A Chinese American View

 Preface

 What led to my most improbable transition after retiring from a 40-year academic career as a professor of psychology to a new career in which I have written and self-published four books so far on the Chinese American experience, that has led to over 60 book talks across the United States. I will examine some of the factors that led to this adventure which I have found rewarding not only to myself, but to many of my readers and audiences.
Finding History Matters describes the chronology and the significant experiences of my excursion into uncharted and unanticipated terrain, one that included many fortuitous breaks, mentoring from contacts, creation of new networks, inspired actions, calculated risks, occasional disappointments and doubts, encouragement from friends, and plenty of old-fashioned hard work and persistence.
  My four previous books on Chinese American history covered family run businesses that were the economic toehold for these immigrants, laundries, restaurants, and grocery stores.  In these books, I focused on the experiences of Chinese immigrants and their families as they overcame racial prejudice and overwhelming hardships to survive in an unfamiliar country.

       The present book is quite different in its purpose.  In Finding History Matters, I will not repeat the content of my earlier books except in passing and instead focus on the creative process of research and writing, the self-publishing process, and the tasks of self-promotion and marketing.
Finding History Matters is a personal account, and it is not offered as a “How To” guide. Rather it describes the ups and downs of planned and unplanned experiences that unfolded as my new career in studying and promoting Chinese American history progressed.
 I hope that in reporting my experiences, many which were totally unanticipated, on this journey, others contemplating the undertaking of writing and publishing their own experiences will find instructive, encouraging, and sometimes entertaining, material. Many of the lessons I learned should be of value to aspiring nonfiction writers on many other topics who are wondering what lies ahead for them when they write about their own adventures.
JJ
Cypress, July 2013









Table of Contents

Foreword 5
Preface i
1 The Journey Begins 1
 2 Southern Fried Rice 8
 3 Chinese Laundries 33
4 Chopsticks In The Land of Cotton 38
 5 Sweet and Sour 59
  77
6 One Thing Leads to Another 77
 7 People, Places, and Events 110
 8 Chance Happenings 128
 9 Promoting Books 155
 10 Kudos 188
11 Some Lessons Learned 194
12 Macon Revisited 207
 13 Some Closing Thoughts 214
 Bibliography 225
Index 226





List of Figures
Figure 1 Xiaolan Bao, Colleague and Mentor 5
Figure 2 Lanier Hotel and Sam Lee Laundry, Mulberry Street, Macon, Ga. 1906. Courtesy, Georgia Archives. 11
Figure 3  Sam Lee Laundry site as a parking garage in 2010. 4
Figure 4 Web page for Southern Fried Rice 12
Figure 5  Chinese Historical Society of America, San Francisco 15
Figure 6 Scenes from Talk to NAAAP, Atlanta, 2006. 17
Figure 7 Omni Hotel Gala with some NAAAP-Atlanta members. 22
Figure 8 Interview on Southern Fried Rice on Bay Area People 24
Figure 9 Answering questions from hostess Rosy Chu Error! Bookmark not defined.
Figure 10 Signing books after MOCA New York talk. 26
Figure 11 Scenes from the Georgia Literary Festival in Macon, 2006 78
Figure 12  Cover of Chinese Laundries book by Lauren Doege 34
Figure 13 Chinese Laundry Kids event at Foo’s Ho Ho, Vancouver 37
Figure 14 Altheimer, AR Chinese grocery store 43
Figure 15 Fried Quon and John Jung, in Memphis, 2011 49
Figure 16 52
Figure 17 Website I Create for Mississippi Delta Chinese 53
Figure 18 Teaching 5th Graders About What Their Textbooks Left Out About Chinese in America 55
Figure 19 Statue of Liberty 57
Figure 20 Cerritos Library 63
Figure 21 81
Figure 22 84
Figure 23 85
Figure 24 Atlanta Emory University 87
Figure 25 91
Figure 26 93
Figure 27 95
Figure 28 96
Figure 29 98
Figure 30 Error! Bookmark not defined.
Figure 31 100
Figure 32 101
Figure 33 102
Figure 34 104
Figure 35 106
Figure 36 Rosemead 109
Figure 37  Clothesline Muse 109
Figure 38 123
Figure 39 124
Figure 40 126
Figure 41 158
Figure 42 160
Figure 43 162
Figure 44 162
Figure 45 164
Figure 46 165
Figure 47 166
Figure 48 167
Figure 49 168
Figure 50 169
Figure 51 171
Figure 52 171
Figure 53 176
Figure 54 177
Figure 55 178
Figure 56 179
Figure 57 181
Figure 58 181
Figure 59 182
Figure 60 183
Figure 61 184
Figure 62 185
Figure 63 186
Figure 64 187
Figure 65 193
Figure 66 197
Figure 67 209
Figure 68  Did the Third Street Fountain and Pond Move? 211
Figure 69 212
Figure 70 213
Figure 71 223















1 The Journey Begins

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.     Lao-tzu (604 BC - 531 BC)

