After studying many texts, Oriard suggests that these texts portrayed games that were taken seriously for the sake of the game itself and seemed more and more to touch the bedrock of American culture. Guerra’s dissertation argues that gameplay in literature both facilitated and informed representations of agency in the nineteenth century. According to Guerra, games act as a metaphor for life itself for two reasons. 1. Life is a process based on decision-making; and 2. The decision-making on a game board emphasizes subjectivity of the player - how to play, what rules to follow, and how to balance chance and skill.78 People also seem to increasingly recognize the balance between reason and destiny. A recent study by Robert Frank, an economist, emphasizes the role of chance and community building in human society. Frank argues that chance events play a much larger role in important life outcomes than most people once imagined.79 Frank particularly points out that the more people understand the role of luck, instead of individual talent and hard work, the more likely people are willing to contribute to society and be better team players.80

Using games as an effective strategy to represent Asian immigrants in literature and influencing public narrative on work, life, and risk-taking, the first-generation Korean-American Min Jin Lee’s recent novel Pachinko (2017) offers a comparable example to The Joy Luck Club. Pachinko describes the century-long life of ethnic Koreans (labeled as “zainichi” in Japanese) in Japan from 1910s to the 1990s. Pachinko is a type of mechanical game originating in Japan and is used as both a form of recreational arcade game and a gambling device, similar to the slot machine in the West. Similar to mahjong influences every level of The Joy Luck Club, pachinko as game constitutes the core of the characters’ life stories. The pachinko game shares several themes with mahjong in articulating immigrant identity, especially regarding race and non- linguistic connectivity. Like mahjong’s connections to the Chinese, the pachinko parlors were usually run by ethnic Koreans in Japan, and the Japanese considered the game to be a “filthy” business associated with the “cunning” Koreans. In some sense, the game reflects changes of how the ethnic Koreans approached risk and chance by engaging in the “unproductive” gaming industry after World War II in Japan (compared to fishing and agriculture in pre-war period, and making kimchi during World War II). To some extent, pachinko, as a tangible game, probably helped to deal with the difficulty of linguistic communication.

Similar to The Joy Luck Club, the ethnic Koreans faced linguistic challenges. Every character had multiple names (in both Japanese and Korean) and many of them were not able to communicate each other even within the same family and same ethnicity because of a complicated colonial history.81 Most importantly, like The Joy Luck Club, the game intersects with the process of conflicts and understanding across generations in the migrant family. Several generations got involved in running the pachinko parlors for different reasons. Noa, the main character Sunja’s elder son, a bright student who dropped out from Waseda University, ran the

78 Guerra, “On the Move,” 1, 14, 254, 255. 79 Robert Frank, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), xi. 80 Frank, Success and Luck, 8, 90, 101, 132, 141. 81 Lee, Pachinko, 342.

RASAALA, Volume 7: “Recreating Recreation” (2019) 34 parlors, but was deeply ashamed of it. Mozasu, Noa’s half-brother, also ran the parlors, but mainly viewed it as a way to make his living, so he could afford to send his son to an international school and earn better social recognition. Solomon, Mozasu’s son, the third generation, grew up going to an international school in Japan and graduated from Columbia University in the United States. Similar to Jing-mei in The Joy Luck Club, Solomon used to doubt the decency of the game business, but gradually accepted it. He even breaks up with his Korean-American girlfriend, stays in Japan, and the novel indicates that he may help his father to run the pachinko parlors. Solomon accepted his own identity symbolically by accepting the game business. The history of pachinko is also a history of ethnic Koreans in Japan achieving a certain sense of reconciliation across generations and cultures in the twentieth century.

