Southern Fried Rice: Life in a Chinese Laundry in the Deep South

By John Jung

This memoir conveys the experiences, first of my parents and subsequently of our family, the only Chinese people living in Macon, Georgia between 1928 and 1956. It describes our family's isolated existence running a laundry, enduring loneliness as well as racial prejudice for over 20 years, explains why and how we moved across the continent to live in San Francisco to be near a Chinese community, and relates how each family member adjusted to the challenges and opportunities of their new lives. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Yin and Yang Press
• Release date: Apr 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386157106

John Jung

 John Jung is a retired psychology professor whose memoir, Southern Fried Rice: Life in A Chinese Laundry in the Deep South described the lives of his immigrant parents and his siblings, the sole Chinese family in Macon, Georgia, where they operated a laundry from the 1920s to 1950s during the pre-civil rights era . Three additional books explore how Chinese immigrants from the late 1800s through the middle of the 20th century overcame harsh societal prejudices and laws against them to succeed in running family businesses such as laundries, grocery stores and restaurants.The goal of these books is to inspire, educate, and preserve the history of the many contributions of the Chinese to American society. His latest book, A Chinese American Odyssey: How a Retired Psychologist Makes a Hit as an Historian, describes the process and experience of a decade of research, writing, and speaking about Chinese American history.

Book preview

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 Assistant Professor of History, Mary Washington University

A humane and personal reflection on life as a young Chinese American growing up in Macon, Georgia, when Jim Crow segregation still ruled. This memoir has 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. It provides a sense of what it was to be like to grow up an outsider in a rigid racial system that could not find a place for those who contradicted its premises and offers us a rare glimpse at the fairly common experience of those 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, University of British Columbia

"... 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 of African American Studies and Women’s Studies, University of Florida

Rich with historical details of immigration...engaging memoir a bout growing up Chinese in the segregated South... insightful observation about the resilience of Asian American families... Barbara Kim, Professor, Asian American Studies, California State University, Long Beach

... fascinating and insightful account of Chinese-American family life in the context of  restraints on immigration and the U. S. racial and economic systems... charming and informative ...

Paul Rosenblatt, Professor of Psychology, University of Minnesota 

This narrative, woven with genuine scholarship, is a masterful bit of storytelling. It is an admirable and valuable contribution.

Ronald Gallimore, Distinguished Professor, Psychology, UCLA 

The unique experiences and struggles of his family members serve both to confirm some principles from social science research on Chinese in America t...engaging, candid, and often humorous and heartwarming...an important contribution not only to the fields of psychology, sociology, and history but also to literature...immensely fascinating and satisfying.

Stanley Sue Distinguished Professor, Psychology and Asian American Studies, University of California, Davis

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, University of Wisconsin

"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, a fascinating account of the negotiation of personal and ethnic identity in a foreign environment highlighting many 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

... a unique view of ethnic identity development... it provides fascinating insights about what it means to be Chinese when there is no Chinese community, or even 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, California State University, Los Angeles

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, Mass.

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, MD.

Some Reader Comments

✓This is a very enjoyable book about Chinese immigrant culture. The whole family went through all the difficulties, struggles and isolation, but still managed to pursue their American Dream." As a Chinese immigrant, I find a lot of feelings shared in this book and I feel more confident and comfortable after knowing the early Chinese immigrant history. Life is hard to immigrants, but your future is in your own hands.

✓this story of Chinese Americans in the deep south in contrast to my own experiences living in Seattle. There are a lot of similarities but certainly different. This book is scholarly with many sources cited.

✓This book is definitely a must read! It examines the struggles of being an immigrant in the United States and how Americanization places a struggle on culture and identity.

✓Most books on Chinese Americans focus on the big Chinese ethnic enclaves—San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York. We rarely read about isolated Chinese in other areas of the country. John Jung provides us with a precious first-person account of his family's experience in Macon, Georgia. Southern Fried Rice is both a memoir and a valuable source on the history of the first Chinese immigrants to America and the families they raised during the first half of the twentieth century. This book explores issues of ethnicity, inter-generational conflicts among Chinese immigrants, and racism in America. Southern Fried Rice is a rare gem. I look forward to reading his other books on Chinese Americans!

✓Being born in Macon, GA and a lifelong resident of central Georgia, I enjoy reading histories of the region and particularly well written memoirs. John Jung's memoir is that and more. In telling his straightforward story, he reveals so much of his Chinese roots in his words as well as how he describes his parents approach to life.

✓As the son of a paper son and also the son of a laundryman I can really relate to his experiences growing up and adjusting to living in two different cultures. Although I did not grow up in the South, our experiences in San Francisco have many parallels. Both our parents were in the laundry business. We even attended the same high school, junior college, and university. It is the great story of immigration and the American dream. Both my parents were really peasants from southern China who came to America seeking a better life. My father entered the country illegally as a paper son as did Professor Jung's father. He was fortunate that his mother was able to come to the U.S. to join her husband in Macon, Georgia. Because of the immigration laws my mother waited almost 15 years to rejoin her husband. Yet despite great prejudice and within one generation most of the kids acquired college educations and became professionals. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the Chinese American experience.