To say that my life after retiring from a career as a professor of psychology for 40 years has been a surprise for me, and everyone who knows me, is an understatement. I had not seriously considered researching and writing about Chinese American history until I began my graduated retirement from university teaching in 2002. My new venture was especially unexpected because my personal identification as a Chinese American was not pronounced, partly because my contact with Chinese people had been minimal during most of my life, especially in my youth. Our family was the only Chinese one in the entire city of Macon, Georgia where my immigrant parents from China came in the 1920s to earn a living running a laundry until the early 1950s.
My initial goal was relatively modest. I wanted to document the experiences of our family living in Macon, Georgia, as the only Chinese in town.  Still, I had doubts as to whether I could write an interesting account and whether the story would have sufficient interest to others.
Visit To Macon in 2004
         When my family moved from my hometown of Macon, Georgia, to San Francisco in 1952, I did not know if I would ever return. A primary reason for our family move was that we were the solitary Chinese in town, and my parents felt it was an opportune time for us to live with other Chinese as my two older sisters were approaching marriageable age.  As I had never lived anywhere else, I did feel a sense of loss at the time, but after moving to San Francisco, I was so wrapped up in adjusting to such a different place that I didn't think much about Macon.  I had good friends to pal around with at school, but after school, I had virtually no age mate companions or friends. Furthermore, the great distance of about 3000 miles between Macon and San Francisco also made it unlikely that I would ever return.
However, about 50 years later I had the chance to take my wife, Phyllis, to see my hometown in 2004 when we planned a visit to North Carolina to visit two close friends at Duke University and to Atlanta to visit relatives.
Since I had not been in touch with any classmates in Macon for several decades, I didn’t plan to try to see any of them. At the last minute, I decided to try to contact my best friend from grammar school, Richard Harris.  Fortunately, he was still living in Macon and available to meet us for lunch. Richard also invited one of our junior high school classmates, Carey Pickard.  Carey, and his wife Beverly, insisted that we stay overnight at their home so they could show us around town the next day.



 Figure 1 Sam Lee Laundry, Mulberry St. Courtesy Middle Georgia Archives
After lunch, I took Phyllis to downtown Macon to the site where our laundry once stood. To my surprise, the building has since been leveled, and the site was paved over to serve as a parking lot. Not that our building was so wonderful, still it had been our business and residence, so I felt a sense of loss.  I believe that moment made me resolve to write my memoir because otherwise there would be no record or trace that my family had existed in Macon!  I
By the time I made another visit to Macon in 2006, a parking structure replaced the open parking lot and most of that side of the 500 block of Mulberry Street and the rest of the block was also gone, and in its place a tall office building.

Figure 2 Sam Lee Laundry site as a parking garage in 2006.

Touring the 'historic' or old parts of downtown was interesting.  After 50 years or so since I lived there, some structures like the courthouse, post office, city hall were the same more or less, whereas the movie theatres were mostly gone, department stores boarded up, etc. as the suburbanization trend that destroyed central parts of cities all over the country did not spare Macon.  It was my 'Rip Van Winkle' moment, one spanning much more than his 20-year slumber.
Carey and Beverly gave us the grand tour of the city, pointing out many historic buildings and giving details that I never was aware of when I was growing up.  I had no way of foreseeing it, but I would make yet two other visits to Macon in ensuing years in connection with my writing.
The result was Southern Fried Rice: Life in A Chinese Laundry in the Deep South.  Then, quite unexpectedly, I found myself writing several other books about the Chinese experience in America.
From 2005 to 2010 my research on Chinese American history led to self-publication of four books about Chinese family-run businesses under my imprimitur, Yin & Yang Press. I have continued to research these topics and post interesting discoveries about these businesses on several blogs.
In the process, I have had a continuing flow of highly unlikely and fascinating experiences and discoveries related to my study and research of the history of the Chinese experience in America. In this 'journal' I will describe some of the most significant events, people, and experiences associated with my 'retirement career' as a public historian.
Mentor and Friend, Historian Xiaolan Bao    
     
Figure 3 Xiaolan Bao, Colleague, Mentor, and Author.

 
I didn't realize it at the time, but before I wrote a single word about growing up in the South, the late Xiaolan Bao, my friend and a professor of history at California State University, Long Beach, was encouraging me by persuading me that my story was an important one to document and share. She hoped that she might herself do some research on Chinese in the South and wanted me to be a resource for helping her locate contacts.
As an expression of friendship, when it was published, she gave me an autographed copy of her scholarly masterpiece, Holding Up More than Half The Sky: Chinese Women Garment Workers in New York City, 1948-92.
In 2005, when I was feeling insecure about submitting a proposal to speak at a Chinese American history conference in San Francisco, she reassured me that I could do well.  Given such affirmation by an accomplished scholar, I was able to forge ahead and get my feet wet into Asian American studies, a move that I have never regretted. Unfortunately, Xiaolan died of cancer at a young age, and never got to see the finished book that she mentored.
Hello, Lulu, Print on Demand Pioneer
            The traditional way to publish a book involved a difficult road.  You had to find a publishing company, usually possible only with a literary agent who evaluated the market potential of your book. If the agent saw promise, he or she would try to market the book to a publisher.
Once a contract was offered, your manuscript would undergo extensive review and editing.  Next book design, layout, and format would be developed. Then the publisher would market or promote and distribute your book to bookstores, etc.
The entire process was daunting, and it might be well over a year between your completion of the manuscript and it being published as a book. The process was difficult and time-consuming, and the odds of success were low.
Then, around 2000, with the development of new computer technology, a new industry was born, variously known as publish on demand or self-publishing.  Authors no longer had to go the traditional route, but could, in varying degree take a Do it Yourself route, and publish a book within a few weeks or months at very minimal or almost no cost.
One major reason for the financial viability of this new approach was that copies were not printed until orders were received.  No longer would there be inventories of thousands of copies stored in garages or warehouses that might never be sold.
The print-on-demand leader, Lulu, was attractive to me the upfront financial costs were minimal, an important consideration since I really had no idea about how many copies I could sell.  All I needed to spend was time, effort, and incidental amounts for paper, toner, and postage.  I would create the book myself from start to finish. I would do the writing, editing, formatting, promoting, and selling myself.

 2 Southern Fried Rice


About 55 years after our family moved from Macon to San Francisco in stages, I embarked on the task of writing a memoir about our family's life in Macon, which after some false starts eventually came to life.  After much deliberation, "Southern Fried Rice" became its title.  It was a good choice, as any reference to “Southern Fried” seems to guarantee an association with the Deep South, while “fried rice” is strongly connected to Chinese American restaurant food.  A minor problem with the title, of course, is that we ran a laundry, not a restaurant, but so far only one person has quibbled about that flaw in the title.
Background of Chinese in Macon
        I had learned from my mother as I was growing up that before I was born, my parents had a second location that served as a drop off site for laundry that would actually be washed at their main location.  My mother would go there early each morning, dragging my two older sisters with her, to open the drop off site.
   