While The Joy Luck Club shows cooperation and competitions in real life on the mahjong table, the game pachinko signifies the uncertainty of life itself. Life itself is like a pachinko game: when a player launches a ball into metal track, it is the track that guides the ball around the edge of the playing field and into the playing field when the ball loses momentum. The player has little control over where the track takes the ball. In this sense, the main character, Sunja, had a “bad” launch of her ball by being impregnated by a rich married gangster and gave birth to their child Noa. This “indecent” launching of Noa’s life became a lifetime stigma that Noa cannot let go, and Noa eventually kills himself because of it. On the one hand, characters in the novel deal with constant losses and sorrows of life. As outsiders in Japan, they faced discrimination, poverty, and extreme hardship and had little control. (The characters used the expression “sho ga nai” in Japanese in the novel, similar to “can’t prevent it” and “could not be help” in Tan’s memoir). On the other hand, however, the novel is full of compassion, passion, persistence, and hope, as well as understanding beyond rationality. Similar to mahjong during wartime China and the 1950s U.S., no matter how difficult it was, there was “joy” and migrants in both works still believed in “luck.” In addition to the opening line of the novel, “history has failed us, but no matter,” one of the few passages directly addresses the game itself as a metaphor of immigrant experience and shows the crucial status of the pachinko game in the whole novel:

There could only be a few winners and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones. How could you get angry at the ones who want to be in the game? Estuko had failed in this important way - she had not taught her children to hope, to believe in the perhaps absurd possibility that they might win. Pachinko was a foolish game, but life was not. 82

Games contribute to a symbolic way to discuss immigration probably because of the similarities and contrasts between the two acclaimed Asian American women writers. Tan and Lee are both first or second-generation Asian Americans grappling with the war memories of their parents and grandparents. Although Tan writes about her neighborhood, which is close to herself, and Lee describes a place far away, both of them will be very interesting dialogue partners and interlocutors. And it also makes sense in terms of timing: in 1989, people were about to start caring about the Nanjing Atrocity and other war crimes and Japan committed during WWII; in 2018, people have been really caring about Japanese occupation of Korea and

82 Lee, Pachinko, 412.

RASAALA, Volume 7: “Recreating Recreation” (2019) 35 all the current conflicts in the South China Sea. Both novels are not historical. Lee is a historically minded novelist, and Tan did not intent to write history either. Both of them, however, are important sources for understanding social history. The community building of mahjong and the uncertainty of pachinko both show the similar risk taking and risk control behind the nature of gaming and immigration. Games add more nuanced meanings to the writings.

In this way, literature created a “gamesmanship” or more precisely, “game character,” and this “game character” helps to redefine and enrich the typified “Chinese character” and “immigrant character.” “Game character,” as illustrated in The Joy Luck Club and other literature and memoirs, emphasizes community building, female roles in society, class performance, risk taking and controlling risk, and non-linguistic communication. This is especially important to reconstruct the “Chinese character,” which traditionally shows Asian Americans as “model minorities” with near-ascetic eschewal of all things fun and an almost fanatical dedication to the serious pursuits of economic and scholastic success. Therefore, “game character” redefines a “model minority” and adds more nuanced and humanistic specifics to the “Chinese character.”83 More importantly, along with other sources, “game character” presents the agency and subjectivity of the group, and creates new meaning for the “immigrant character,” which was previously full of discrimination, poverty, hardship, lacking communication and control, forever miserable, and not being able to be accepted and assimilated. By rationalizing and celebrating the risk-taking nature behind game playing, “game character” helps to construct a more desirable modern self to approach risk and uncertainty as immigrants.

How should people understand the immigrants’ world? Based on the novel The Joy Luck Club, documentary films, and memoirs about Chinese immigrants in the U.S., and the comparison with other games in immigrant literature, this article provides an analysis of the role of play among immigrants. Throughout the article, three main themes provide different kinds of insight: games as activity to tie people together in an intimate space, games as a metaphor to convey meanings of identity and experience, and games as an overall strategy to present the immigrant community more purposefully and positively with nuances. This article argues that the act of playing a game represents a mechanism through which the immigrants not only retain their cultural ties to their previous lives as lived in their home country, but also represents a certain progressive assimilation onto the current society in which they live. The examination of the way the players meet extends the playing ritual beyond just a game, but also a socialization process, a culinary experience, and a supportive network for those involved. This is a general experience that could be seen in cultural adjustments in a new home both individually and collectively, while engaging in a regular meeting time and space. The experience of being “displaced” and “relocated” is more than leaving a home and building a new one, but a nuanced process of creating familial, cultural, linguistic, and economic ties across national borders.84 Gaming is one of the many ways to connect people between “homeland” and “motherland.”85

83 Fickle, “American Rules and Chinese Faces,” 69. 84 Shelly Fisher Fishkin, “Asian Crossroads/Transnational American Studies,” The Japanese Journal of American Studies 17 (2006): 10, 18. 85 Oriard, Sporting with the Gods, 484.

