The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America - Expanded paperback Edition
By Mae M. Ngai
3/5
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About this ebook
The Lucky Ones uncovers the story of the Tape family in post-gold rush, racially explosive San Francisco. Mae Ngai paints a fascinating picture of how the role of immigration broker allowed patriarch Jeu Dip (Joseph Tape) to both protest and profit from discrimination, and of the Tapes as the first of a new social type--middle-class Chinese Americans.
Tape family history illuminates American history. Seven-year-old Mamie attempts to integrate California schools, resulting in the landmark 1885 case Tape v. Hurley. The family's intimate involvement in the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair reveals how Chinese American brokers essentially invented Chinatown, and so Chinese culture, for American audiences. Finally, The Lucky Ones reveals aspects--timely, haunting, and hopeful--of the lasting legacy of the immigrant experience for all Americans.
This expanded edition features a new preface and a selection of historical documents from the Chinese exclusion era that forms the backdrop to the Tape family's story.
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Reviews for The Lucky Ones
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- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Lucky Ones is essentially a historical account of the Chinese Americans in California. The book features one family in particular, the Tapes of Russell Street in San Francisco who were among the first middle class Chinese American families in that area. If you are not familiar with the history of California, Chinese labours came to this state firstly during the gold rush in the 1840’s as a cheap, abundant source of labour. However when the gold rush era panned out, large numbers began to come into the state around the 1860’s to work on the transcontinental railroad. The fact that their labour was cheap angered the Occidental population and led to discriminatory laws against the Chinese well into the turn of the twentieth century. It is under this climate that the Tapes, Joseph and Mary lived in California.Ngai has done a great job telling the story of this family. It is not so much analysis as it is a narration of the family's life, their battle against segregation in education and how they retained or in some instances assimilated there culture with that of America. The author used mostly family photos and official documentation to reconstruct their lives, the former can be found throughout the book.At 304 pages, this book is not a light read and may be mostly suited to history buffs like myself yet the content of the book gives you a story not just about this family but about Chinese (and Japanese) Americans during the late eighteenth and nineteenth century and more importantly the development and growth of one of the most populated states in America, California.