Southern Fried Rice: Life in A
Chinese Laundry in the Deep South.
Yin & Yang Press, 2005. Paper, 240
pp, 6 x 9, $15.00.
A story of immigrant
parents and their children, the only Chinese in a city in the Deep South,
running a laundry from just before the Great Depression until the early 1950s
when they moved to San Francisco to escape social and cultural isolation and
join a Chinese community. The memoir raises issues that are central to the
daily lives of immigrants from many lands as they struggle to adjust to a new
country with a different language and customs. It describes how they encounter prejudice
and discrimination against racial minorities in America, manage to earn a
living through hard work and thriftiness, stay connected to family and
relatives in their homeland, and eventually become acculturated to American
ways. Southern Fried Rice illustrates the immigrantsÕ struggle to
raise children who often reject or question the values and customs of the
parentsÕ homeland as they become ÔAmericanized,Õ and examines how children face
and resolve conflicts and dilemmas related to ethnic identity and cultural
clashes with their immigrant parents.
The
current focus on immigration issues in America makes Southern Fried Rice especially relevant as it provides
insights that promote better understanding of the difficult lives of many
immigrant families in America. Although it is the story of only one family,
Southern Fried Rice has
wide appeal because of its relevance to peoples across a wide range of
backgrounds. The story has fascinated audiences differing in age, gender,
ethnic background, and education level for it deals with many experiences
universally encountered by immigrant families.

Author
Bio: Born
in 1937, John Jung grew up living above the Sam Lee Laundry in Macon until the
early 1950s when his parents moved the family to San Francisco. Earning a Ph.D.
from Northwestern University in 1962, he was a Professor of Psychology at
California State University, Long Beach for 40 years, publishing many research
articles as well as eight college textbooks, including Psychology of Alcohol
And Other Drugs,
Thousand Oaks, Ca.: Sage Publications, 2001.
ÒSouthern Fried RiceÓ is searchable at: http://books.google.com Available
online: www.lulu.com/content/142027
Scholarly Praise for Southern
Fried Rice
ÒSouthern Fried Rice tells the
overlooked history of Chinese Americans in the Deep South through the authorÕs
account of his familyÕs experiences in Georgia running a laundry from the late
1920s through the 1950s. This
inside view of an immigrant family who struggled to make a living and to
maintain connections with their Chinese heritage and homeland highlights the mutability
and complexity of Chinese American identity and the frequently forgotten ethnic
and racial diversity of the South.Ó
Krystyn Moon, Asst. Prof. of
History, Georgia State University
Author, ÒYellowface: Creating the
Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s-1920sÓ
ÒÉ a humane and personal reflection
É an incisive clarity that shines extra light on the mundane oddities and
inhuman logic of everyday life in the South before the Civil Rights era. É a rare glimpse at the fairly common
experience of those Americans who found themselves in the impossible spaces of
the American racial order, a world that is both thankfully distant and yet
hauntingly familiar still.Ó
Henry Yu, Associate Professor
of History, UCLA and University of British Columbia
Author, ÒThinking Orientals, Migration, Contact, and
Exoticism in Modern AmericaÓ
ÒÉBeing the only Chinese in town, their
lives were certainly not mint julep and magnolias. Southern Fried Rice describes the process of running
a laundry and the difficulty of raising children isolated from other Chinese...
Through it all, the family, itself, remained steadfast in their cultural traits
and folkways. ÉQuan Shee, the authorÕs mother, was truly a woman warrior...Ó
Sylvia Sun Minnick Author, ÒSamfow, The San
Joaquin Chinese ExperienceÓ
ÒSouthern Fried
Rice offers a fascinating and insightful account of Chinese-American family
life in the context of restraints on immigration and the U.S. racial and
economic systems. This story of one remarkable family offers valuable insight
about economic struggles in difficult times, intergenerational relations,
continuing ties to Chinese culture and community, family obligation, gender,
the key role of laundries in Chinese economic opportunity, and much else. This is a charming and informative
book.Ó
Paul Rosenblatt, Professor of Family
Social Sciences, University of Minnesota
Author, Multiracial Couples: Black and White Voices
"John Jung provides an insightful account
of himself and his family in the context of Chinese immigrants who lived in the
American South during the 1940s and 1950s. The unique experiences and struggles
of his family members serve both to confirm some principles from social science
research on Chinese in America as well as to remind us of the importance of
individual differences, yielding meaningfulness and substance to issues of
culture, race relations, immigration, and identity development. This engaging,
candid, and often humorous and heartwarming book is an important contribution
not only to the fields of psychology, sociology, and history but also to
literature. Social scientists and students alike will find the book immensely
fascinating and satisfying."