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When writers have become more sophisticated and self-conscious in addressing the persistent work-play dualism, gaming has been shown to have impacted the real world of immigrants. In The Joy Luck Club, the gambling winnings, previously mostly won by Suyuan, help Jing-mei and her father reunite with Suyuan’s other daughters in China. Gambling funds transnational family reunification. In the history of overseas Chinese immigrants, some games also show important connections with publicity and community building. The gaming practice among Chinese immigrants not only contributed to a shared community by reinforcing culture and tradition, but also created shared funds. Gambling funds in the U.S. were often used for the public good of the community. In the nineteenth century, winners of large sums of money frequently contributed to local shrines and to the building of temples in San Francisco. Similarly, some shops in Qing China were funded by gambling dens in eastern American cities.86 This community building resonates with the literary depictions of winning funds at the mahjong table being used for gatherings and trips to China in The Joy Luck Club and in other sources. As this article shows, a new type of Chinese immigrant was redefined and reimagined through the vivid representation of mahjong: they make friends, and they have fun in a game that displays Chinese wisdom. More importantly, they take chance and appreciate chance, and they are good team players.

In this sense, although this article focuses on and starts with the realm of literature and cultural representation, confirming the analysis with other works related to immigration and socialization of immigrants into a new society, this retitle shows that games and play can be an effective thematic approach to examining the cultural roles experienced by the players of this ancient game. This is something that social history does not convey or does not articulate to that extent, which could become an effective teaching tool to use those sources to teach immigrants and cross-cultural experiences. Most importantly, this analysis provides a storyline that may be replicated among many other cultural groups, places, and other activities, and therefore, understanding the nature of the immigrants is enhanced through the role of the game.

How much, however, do people really share in common in a community that was built on/through games? The community through gaming, regardless in literature or in social history, could be superficial. It also seems exclusive - no new members were recruited to the Joy Luck Club, except the four families in the novel. But game playing challenges a way of race thinking in today’s world. Migrants were often excluded on the basis of perceived racial difference and what political philosopher Hannah Arendt described as “race-thinking” - a way of seeing the world on the basis of “racial differences” and a source of convenient argument for various existing conflicts.87 While race thinking endures in today’s world, gaming rhetoric provides a humanitarian aspect to approach the “outsiders” within. Playing games might not be as profound but presents valuable reflections: when the second-generation Chinese were able to communicate

86 In his work in 1891, Steward Culin mentioned that a man from New York, who won 500 dollars from the “white pigeon” lottery, took out the money to build a shrine in Philadelphia and hoped by its erection to propitiate the god to who he attributed his good fortune. See Steward Culin, The Gambling Games of the Chinese in America: Fán T'án, The Game of Repeatedly Spreading Out, and Pák Kòp Piú, or, the Game of White Pigeon Ticket (1891), 17. 87 Hannah Arendt, “Race Thinking before Racism,” The Review of Politics 6 (1944): 36-73, 72-73.

RASAALA, Volume 7: “Recreating Recreation” (2019) 37 with their mothers on the game table, when the Jewish and the Chinese played the same game, when Jing-mei used the money from mahjong to connect to a home away from home, gaming signified a sense of possibility and compassion. It also resonates with the idea of simultaneity that Benedict Anderson conceptualizes beyond existing borders and labels and creates an alternative way to rethink what “home” is. People travel, as does culture. “Homeland” is not the same as “motherland,” and it will never be. People might be different from one another. At least they can sit down and play a game. Let games unite people.

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