✓I've always been curious about immigrant struggles in America, and this book allowed the reader a glimpse into the world of a business venture of the Chinese laundry. The Chinese in this book are portrayed as hard working individuals, who struggle with different obstacles, such as racism, coercion, and isolation from other Chinese. This book proves to the reader with hard work, and commitment, as well as determination one’s dream is possible.

Southern Fried Rice

Life in a Chinese Laundry

in the Deep South

John Jung

Yin & Yang Press

Copyright © 2005, 2016. John Jung

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

LCCN: 2005-905657

ISBN: 1466218924; 9781466218925

JUNG, JOHN, 1937-

Southern Fried Rice: Life in a Chinese Laundry in the Deep South

/John Jung

xviii, 244 p. ill. 23 cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Chinese Americans—Georgia—Macon—Biography.

2. Chinese Americans—California—San Francisco—Biography.

3. Laundry workers—Georgia—Macon—Biography.

4. Laundry workers—California—San Francisco—Biography.

5. Immigrants—Georgia—Macon—Biography.

6. Jung, John, 1937-—Childhood and youth.

7. Jung, John, 1937- -

8. Family. Jung family.

I. Title

F294.M2 2005 dc21 975.8/042092; B

Cover Design by Solveig Bang

Yin & Yang Press

Dedicated to

CHINESE IMMIGRANT WOMEN of the Deep South,

Enduring years of cultural isolation, racism,  and poverty,

Raising their children to overcome  all obstacles

Foreword

SIXTY YEARS AGO SOCIOLOGIST Paul Siu conducted the first study of Chinese laundrymen in Chicago. His dissertation, completed in 1957, was finally published as The Chinese Laundryman: A Study of Social Isolation, by New York University Press in 1987. In the editor’s introduction, John Kuo Wei Tchen remarked on why it had taken so amazingly long for someone to investigate what had been the predominant occupation and stereotype of Chinese in America since the 1870s. The establishment of social history, Ethnic Studies, and Asian American Studies as legitimate fields of study in academia as well as the recognition of publishers that there was a growing market for ethnic titles had made a difference. Surprisingly, it has taken another twenty-five years before psychology professor John Jung would come along to write the first book about family life in a Chinese laundry in the Deep South, where Chinese laundries had thrived for decades.

Like Paul Siu, John Jung is the son of a Chinese laundryman, and he has based much of his book, Southern Fried Rice: Life in a Chinese Laundry in the Deep South, on archival research, family history, and personal experience. On a macro level, this book pays tribute to the indispensable role that the Chinese laundry played in Chinese immigration history. His own family’s immigration story—twenty of his great-great-grandfather’s male descendants operated laundries in Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee from 1915 until the 1960s—helps us to understand how Chinese immigration to the proverbial Gold Mountain continued despite the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and why so many Chinese men from the Sze Yup (Four Districts) of Guangdong Province would end up operating laundries all over the United States. For them, Jung writes, gold was not in the hills of California, but in the dirty clothes of its residents.  On a micro level, John Jung’s descriptions of the poor living conditions above their laundry, the endless toil involved in laundry work, and the cultural isolation that his parents suffered as the only Chinese family in town, all provide insights into the immigrant family economy and psyche. John’s empathy for his mother’s hard life—coming to Macon, Georgia, as a young bride from a small village in China and having to bear the burdens of alienation, raising four children, doing all the cooking and housework, and assisting with the laundry work—is especially profound. As John comes to realize in his adult years, his parents set the example for sacrifice, courage, discipline, and perseverance, values that enabled John and his siblings to later succeed and prosper in America.

Southern Fried Rice is also a study of the assimilation process for second-generation Chinese Americans who grew up in the Deep South during a time of racial strife and Jim Crow segregation. As young John strived to become Americanized and to fit in, he felt only shame and resentment toward his parents and their foreign ways. As Chinese, and the only ones in town, we were neither ‘fish’ nor ‘fowl,’ he wrote. We were just different from everyone else and we learned to live with that fact. That meant straddling the middle in the racial hierarchy—above the blacks but below the whites. He could drink from the white water fountains, go to white schools and white theaters, have white or black friends, but he knew he should marry his own kind and learn to tolerate white rudeness. Racial taunting, media stereotypes like the pigtailed no tickee, no shirtee laundryman, and the overall mistreatment of Chinese immigrants made John wish he had not been born Chinese. If we had to be Chinese, why were we the only Chinese in town? he asked. It seemed so unfair. Not even the positive attention given to the family—when Madame Chiang Kai-shek (Soong Mei-ling), the First Lady of China, came to Macon in 1943 to receive an honorary doctorate at Wesleyan College—could make up for his feelings of racial inferiority and difference.

