Praise for “Southern Fried Rice”

“… 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, Assoc. Prof. 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 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, Mary Washington University, Author, Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s-1920s.

”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

“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, Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, UCLA Author, Rousing Minds to Life, Teaching, learning, and schooling in social context

"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

“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

“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

“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,: An Intellectual History

“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

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, Author "Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women's Literature” English and Asian American Studies (Director) University of Wisconsin

I think SOUTHERN FRIED RICE is fascinating and very revealing. You have a fine talent as a storyteller.

Greg Robinson, Associate Professor of History, Université du Québec À Montréal