Yin & Yang Press

“When You Drink Water, Remember the Source”

Southern Fried Rice: Life in A Chinese Laundry in the Deep South, 2005

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 immigrants’ struggle to raise children who often reject or question the values and customs of the parents’ homeland as they become ‘Americanized,’ 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.

“Southern Fried Rice” is searchable at: http://books.google.com Available online: www.lulu.com/content/142027

Scholarly Praise for Southern Fried Rice

“Southern Fried Rice tells the overlooked history of Chinese Americans in the Deep South through the author’s account of his family’s 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.”

Krystyn Moon, Asst. Prof. of History, Georgia State University

Author, “Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s-1920s”

“… a humane and personal reflection … 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. … 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.”

Henry Yu, Associate Professor of History, UCLA and University of British Columbia

Author, “Thinking Orientals, Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America”

“…Being 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. …Quan Shee, the author’s mother, was truly a woman warrior...”

Sylvia Sun Minnick Author, “Samfow, The San Joaquin Chinese Experience”

“Southern 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.”

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,” Asian American Mental Health: Assessment Theories and Methods”

“This narrative, woven with genuine scholarship about the lives of Chinese immigrants, is a masterful bit of storytelling. It is an admirable and valuable contribution.”

Ronald Gallimore, Professor, Department of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences, UCLA Author, “Rousing Minds to Life, Teaching, learning,and schooling in social context”

“Rich 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.”

Barbara Kim, Asst. Prof. Asian American Studies, Cal State University, Long Beach

“Southern Fried Rice demonstrates the fluidity of regional and national identity and is both a construction and deconstruction of "Chinese-ness.”…These 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" … 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.”

Stephanie Y. Evans, Assistant Professor, African American Studies and Women's Studies, University of Florida Author,”Black Women in The Ivory Tower, 1850-1954: An Intellectual History”

“This 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.”

Jean Phinney, Professor of Psychology, Cal State U, Los Angeles Creator of the Multi-Group Ethnic Identity Measure

“In 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, Jung’s 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.”

Kay Deaux, Distinguished Professor, Psychology, City University of New York Graduate Center Author, “To be An Immigrant”

A charming and engrossing self-ethnography. More importantly, John Jung’s book enhances the archive on Asians in the South as well as our understanding of how Jim Crow situated the Chinese between “white” and “colored.”

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 Literature”

Coast To Coast and, even Down Under … Readers Love Southern Fried Rice

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 ‘WEB JOURNAL’ About the Origins of the Book and Audience reception at Book Talks/signings

---

Chinese Laundries: Tickets To Survival on Gold Mountain

A

social history of Chinese laundries in the U.S. and Canada that examines their origins and development as a major factor on the economic, psychological, and sociological status of Chinese immigrants from 1850s to 1950s. Yin & Yang Press, 2007.

Scholars Praise for "CHINESE LAUNDRIES”

---

"

…important window into the history of the early Chinese immigrants. . . The laundrymen faced struggles, challenges, and even disappointments; yet, the Chinese laundry became a valued and necessary enterprise …

Sylvia Sun Minnick, SamFow: The San Joaquin Chinese Legacy and Stockton's Chinese Community

… a significant contribution to the history of Chinese laundries … best told by someone like Jung who experienced a ‘laundry life,’ and understands its psychological impact on the Chinese laundrymen and their families. . .

Murray K. Lee, Curator of Chinese American History, San Diego Chinese Historical Museum

… rewarding study of an era marked by invention born of dire necessity, an unforgiving host society that demanded Chinese laundrymen’s services but then punished them for being too good at it, … a long overdue analysis of a familiar experience hidden in plain sight.

Mel Brown, Chinese Heart of Texas, The San Antonio Chinese Community, 1875-1975.

… a welcome contribution to Chinese American studies that depicts the plight of early generations of Chinese caught in the predicament of operating laundries to provide for their families, ... while enduring extreme hardship and loneliness ... inclusion of historic documents, photographs, newspaper article excerpts, and revealing personal stories and insider observations from a few of the many who, like the author, grew up and worked in their family laundries. The subject deserves attention and further exploration in view of the significant impact that the laundry had not only on the Chinese American experience, but also in the social and cultural histories of the U.S. and Canada

Joan S. Wang, Race, Gender, and Laundry Work: The Roles of Chinese Laundrymen and American Women in the United States, 1850–1950, Journal of American Ethnic History

… a remarkable book...a comprehensive historical study of the Chinese laundries in the United States, a profound analysis of the psychological experiences of the Chinese laundrymen in America and their families in China; and above all, written by someone who has intimate experiences with the Chinese laundry, it is a tribute to those Chinese immigrants whose labor and sacrifice laid the foundation of the Chinese American community, and a testimony of the Chinese laundrymen’s resilience, resourcefulness, and humanity.