Stanley
Sue, Distinguished Professor, Psychology and Asian American Studies, University
of California, Davis Co-Editor,Ó Asian American Mental Health: Assessment
Theories and MethodsÓ
ÒThis narrative, woven with genuine scholarship about the
lives of Chinese immigrants, is a masterful bit of storytelling. It is an admirable and valuable
contribution.Ó
Ronald Gallimore, Professor, Department of Psychiatry
& Biobehavioral Sciences, UCLA
Author, ÒRousing Minds to Life, Teaching, learning,and schooling in
social contextÓ
ÒRich with historical details of immigration, John Jung's
engaging memoir about growing up Chinese in the segregated South is an
insightful observation about the resilience of Asian American families and the
fluidity of culture and ethnic identities across different historical moments
and racialized spaces.Ó
Barbara Kim, Asst. Prof. Asian American
Studies, Cal State University, Long Beach
ÒSouthern Fried Rice demonstrates
the fluidity of regional and national identity and is both a construction and
deconstruction of "Chinese-ness."ÉThese stories offer much toward
confirming and complicating popular notions of what it means to be
"American" just as it traces the slippery identity shifts of what it
means to be "Chinese" É a valuable mirror that will help move the
history of those who are neither Black nor White towards a more deserving
central role in the national and international human story.Ó
Stephanie Y. Evans, Assistant Professor, African
American Studies and Women's Studies, University of Florida Author,ÓBlack Women
in The Ivory Tower, 1850-1954: An Intellectual HistorÓ
ÒThis interesting memoir presents a
unique view of ethnic identity development. It provides
fascinating insights into the process of learning what it means to be
Chinese when there is no Chinese community, or even other Chinese families, to
interact with, and the way subsequent experiences in -- and out -- of a Chinese
community further shape this process.Ó
Jean Phinney, Professor of Psychology, Cal
State U, Los Angeles Creator of the Multi-Group Ethnic Identity Measure
ÒIn Southern Fried Rice, John Jung offers an
intriguing and unique perspective on American immigration. Based on his
experience as a child in the only Chinese family in Macon, Georgia in the
mid-20th century, JungÕs story is a fascinating account of the negotiation of
personal and ethnic identity in a foreign environment. His narrative highlights
many of the features of the larger society, including both government policy
and situational practice, that shape the lives of immigrants, both then and
now.Ó
Kay
Deaux, Distinguished Professor, Psychology, City University of New York
Graduate Center Author, ÒTo be An
ImmigrantÓ
A charming and engrossing self-ethnography. More importantly, John JungÕs book
enhances the archive on Asians in the South as well as our understanding of how
Jim Crow situated the Chinese between ÒwhiteÓ and Òcolored.Ó
Leslie Bow, English and Asian American Studies (Director) University of
Wisconsin
Author "Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion:
Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women's LiteratureÓ

Readers Love Southern Fried Rice
From Coast To Coast AndÉ Even Down Under,
Your book is a joy to read. It has a
beautiful flow to it and an enriching quality that is easier to feel than it is
to describe. Couched in humor, it deals with the painful and serious matter of
day-to-day struggles of existence of a couple who came here with hardly
anything more than faith in their hearts and steel in their spines.
Krishan
Saxena, Kensington, California
Your book is the one that I had promised
myself that I would write one day, but you went ahead and wrote it. You did a
wonderful job!
Henry
Tom, Frederick, Maryland
Thank you for telling your story in such an
engaging manner. While your story
is personal it is also universal because of its working class foundation laced with
layers of Chinese ethnicity, family structure and dynamics, and the specificity
of the South.
Flo
Oy Wong, Artist, Sunnyvale, California
Enjoyed very much reading your family
history revealing a unique experience yet sharing many of the same problems of
families in Chinese laundries. Yours is one of the few written accounts of the
many family-run laundries in the U. S. Thank you for the careful documentation
of this history, which would be otherwise forgotten.
Tunney Lee, Boston, Massachusetts
"Southern Fried Rice" is a
well-written and factually documented memoir that gave me insight into the
lives of Chinese in the South, especially those living where there were no
other Chinese, as you did in Macon. Your move to San Francisco must have been
as much of a cultural shock for you as it was for me, an African American
moving to the Bay Area from Memphis.
Leatha Ruppert, Cotati, California
"Riveting - couldn't put the book down
until it was finished - it mirrored many of my own childhood experiences
growing up in New Zealand in the 50s. The Chinese immigrant experience must
have been the same the world over."
Helen
Wong, Auckland, New Zealand
A ÔWEB JOURNALÕ About the Origins of the Book and Audience
reception at Book Talks/signings
Title: Southern fried rice: life in a Chinese laundry in the Deep
South /
Author(s): Jung, John, 1937-
Publication: [California] : Yin & Yang Press,
Year: 2005
Description: xii, 221 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.
Language: English
Standard No: LCCN: 2005-905657
Accession No: OCLC: 61656477
Database: WorldCat
===============================================================================================
Available Spring 2007, Yin & Yang
Press:
Chinese Laundries: Tickets To
Survival on Gold Mountain
A Social History of Chinese Laundries All Over the U.S. and
Canada that examines the origins and development of the Chinese laundry as a
major factor on the economic, psychological, and sociological status of Chinese
immigrants from 1850s to 1950s.