I began to wonder if there had been any Chinese living in Macon before my parents came there in the 1920s.  I contacted the Washington Memorial Library in Macon, where I had spent many happy hours during my childhood devouring its collection to enlarge my window on the world. The archivist, Chris Stokes, did a thorough search of City Directories and informed me, much to my surprise, that a handful of Chinese immigrants had lived in Macon and had operated laundries. In fact, our very own laundry at 533 Mulberry Street had operated as far back as 1885 by earlier Chinese immigrants according to the city directory.
  An interesting footnote to this connection with Chris Stokes is that when I met him in person several years later when I had the opportunity to speak about Southern Fried Rice in Macon, he showed me a junior high school yearbook that revealed that his father and I were both enrolled at the same school even though we did not know each other!
Macon Had Chinese Laundries As Early As 1888
Growing up in Macon's only Chinese laundry during the 1940s and 50s, the thought that there might have been Chinese laundries in Macon before my parents came to live there never entered my mind. All I knew as a child was that we were the only Chinese in town, and as far as I was concerned, we were the one and only such business there.    
         When I did the research for Southern Fried Rice, I discovered much to my surprise that not only did the Macon City Directory list a Chinese laundry as early as 1888, it bore the same name that our laundry had, Sam Lee Laundry, and was located at the same address as our laundry. It was not until later that I discovered that “Sam Lee Laundry” was one of the most common names for Chinese laundries across the country, a fact that I will discuss in more detail later.
The obvious conclusion was that in 1928 my parents acquired their laundry from another Chinese who had operated this laundry at this site. It was a plausible explanation that was obvious in hindsight. It would have been less likely for my parents to have just come to Macon as immigrants and opened a laundry on a site where none existed before than for them to have purchased an established laundry, perhaps from an older Chinese who was retiring.
This speculation acquired more credibility when I stumbled upon an archival 1906 postcard that contained a photograph of the 500 block of Mulberry Street that featured the Lanier Hotel, the largest hotel in the region at that time. Immediately to the right of the hotel, there was a clear image of the very building that held our laundry and living quarters above it as it appeared in 1906.  In all likelihood, it was the very building that housed the Sam Lee Laundry since 1886 and was the same one that my parents acquired in 1928 that would house our family business (and home above it) until the early 1950s. That was an exciting personal discovery!
     
Figure 4 Lanier Hotel and Sam Lee Laundry, Mulberry Street, Macon, Ga. 1906. Courtesy, Georgia Archives.
But at first glance, I first thought there was a mistake because it did not look like the hotel that I knew.  It turned out that the facade had changed as the balconies in front had been removed by the 1940s when I grew up reading comic books at the hotel newsstand. It was exciting to find this treasure, which showed a horse and buggy and a streetcar running down Mulberry Street.  But the biggest thrill was that on the right hand edge of the photo was the image of the building that our laundry occupied and above which we lived. Even though I had seen City Directory listings that our address had been occupied by a Chinese laundry prior to 1900, seeing this photograph of the street in 1906 with the laundry building there was more compelling evidence.




Creating A Web Page Paid Big Dividends
           
 Figure 5 Web page for Southern Fried Rice

Around 2005, web page companies had developed software that enabled individuals with little or no technical knowledge to create their own free websites. I didn't know anything about how to create a webpage, but enjoyed (?) tackling the task on a hit and miss method.  Fortunately, some sites were free and even though not high powered, they gave me an opportunity to post some of my thinking about our family's isolated existence in Macon, Georgia, where our Sam Lee Laundry was located in the heart of the business district.  Most of my posts were drafts, in essence, of topics that I would later incorporate into what would be a memoir entitled, Southern Fried Rice.
Two Strokes of Good Fortune in 2005
           My website was 'discovered' by two people interested in the history of Chinese in Georgia.  One was the preeminent scholar on the history of Chinese American women, Professor Emerita Judy Yung and the other was someone at the beginning of his career, a doctoral student, Daniel Bronstein, at Georgia State University who was writing a dissertation on the history of Chinese in Atlanta, Augusta, and Savannah.
Both contacted me via e-mail, for different reasons, about the same time.  Judy Yung, a noted authority on the history of Chinese women in America, was going to Georgia to give some lectures on the topic.  She had stumbled upon my website, and noting that I grew up in Macon, Georgia, thought I might be able to recommend some sites that were relevant to Chinese American history. To be honest, I could not think of a single site or place of relevance to Chinese America for her to visit other than Wesleyan College in Macon where Madame Chiang Kai-Shek had received an honorary doctorate in 1943 during her historic visit to the United State to raise support, financial and political, for China in fighting the Japanese invaders.  However, that building had burned to the ground some years ago!
I took advantage of our contact, after some agonizing, to mention my memoir to Dr. Yung, and offering to send her a copy of a draft.  She graciously agreed to read it when she could find time.  Fortunately, the story held enough interest for her and after she read the draft, she realized it had some promise and proceeded to give me substantial feedback and encouragement.

Daniel also happened upon my website and was quite excited to find someone who had some first-hand knowledge of the Chinese living in Georgia back in the middle of the 20th century.  As luck would have it, Daniel’s graduate school mentor, Professor Krystn Moon was a program chair for the Asian American Studies Association, which was holding its annual national conference in Atlanta that year and eager to include presentations of research about Chinese in the South.
         After Danie; told her about my work, she invited me to submit a paper about Chinese in the American South. As I was not a trained historian, I would not have felt qualified otherwise to submit a proposal, but felt I could say something meaningful on the topic of Chinese experiences in the South.
So although the reason why each of them contacted me was quite different, I was able to get them to read a draft of my memoir, Southern Fried Rice: Life in A Chinese Laundry in the Deep South. Fortunately, both found that the memoir had merit as a contribution to the literature.
I daresay that without these two important contacts I might never have gotten very far along in my 'retirement career' writing about Chinese American history.  Their interest, and encouragement, gave me a powerful motivation and heightened confidence that what I was doing was of value.
             