Renqiu Yu, To Save China, To Save Ourselves, The Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance of New York.

From the Foreword:

What is remarkable is the combination of this historical perspective with his social psychological descriptions and analyses of laundrymen and their descendants. The personal life stories, with their inner thought, feeling, values, attitudes, work experiences and survival hardships, are skillfully presented with penetrating insights and observations. These perspectives present an overall picture of the history and the life and work of the laundrymen.

Ban Seng Hoe, Curator of Asian Studies, Canadian Museum of Civilization

---

Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton:

Lives of Mississippi Delta Chinese Grocers

The story of how a few Chinese immigrants found their way to the Mississippi River Delta in the late 1870s and earned their living with small family operated grocery stores in neighborhoods where mostly black cotton plantation workers lived. What was their status in the segregated black and white world of that time and place? How did this small group preserve their culture and ethnic identity? "Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton" is a social history of the lives of these pioneering families and the unique and valuable role they played in their communities for over a century.

Scholars Praise for Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton

---

John Jung’s third book about relatively undocumented aspects of Chinese American history is a solid, well-researched, and engagingly written study of the Chinese grocery stores in the Mississippi River Delta from their post-Civil War Reconstruction era beginnings to the present. Jung deftly demonstrates how these sojourners from the Guangdong province found their niche in a unique and challengingly complex social setting, rigidly stratified by race. They not only ‘survived,’ but overcame racism to prosper and eventually become valued members of their communities. After a thorough historical background that provides a framework needed to fully portray their difficult circumstances, the author examines both the sociological and psychological aspects of daily life for Chinese American grocery store families. As a Chinese American who grew up in the Deep South himself, John Jung has a degree of empathy that imbues Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton with an insight both in depth and breadth that is totally requisite for a study of this nature.

Mel Brown, Chinese Heart of Texas, The San Antonio Community, 1875-1975; Editor, TexAsia, San Antonio’s Asian Communities, 1978-2008.

In "Chopsticks in The Land of Cotton," John Jung has done it again! Plunging into the history of Chinese grocers in the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta, he traces their migration history, work, families, and social lives. His work is anchored in a creative mix of oral history, community historical documents and public records, and includes a generous fill of photos. As a study of the complexities of triangular race relations in the Jim Crow South, his work rivals James Loewen's classic study, The Mississippi Chinese.

Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Harvard University Press, 2001); Mine Okubo: Following Her Own Road (University of Washington Press, 2008)

“Chopsticks” tells the story of yet one more example of Chinese tenacity in which John Jung traces the paths of pioneer Chinese immigrants in Mississippi as they moved from laborers to become successful grocery store merchants for decades with family members and relatives serving as the backbone. “Chopsticks” pays tribute to the resilience and “can-do” attitude of these enterprising entrepreneurs.

Sylvia Sun Minnick, Sam Fow,The San Joaquin Chinese Legacy

Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton explores aspects of Chinese settlement in the Mississippi Delta that earlier writings on the subject do not address in detail. Jung analyzes why grocery stores emerged as virtually the only occupation for Chinese in that area instead of farming and hand laundries. He examines the extensive kinship networking that brought male relatives and later whole families to this unlikely region for Chinese settlement. Jung’s impressive book can be enjoyed by ordinary readers for its captivating stories and by scholars for its thorough research and analysis of sources.

Daniel Bronstein, The Formation and Development of Chinese Communities in Atlanta, Augusta, And Savannah, Georgia: From Sojourners To Settlers, 1880-1965

John Jung provides meticulous detail on a subject worth much greater examination: the Chinese grocery stores of the South. These grocery stores were the center of Chinese American family and commercial life in the South, including Texas and the Southwest, for at least half of the twentieth century. Jung illuminates every aspect of these grocery stores, which were as important to black neighborhoods as they were to the Chinese American families who ran them. Especially of interest is Jung’s exploration of the relationships between Chinese Americans and African Americans, a topic distorted by the iconic images of more recent inter-ethnic conflicts. Chopsticks is a valuable contribution to Asian American history.

Irwin Tang, Co-Author and Editor Asian Texans: Our Histories and Our Lives