About Us | LuxMahjong

Every company has a founding date on a piece of paper. Ours has a sound instead: tiles being washed across a green felt table — that dry, rattling shuffle I used to hear through the wall when I was supposed to be asleep.

My name is Alice Chi. I'm Chinese-American, I'm the founder of LuxMahjong, and this is how a shoebox of old tiles turned into a company.

A childhood in two languages

I was born in Suzhou, in a family where Sunday afternoons had a fixed geography: my mother, my grandmother and three of their friends took over the dining table, and the children were allowed to watch — in silence — from the doorway. The tiles were bamboo-backed and worn pale at the corners from forty years of hands. There were house rules that had nothing to do with scoring. Everyone washed their hands before touching the tiles. Whoever lost hosted the next week and brought the pastries. When you drew, you placed the tile down gently, because slamming a tile is either showing off or losing your temper, and nobody wanted to be either.

When my parents moved us to Southern California in the 1980s, the tiles came too. But the geography didn't. There was no dining-room table full of aunties in our new house — just a cardboard box in the garage, and parents who were working two jobs. I was eleven, and I was busy becoming American. For a long time I thought mahjong was the thing I had to put down in order to fit in: old-country, old-people, not for a girl who wanted to sound like everyone else at school.

That's a very Chinese-American thing, I've since learned — the decade where you set the old thing down, and the decade after, when you go looking for it again.

Twenty years without a table

College, work, marriage, two kids, a commute. The decades went where decades go. My mother eventually had her own group again — other Chinese-American women from the community center, playing in a rotation of living rooms across the San Gabriel Valley — and I told myself I'd join them "next year" for about fifteen years.

In 2023 my mother died, and I flew back to Suzhou to help settle her apartment. In the back of a wardrobe, wrapped in a cloth, was the old set: my grandmother's bamboo-backed tiles, the box polished smooth by forty years of Sunday hands. I brought the shoebox home to California.

A week later I did the only sensible thing you can do with a thing like that. I invited three neighbors over — one Irish-American, one Mexican-American, one whose grandmother played in Shanghai — and I tried to teach them. Which is how I learned that the game I'd been carrying around in my head since childhood was not the game they play here. American mahjong has its own card, its own hands, and a ritual called the Charleston that I had to learn from scratch, at forty-something, from a rulebook.

The two shelves

Teaching on antique bamboo tiles is a specific kind of chaos — beautiful tiles, no jokers, wrong game. So I went shopping for a proper American set. What I found were two shelves and nothing in between.

On one shelf: inexpensive sets that felt like toys — printed faces instead of engraved, tiles so light they skittered when you shuffled, and half the accessories missing. On the other: gorgeous designer sets at four hundred, seven hundred, nine hundred dollars, priced like a piece of furniture. What I wanted was what I had grown up around — honest weight in the hand, faces cut deep enough to read across the table, made by people who'd been making tiles their whole lives — sold at what tiles actually cost.

Through family connections back home, I found a workshop in Jiangsu, a region that has made mahjong tiles for generations. I asked them to make me a few sets the old way. I gave most of them away.

How LuxMahjong actually happened

Nobody planned a company. It happened one year at a time, and honestly it happened because other people kept asking.

• 2023 — The shoebox. I bring my grandmother's tiles back from Suzhou and start Thursday nights in my dining room. Four women, one table, tea going cold.
• 2024 — The first order. Twelve sets arrive from the Jiangsu workshop. I keep two and give the rest to my table, my sister, my neighbors. Within months, their friends are asking where the tiles came from, and the honest answer — a workshop, my family, no middlemen — is apparently an answer people want.
• 2024, autumn — The spreadsheet. I start ordering in small batches for friends-of-friends, tracked on a spreadsheet that got embarrassing. Someone asks if I have a website. I don't.
• 2025, spring — We become a real company. LuxMahjong is registered and the boutique opens. We set one rule that every set has to pass: complete out of the box — racks, pushers, betting sticks, the current NMJL card and a carrying bag, because I remembered exactly how annoying it was to buy tiles and then go hunting for the rest of it.
• 2025, autumn — Custom engraving. We add personalized engraving — a name, a family phrase, your table's name — and build the four tiers we still sell today, from the $69.90 starter set to the $299 flagship with its porcelain-print mat.
• 2026 — Growing up. We move to factory-direct shipping with duties and taxes included, complete CPSC safety testing, and start shipping to tables in every region of the country. The Thursday table is still going. The box on my grandmother's set is a little paler than it was.

What we are, and what we're not

LuxMahjong is a small, Chinese-American, woman-founded boutique. We design our own sets and have them made by the same workshop that made the very first order — one margin instead of four, which is why a complete set from us lands between about $120 and $320 where a designer set runs $660 to $925. 

What we're not: we're not a lifestyle empire, and we're not in the business of selling someone else's culture back to them. Mahjong came to this country with immigrants and it belongs, now, to everyone who sets up a table — including the three neighbors I taught in my dining room. I'm proud that this company is Chinese-American: it means carrying the craft carefully and refusing to turn it into a costume. No lucky-cat prints. No "ancient secrets." Just good tiles, honestly priced, made by people who know how.

The point was never the tiles

My grandmother's set is on our table again, the same one that came through the wall as a shuffle and a laugh. We still play Thursdays. Somebody always brings pastries.

People ask what LuxMahjong sells. Tiles, technically. But what I'm really trying to hand you is a Thursday: four faces, the same four, week after week, getting older at the same table. The tiles just have to be good enough to last that long. Ours are.