Figure 6 Chinese Historical Society of America, San Francisco
The AAAS press releases about the conference attracted the attention and interest of local Chinese organizations such as the Organization of Chinese Americans (OCA). Dennis Chao, its president contacted me to ask if I would come and speak at their dinner meeting.  This seemed like a great opportunity to talk about my memoir, Southern Fried Rice, at a place not far from where the story came from.
However, right from the start, the OCA event seemed doomed because a miscommunication between OCA and the restaurant had occurred. Many more people had signed up for the talk than restaurant was told so there was a mad scramble to get enough food to serve.  Fortunately, they managed to somehow prepare the dinner, but not without considerable delay. I realized that I needed to condense my 50 minute talk to about 15 min. as the evening was getting late by the time I got to speak.
Somehow this potential fiasco turned into a triumph of sorts.  After my 15 min. talk, the Q&A ran on and on until I cut it off after 45 minutes. Having survived this crisis, I felt a surge of confidence that I could handle any future obstacles at presentations, of which I would later experience many at subsequent talks!
         A side trip to Augusta, Georgia after the conference gave me an opportunity to make a pilgrimage to the site where my father worked for several years in the 1920s when he first arrived in the United States. I got to speak at a potluck dinner at the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, in which my father's uncle and cousin were leaders.
Two Unexpected Dividends of Atlanta OCA Talk
At the conference, I received two unexpected offers to return to Atlanta to speak. First, Sachi Koto, formerly the news anchor woman for CNN, and now a business consultant invited me to come to a gala event in a month to give a keynote address to an assemblage of the 'best and brightest' Who's Who Among Asian Americans in Georgia who would be recognized in a ceremony and black tie event at the Omni Hotel.
I was startled at the invitation but, upon reflection, recognized it was a golden opportunity for exposure.  I surprised myself when I decided after a few days to accept the offer.
And, then that evening, after my success at the OCA dinner, described above, I suddenly was approached by, Brenda Tran, the President of the local chapter of the National Association of Asian American Professionals (NAACP) who asked if I would come and speak to this network of young urban professional Chinese.  I was hesitant, thinking that this youthful group would have minimal interest in hearing about matters from the distant past and find a speaker on career advancement of greater value.  Undaunted, Tran assured me that my knowledge of how Chinese were regarded in the South in the past was of great interest and value for members of her organization. Thus, assured, I agreed to return to Atlanta in a month, provided I could speak to her group on Friday night and to the Who's Who event at the Omni on the evening of Saturday, April 29.

Figure 7 Scenes from Talk to NAAAP, Atlanta, 2006.

I had a whole month to ask myself, how did all this good fortune happen and what am I going to do to deserve the confidence of these two organizers?  The Friday night event with NAAAP went very smoothly, and the young professionals were attentive and complimentary about my presentation that described what life had been like for my family growing up in our laundry in Macon.  
Similarly, the Saturday night black tie event started well.  There were over 300 guests and many influential civic and community leaders at this event that honored about 40 or so Asian Americans in Georgia who had made outstanding achievements in science, business, academia, and the arts. My brief keynote speech, All I Really Needed To Know, I Learned In A Chinese Laundry was well-received:

Distinguished honorees, ladies and gentlemen:
It is a high honor to have the privilege to speak to you on this wonderful occasion.

I am impressed with what a vibrant and energetic sense of community there is today among the Atlanta Asian American community. In contrast, when I was growing up in Macon, we had a much smaller community.  As a matter of fact, since our family was the only Asian, let alone Chinese, family in town, we WERE the Asian COMMUNITY. When we moved from Macon to San Francisco in the early1950s, the entire Macon Chinese community was gone!  The local paper noted the occasion with an editorial with the headline, “Not a Chinese in our town for first time in a century.”  When I first saw the headline, I was surprised because it never occurred to me that there had ever been any Chinese in Macon before us.

A few years ago, as I reflected on my family’s life in Macon in cultural isolation for over 25 years as the solitary Chinese family in town during an era of staunch segregation, I was inspired, to write a memoir, Southern Fried Rice, to document our family’s life experiences so that in this small way I could preserve and share a bit of Chinese American history that few people knew about. There isn’t time enough tonight to go into any detail about our family story so instead I want to say a few brief things about some valuable lessons learned from growing up in a Chinese laundry.

Let me BEGIN with what might seem to be a digression:  I’ll bet none of you knew that this past Thursday was:   National Take Your Child To Work With You Day

The premise underlying such a concept is admirable.  It’s good for kids to learn what their parents do at work, even if they go just 1 day.  I should note. However, that this doesn’t always have an accurate result: As a personal example, when my son was a youngster, I’d occasionally take him with me to campus.  He soon reached the (false) conclusion that work was fun because all he ever saw me do was:

Drink coffee, chat with students, and occasionally scribble illegibly on the blackboard.

Now when I was growing up, I also had the chance to watch my parents work.  In fact, I worked with my parents in the laundry, and not just for 1 day a year, but EVERYDAY so that I came to sometimes detest having to work in the laundry, BUT now I must admit it did teach me some valuable lessons. What  are some of these “lessons” I ‘learned’ from work in our laundry?

The Nature of Work
1. Work is hard   Ben Franklin, as we all know said “Early to Bed, Early to Rise…well, he obviously never talked to a Chinese laundryman for even though my parents went  to bed early and got up early… six days a week, 52 wks a year. …it did not exactly make them any healthier, or wealthier, ..but perhaps wiser

2. The Peter Principle (If it can go wrong, it will) also applies in the Laundry  When the hired help doesn’t come in, the work must still be done. When machinery breaks down, the work must still be done…
And as with President Harry Truman, the buck stops here ….  with my parents who still had to get the work done.

