Begin before American adoption.
Choose a city, period, family, publication, association, or language community. Seek sources that can speak from within that context.
Communities are not footnotes.
They are where the game lives.
Mah Jongg has been made meaningful in different places, periods, languages, families, institutions, and migration stories. Specificity is how we give that complexity respect.
Name the infrastructure.
Weekly games, teachers, organizations, resorts, charity, family networks, and the NMJL tradition shaped a durable social world.
Ask who carried it.
A game can persist through informal labor: invitations, room setup, translation, teaching, rides, records, and memory.
The question is not “who owns Mah Jongg?” It is “whose work, context, and continuity are we willing to name accurately?”