Then, in 1952, as the children reached adolescence, John’s mother convinced her husband to move to San Francisco so that their children could find Chinese mates and be immersed in Chinese culture and hopefully, find Chinese spouses. Finally, John got his wish—they were no longer the only Chinese family in town. His parents bought a six-room flat with a laundromat downstairs that they could run in a desirable neighborhood. But while his parents had no trouble resettling in a city with a large Chinese community that met all their cultural and social needs, John had a difficult time adjusting to life in San Francisco and identifying with his Chinese American peers in high school. Coming from Georgia, where we were neither white nor black, we were a different breed of Chinese, he wrote. He was just not Chinese enough to fit in. Yet when he moved away from San Francisco to attend graduate school in the Midwest, and later teach psychology at the California State University in Long Beach, where there were few Chinese for many years, he again felt ethnically isolated. In the last analysis, despite his mother’s urging to marry Chinese, John chose to marry a white Jewish woman at the age of thirty-one. He had finally come to terms with his ethnic identity. By placing less emphasis on his Chinese identity, he was able to expand his field of eligible mates and find his soul mate. In contrast, two of his sisters, who had no trouble fitting into Chinese American life in San Francisco, chose to marry Chinese men.

Like Paul Siu’s study, Southern Fried Rice provides us with an insider’s perspective of the Chinese laundry as an immigrant economy and the laundryman as a sojourner. For indeed, his immigrant parents, too busy with laundry work in Macon, Georgia, never assimilated into American life and culture. But, in addition, John Jung’s book looks at the contributions of family members to the economic success of the laundry and at the assimilation process for the children of laundrymen in the Deep South, as compared to a city with a sizeable Chinese population. As such, Southern Fried Rice makes an important contribution to our understanding of Chinese immigration, race relations, women’s studies, labor history, and cultural identity.

Judy Yung, Professor Emerita

University of California, Santa Cruz

September 2012

Foreword

JOHN JUNG’S DELIGHTFUL book opens a window to provide a glimpse into the lives of one family born to Chinese immigrant parents in a small town in the South in the 1930s and 1940s. Being the only Chinese in town in a segregated society, 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 before the family moved to San Francisco to live within a Chinese community. Through it all, the family remained steadfast in its cultural traits and folkways. The author sees his upbringing, and that of his siblings, as the challenging task of accommodating two worlds and, being more Chinese than not.

Quan Shee, or Grace, the author’s mother, was truly a woman warrior. She raised her children, worked in the family business and perhaps later came to understand the world of finance far better than her husband, all the while drawing on her own creativity and resources. It may have been many years that she was a lone Chinese woman in town but she was never deterred from her vision of the betterment of her family and herself. Bravo!

Sylvia Sun Minnick

SAMFOW, The San Joaquin Chinese Experience

October 2005

Preface

SOUTHERN FRIED RICE tells a personal story that calls attention to an overlooked aspect of the history of the Chinese in America. Unlike most immigrants from Guangdong villages who lived and worked in communities along the Pacific coast from the late 1800s to the middle of the twentieth century, a handful settled in the Deep South. This account of the experiences of one such family offers a glimpse of what life was like for Chinese immigrant families in the South, unable to enjoy connections and cultural practices with other Chinese, while at the same time, being victimized by the staunch racial prejudice of the region.

What was it like to be entirely isolated culturally? We were the only Chinese in the entire city of Macon, Georgia, where we lived above our laundry between 1928 and 1952. During those years racial segregation and Jim Crow were firmly entrenched and entirely legal in the Deep South. My three siblings and I, all born in Macon, were always acutely aware of racial discrimination, and expected to experience it ourselves because, as our parents carefully taught us, we were Chinese but everyone else was either black or white. We were occasional objects of ridicule and curiosity, taunted, rather than threatened. These reactions from the community, combined with our ethnic isolation, often made us children ambivalent about being Chinese. In due time, the lack of contact with a Chinese community forced our parents, and other immigrants with children approaching adulthood, to face the difficult choice between staying in the South or moving to places that had a Chinese community. My parents chose to move across the country to San Francisco because they wished us to meet other Chinese people, acquire Chinese values, learn Chinese traditions, and eventually marry other Chinese.

What was it like for a Chinese family, long accustomed to living without contact with its culture, to move to a community with a large Chinese population? Our nearly overnight shift from cultural isolation to cultural immersion held many new challenges. Now living in the midst of the Chinese community in San Francisco, we children were curious and eager to learn about Chinese culture and its traditions. Of course, we wanted to be accepted by other Chinese but this was not easy for we first had to learn a different way of being Chinese. We did not escape racial divisions by moving to San Francisco. As in the South, white prejudices treated Chinese as inferior. Oddly, we may have faced less discrimination in Macon, because being the only Chinese there we were not considered a threat. I also discovered, to my surprise, that Chinese sometimes chose to isolate themselves.

At first, I assumed that this tendency stemmed from their acceptance of white superiority but at other times it seemed that Chinese believed they were the superior ones. This self-imposed segregation was a new and uncomfortable experience about which I had mixed feelings.

My parents’ ability to speak and read Chinese eased their transition, but they too had to adjust, as it had been many years since they had