3. The Customer Always Thinks he is right, even when he is wrong. Some customers thought we lost clothes that they later admitted they had never brought in… but had misplaced or left at home

4. Golden Rule  Treat Customers the way you wanted to be treated… this did not always work, but it was a good starting point.

5. Learn how to ‘read’ or size up customers,   that way I could pick easy to serve customers to wait on, … and let father deal with the obnoxious ones.

6. Dealing with many illiterate customers, white as well as black, quickly taught me the value of being able to read and write and why education is so important.

7. Learn Problem Solving skills:
For example:  Lost tickets were the bane of our existence…  By the way, just why  the expression, No tick-ee, no shirt-ee, was used to criticize the laundryman is a mystery to me.   No Chinese laundryman ever enforced such a policy because we always found the laundry, even without a ticket but we had to open, and rewrap, many bundles to find the right clothes.

This taught me to develop strategies for finding a customer’s clothes efficiently.
             
8.  Develop Organization and memory Skills because Time is money:
In a laundry, you have to do more than just wash and iron clothes; after that you must sort and reassemble finished items for each customer and to do this efficiently you need to be organized and have a good memory.

9.  Money Does Not Grow On Trees, (although it sometimes fell out of clothes).
Our parents did not indulge us. or themselves, with material items,  but they always found the way to provide for essential needs especially if it had to do with our schoolwork.

10. Family cooperation is essential for survival… we all had to pitch in and work together in order to make a living.

These lessons were invaluable in helping me succeed throughout life.

Now I will conclude by contrasting two conceptions of Laundry Life

The first, I will call the Customer’s “Romantic” Philosophy of  The Laundry

There was an OLD commercial in which:

 A white customer asks the Chinese laundryman: How do you get the shirts so white?  The Laundryman’s proud but sly Answer: ANCIENT CHINESE SECRET!
(Imagine background music of “Laundryman, My Laundryman” to the tune of ‘Chinatown My Chinatown”)

In other words, CHINESE were IMBUED by the white ad writer with magic-like power to transform dirty, smelly clothes into clean fragrant clothes,  This stereotype shows that mainstream society saw Chinese as experts, but only in this one area.
versus
A “Realistic” Philosophy of Laundry, one that might represent the viewpoint of the Chinese laundryman:

Children, you should aspire to something higher than doing laundry; control your own future with knowledge and education. Our laundry earnings will provide the financial support for you to get this valuable education.

In conclusion, we must recognize that successful though we may be, we did NOT do it alone.  We stood on the shoulders of our parents and families, a strength of our Asian cultures.

Tonight, in honoring these 67 outstanding members of the Who’s Who in Asian American communities, I think I can safely say that we are at the same time honoring their parents and families who supported them in pursuing and achieving their dreams.


Figure 8 Omni Hotel Gala with some NAAAP-Atlanta members.
Then after dinner, disaster hit. With some many people (300 or so) milling around after the dinner and awards ceremony, it was difficult for most of them to even see my book signing table.  Moreover, having spent $100 per plate for dinner, most people probably didn't have any money left for buying books.

So, there I was, stuck at the Omni Hotel with several boxes of unsold books, 3000 miles from home!  It was a moment of great despair!  Fortunately, my hostess generously offered to store my boxes and boxes of unsold books in her garage until I could develop a plan to retrieve them!
As it turned out, in the not too distant future, although I did not know it at the time, destiny would bring me back to Georgia a few months later and provide me with another opportunity to sell my books.
Writing is Easy Compared to Marketing
After I published Southern Fried Rice, I searched for target locations where I could best market the book.  I assumed, rightly or wrongly, that the large chain bookstores would not be likely to want to stock a book that might appeal mainly to some segment of Chinese Americans.
Chinese Historical Society of America
         I contacted the Chinese Historical Society in San Francisco in hopes that they would take some copies to sell on consignment in their book section.  Much to my surprise, I was invited to do a book reading followed by book signing.  This was much better than I had dreamed possible.
          I had actually never attended any book reading so I had to decide how much I wanted to read verbatim from the book as opposed to talking about the background and purpose of the book. The event was well-attended and the response was positive, much to my relief.
KTVU-TV Interview
        And, thanks to the press releases from the Society, another surprise was that Rosy Chu of KTVU-TV invited me for an interview on her program, Bay Area People, a local tv talk show. I had never done a television interview so it was exciting to be invited but also a bit scary! Several problems existed. I would have to fly up from southern California at my own expense to tape the interview, which I learned would be aired at the ungodly hour of 6:30 a.m. After mulling it over, I decided to “go for it” as it would be a great learning experience (in case I got subsequent invitations!).
Still, I recognized it would be a good way to promote the book, (even if the program did air at 6:30 in the morning).

Figure 9 Interview on Southern Fried Rice on Bay Area People

On the day of the interview, I arrive a bit early just to be sure I can find the station in Oakland. As I sit in the lobby waiting, a young couple enters with 2 dogs.  As I began to realize that they were also going to be on the program (3 guests for 8 mins. each, with the rest of the 30 min. show devoted to commercials), I start to panic; how can I compete with 2 cute furry guests! Fortunately, I got to be the first guest and did not have to appear on the set sitting next to the SPCA couple and canines. The interview went smoothly, and I survived the test! Lesson: You have to take chances. Carpe diem, or seize the opportunity, if you want to succeed in whatever you do!  (Ftnote: Ed Soon cousin)
Museum of Chinese in the Americas
Just as my hope in contacting CHSA was to get them to display and sale my books. I approached the Museum of Chinese in the Americas (MOCA) with the same plan.  And, just as CHSA responded by inviting me to speak, MOCA’s William Dao extended a similar offer. We were able to schedule a date close to the weekend when I was planning to be in New York for a family birthday, so the timing was perfect.
         When I spoke about the book in New York's Chinatown at the Museum of Chinese in the Americas in 2006 and Chicago's Chinatown at the Chinese American Museum of Chicago in 2008, I was surprised how much interest there was in learning about Chinese in the South.  For these northern audiences, the attraction had to be different from that for southern Chinese. For many northerners, they were eager and curious to know how we existed without a vibrant "Chinatown" where there would tbe many Chinese stores, restaurants, churches, community organizations, etc.  As Chinese 'southerners' were unfamiliar to most of then, my stories probably intrigued them from an "anthropological" perspective.
   
Figure 10 Signing books after MOCA New York talk.
Lessons Learned
            Fate smiled on me by giving me three important opportunities to speak about Southern Fried Rice in Atlanta to OCA and NAAAP, CCBA in Augusta, MOCA in New York, and the Georgia Literary Festival in Macon. These experiences first reassured me that I could deliver talks to diverse audiences effectively, and that I could handle all types of unexpected mishaps connected with live audiences.  Secondly, I quickly realized that marketing books through book talks was an effective method for me as a self-publisher with no advertising funds or access to bookstore displays of my book.
Surprises Related to Southern Fried Rice
After working for months to finalize Southern Fried Rice, the big moment finally arrived and I was ready to upload my files to my Print On Demand (POD) printer, Lulu.com. I waited anxiously for several days before the proof copy arrived in the mail. When I ripped open the container, I was amazed at how big the book appeared.  But when I opened the book, I realized, to my embarrassment, that everything was double-spaced, which looks fine for a typed manuscript, but awful in a printed book.  So, I had to change the line spacing and re upload the file and wait for another proof copy.  The consolation was that with half as many pages, the cost of each book was also substantially reduced!
        To be honest, there were other unanticipated pitfalls along the way in formatting the book such as getting the photographs in the right place, tweaking them so they were suitable for a printed page rather than a monitor screen, by making sure that they were high, rather than low, resolution images.
Murphy's Law, "If anything can go wrong, it will" is definitely valid when it comes to writing, editing, and publishing a book!
You Have Written MY life story!
            Imagine my surprise one day to receive an e-mail that at first seemed accusatory! A Chinese American with a name that was eerily similar to mine, James Jung, wrote to tell me that a friend has told him he should read "Southern Fried Rice." This chemistry professor went on to tell me that his family's life in a small town in North Carolina during the 40s was virtually the same as the one I described of our family in Georgia during the same time period.
          His parents, like mine, were immigrants from China who ran a laundry.  Moreover, like us, theirs was the only Chinese family in town. He noted that he and his 4 siblings, three of them boys, shared many similar experiences that our family did living in cultural isolation in the South during the days when Jim Crow laws prevailed.  He even noted that there was an uncanny similarity of our living spaces. We both lived above the laundry and the physical appearance of our buildings were strikingly similar even to the detail of having three front windows.
I then realized that my laundry story was not so unique but probably could represent the situation for dozens, if not hundreds, of other Chinese laundry families throughout the U. S. and Canada.
Connecting with Artist Flo Oy Wong
           When I gave my first book signing for Southern Fried Rice, I received an e-mail from artist Flo Oy Wong that she wanted to attend but had a conflicting event. She was especially interested in my story because her husband, Ed, had grown up in Augusta, Georgia, not too far from my hometown of Macon.  We met soon afterwards, and became friends and mutual admirers of our work on Chinese America.
         Several years later, 2009, to be precise, I was working on my social history of Chinese family restaurants and wanted to invite some Chinese Americans who grew up in their family restaurants and helped with the work to write about those experiences and the impact it had on their lives.  Flo accepted the challenge and wrote about her family's Oakland, California, restaurant, Ai Joong Wah, or Great China, and included some drawings she had made of the restaurant interior back then.  As a bonus for my book, Sweet and Sour: Life in Chinese Family Restaurants, Flo told me that her sister, the activist poet, offered to let me print some of poems about Chinese restaurant life. What a wonderful and unexpected contribution that I could add to the book!
“I live in Macon. Your cousin was a college classmate”
Reading "Southern Fried Rice," Charles Brittain, an architect living in Macon, Georgia, the scene where the story in the book is based, noticed from one of the photographs that one of his classmates at Georgia Tech was my cousin, William.
        Brittain and I planned to meet in 2006 when I came to Macon to speak at the Georgia Literary Festival, but unfortunately it was not possible. An intriguing discovery I made a few years later was when I returned to Macon and was staying in the home of my best friend from first grade, Richard Harris. During the course of conversation, I discovered that Richard also knew Charles Brittain because he was the architect who designed Richard's home!
People DO Judge A Book By Its Cover
  Writing a book is never easy, but creating a suitable cover is also challenging. There is truth to the saying, You can't judge a book by its cover, but in reality, many people do.  It is crucial that you have an interesting and eye catching cover so that potential readers will at least notice your book.  
My first attempt at creating a cover for Southern Fried Rice, not surprisingly, was rather amateurish and hum drum at best. In fact, on a trip to Portland to visit my niece, Liz Gee, I asked for her opinion of my cover. Her 15-year old daughter, Lauren Doege, seemed unimpressed as I think she was suppressing the urge to roll her eyes in dismay!
Lauren hinted that she would welcome a chance to create my cover.  I accepted the generous offer, knowing she was skilled in the use of Photoshop, and figuring it would have to be superior to my feeble attempt.
  When she eventually e-mailed the cover to me, I must confess that while it was artistically stunning, it caught me completely by surprise.  Instead of a brightly colored cover as I has assumed it might be, it had a dark black background with a diagonally placed photograph of our family's Sam Lee Laundry in the foreground.
Note that I shouldn't have been too surprised, as Lauren was then going through a fascination with Goth imagery like many other adolescents.  I was not sure what to do. Should I use it, or politely and tactfully tell my artistic niece that I was not going to use it.


Figure 11
I decided to poll some of my college students to see what they thought.  To my surprise, they all expressed positive feelings about it, but were they just being polite?  One student even gushed, it's so edgy!
           Then, I asked myself, is it a positive or a negative for my cover to be edgy for a memoir?  I finally concluded that "edgy" is high praise, and proceeded to use it, and have never regretted it!
In fact, later when I wrote my second book, Chinese Laundries, Tickets to Survival on Gold Mountain, I again enlisted her artistic skills to create a beautiful cover for it
Norwiegan man grew up in Minnesota among Germans, and other Nordic groups
√ Man in Portland writes me after reading SFR that his father was a laundry customer in Macon

        √ Oct. csulb student from 20 yr ago tells me her parents are from Augusta and have SFR which she is reading….that  they also patronize Chattanooga laundries

        √ Sieglinde Lim de Sanchez informs me she read SFR during chemotherapy.
 Macon archivist was son of my classmate in junior hi

  Librarian at CSULB had a classmate now in DC who grew up in Macon, and recognized Whittle School on the book cover

Natalie ….wondered about my sister….
Another reader suddenly realized from the chapter where I referred to my sister Mary’s marriage that her mother and Mary had worked together for many years to develop Chinese language classes where they lived.  They had lost track of each other after they moved to different places so the reader was able to get them back in touch with each other.


 3 Chinese Laundries

Southern Fried Rice was a memoir, and based on my personal experiences so there was no need for much historical background research.  Nonetheless, my habits as an academic researcher in psychology carried over and led me to do extensive research about the history of Chinese in America.
I had not previously known about the large extent to which Chinese operated laundries in the late 1800s and much of the 1900s before this livelihood became increasingly obsolete with the wider availability of affordable home washing equipment after World War II.  As a kid, growing up in our laundry in Georgia, how was I to know, or even care, that all across the U. S. (and Canada) there was least one Chinese laundry in virtually every town.
School textbooks did not discuss much about the history of Chinese in America other than to mention they worked on the construction of the transcontinental railroad.  I grew up knowing little about the Chinese experience coming to live in America aside from the personal experiences and views of my mother who told me often about the anti Chinese sentiments and racism toward them.
         More importantly, I came to realize some of the reasons that the laundry was so commonplace among Chinese immigrants.  It was not because it was their preference, or that they had expertise as laundrymen acquired before they left China.  Underlying this occupational niche was the racism toward Chinese, which drove them out of other work opportunities, and eventually challenged their existence even in the laundry business in some areas.
Writing A Prequel

Figure 12  Cover of Chinese Laundries book by Lauren Doege
This realization of how pervasive Chinese laundries were, the unavailability of other work for Chinese for many years, and the vital role they had in providing economic survival of the early Chinese led me to publish Chinese Laundries: Tickets to Survival on Gold Mountain in 2007.

Writing this book gave me a deeper understanding of why my father, his uncle, his brother, his cousin, and thousands of other Chinese men entered the laundry business even though none of them ever did their own laundry back in their villages in China. As elsewhere, laundry work was considered a domestic responsibility of women in the family.

The 19 Chinese Laundries of Fun Fai Lo




Insert chart

Is "greasy clothes" the Chinese term for "overalls"?

A book cover is important even though we also know that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover!  When I wrote "Chinese Laundries: Tickets to Survival on Gold Mountain," I wanted to include two iconic images, an abacus and a laundry ticket.  As luck would have it, the ticket I used also included Chinese characters next to each type of clothing written in English.
I was surprised to receive an e mail from someone who could read Chinese, and who had studied my book cover closely. He examined the Chinese characters on the ticket next to overalls and realized that the literal translation was "greasy clothes."  He wrote me to confirm his analysis.
               However, since I cannot read (or write) Chinese I wasn't sure even though my intuition told me he was probably correct.  In Chinese, where there is no existing equivalent for an English word, a term is often coined. For example, DAI FOW or Big City for San Francisco, since it had the largest Chinese population.  I did check with someone who does read Chinese and he confirmed the conclusion of my careful scrutinizer of my book cover!
Elwin Xie


Figure 13 Chinese Laundry Kids event at Foo’s Ho Ho, Vancouver
4 Chopsticks In The Land of Cotton
       Given that I had never been in Mississippi previously, how did I come to write a book about Chinese grocery store families in the Mississippi Delta in 2008?  Well, technically speaking, I must admit that I had been in Mississippi for a few hours back in the early 1950s when I took a train from New Orleans late one summer evening en route to Macon, Georgia.  When I awoke the next morning, the train was in Alabama, so onviously I must have been physically in Mississippi, albeit asleep.
First, a digression is needed to explain how a talk in Los Angeles about Southern Fried Rice ended up with me writing Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton.

At the time, I was seeking venues where I could speak about Southern Fried Rice to promote the book.  Living near Los Angeles, I decided to approach the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, although I was not sure if they would be interested in inviting me to speak about Chinese life in the American South. But judging from a list of their past speakers they did not limit their speakers to those studying Chinese in southern California. I contacted them, and received an invitation to talk there in February, 2007. (I would later become a member of the Board)
      On a personal level, the timing couldn't have been better because, by chance, my cousin Henry and his wife Ronnie from Atlanta were in town to visit their daughter, Jessica, who was attending Occidental College.  I have another cousin, James and his wife Helen, originally from Atlanta but more recently retirees to southern California from Chicago. All of these relatives from Georgia were able to attend the presentation, which of course dealt with experiences they knew about. Furthermore, a long time close friend, Ronald Gallimore, a psychology professor at UCLA who attended graduate school with me, came with his wife Sharon.  So, the event was like a small family gathering.

            Insert pix with Jew famuly

What Do You Know About the Chinese in Mississippi?
During the Q and A after the talk, an audience member, Roland Chow, stood up and identified himself as a Chinese from Mississippi who had learned of the talk at the last minute but came to learn about my life in Georgia. Roland asked if I was familiar with history of Chinese in the Mississippi Delta to which I acknowledged that I had read two books about them but had never had direct contact with these Chinese.
          Undeterred, he suggested that since I was familiar with how Chinese in the South lived, I should consider writing a book about the Mississippi Delta Chinese community. I was taken aback by his enthusiastic suggestion, and could only say, "Thanks for the suggestion, but it's something I'd have to think about." He even offered to give me names of other Delta Chinese that I could interview to gather more information.
After a few months of research, I realized that the history of these Chinese was unique but fast vanishing with the times and decided it was worthwhile to write about it. Thanks to Roland's encouragement and contacts with other Delta Chinese, the result about two years later, was the publication of Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton: Lives of Mississippi Delta Chinese Grocers in 2008
         Without this fortuitous meeting and urging from Roland Chow, I would have never considered undertaking this project. I was able to interview some Delta Chinese by phone and to study a collection of about 15 oral histories of Delta Chinese from around the 1980s.  I used some excerpts from them to illustrate important issues and sent them to the persons being quoted to make sure I was not taking their comments out of context.
This exchange generated strong interest among Delta Chinese and enthusiasm for a historical account of the Chinese groceries and the families that ran them.  I was invited to visit the Delta, meet many Delta Chinese, and to give a talk about Southern Fried Rice at Delta State University.
As I was in the final stages of writing, it seemed a bit late to go to the Delta but at the same time it was, of course, an important opportunity to talk in-person and on-site with people who I was writing about.  I can honestly say that my impressions from my visit only served to validate the overall presentation of the Delta Chinese grocers that I had already formulated for the book.
I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to contribute to the recording of aspects of the history of this once thriving community that had begun a steady decline for many decades due to deaths, retirements, and relocation to other areas such as Texas and California.  I like to think that my timing was fortunate in that it helped boost the morale and community pride in its history and the need to take other immediate actions to preserve the stories of its important contributions to the Delta.
  In writing Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton, I used the Library of Congress Living Memory photograph collection of plantation workers, Delta people, and business and residential buildings created during the Great Depression for the WPA.
 I found a 1930s photo of a dilapidated looking "Benson" grocery store located in Altheimer, Arkansas, and because I had been in contact with someone who came from a Chinese grocery background in that small town, I sent it to him to ask him if he remembered the Benson store. Surprise! He wrote back declaring that the "Benson" store was in fact his father's store (he never bothered to change the signage)!  He wrote, " How did you come by the picture?”
  He (   )   remembered sitting on that wood bench at the store front in late evenings with family members, even though the mosquitoes might be bad.  “ We;d take turns riding my bicycle--I was the only one to get one at about age 10.”

Figure 14 Altheimer, AR Chinese grocery store

Arkansas Connection via Henry Wong    
  After I spoke on "Southern Fried Rice" back in 2006? at the charming San Diego Chinese Historical Museum, I met Henry Wong from the San Fernando valley who told me about his detailed research on his family history. Henry came from Hong Kong at an early age to live in Arkansas for a few years with his older sister, Nellie, who with her husband ran a grocery store in Round Pound, Arkansas.
            So, two years later when I was researching the Mississippi Delta Chinese grocery stores on both sides of the river, I remembered our previous conversation and contacted Henry to obtain more details about his sister's life in the Delta.  He provided me with a richly detailed account of how several Chinese families from all over the U.S. (Illinois, North Dakota, Colorado, and Massachusetts came to operate grocery stores in the Arkansas delta, which I found very important to include in my book, "Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton."
Paul and Helen Wong Provide Valuable Help
After I had written most of my first draft of my book about the Chinese grocers in the Mississippi Delta, I chanced to learn at a dinner after my Cupertino talk on Southern Fried Rice that a Paul Wong, who had lived in the Delta, was also working on a book on this topic.  This was a "stop signal" to me because I felt that if a native of the Delta was writing a book, it would have an insider perspective than I did not have. Paul, and his wife, Helen, actually lived about 25 miles from me in southern California.
I contacted him and he clarified that he was editing a collection of reminiscences of Chinese who attended the Chinese Mission School in Cleveland, Ms., and was not writing a history of the Chinese grocers and their families in the Delta.  We were not working on the same topic although what he was doing had some connection to the larger story I was working on. Thus, I continued to research and write on "Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton."
This contact turned out to be timely for other reasons.  Helen, Paul’s wife, also from the Delta, had just completed writing her own memoir of her family, and a gathering was planned within a few days at their home at which copies of her research would be distributed to family members in the area.  The Wongs generously invited me to the event at which I was also the recipient of a copy of the memoir, which told an amazing story.
Joe Young, her father obtained a civil engineering degree from M. I. T., one of the most, if not the top, prestigious engineering university in the country. He then went to Chine to help build railroads, but returned to the U. S. with his family when the dangers of war between China and Japan in the late 1930s increased.  He settled in the Delta, opening a grocery store in Tchula at first, and later in Greenville.
        Quite by 'accident,' I discovered that Helen's grandfather and his two brothers had owned a laundry in Holyoke, Massachusetts back before 1920. When they heard about opportunities to earn a better living in the Delta running a grocery store, they sold their laundry and moved to the Delta where they operated one of the larger and best known stores, Joe Gow Nue Grocery, at the foot of the main street of Greenville just down from the Mississippi River.
           I say, by accident, because I was sitting with Paul in his living room telling him how surprised I was to discover there were no Chinese in the Delta operating laundries whereas it was the primary Chinese business in all other parts of the U. S. at that time. No one I interviewed from the Delta could recall ever seeing a Chinese laundry in the region; yet I knew from census records that prior to 1910 there had been a handful of Chinese laundries in the Delta.
I suggested to Paul that perhaps some of these earlier Chinese laundrymen saved enough capital to enable them to acquire an inventory of goods to stock and open a grocery store. Just at that time, Helen walked into the room and overheard our discussion. She then confirmed my reasoning, using the example of her grandfather and his two brothers who had first owned a laundry, but in Massachusetts, before coming to the Delta to enter the grocery business.
             On several later occasions, I relied on Paul for invaluable information about the Delta Chinese grocers that gave me a better understanding of the conditions under which they lived and worked. Furthermore, Paul's detailed account of how his family moved around the U. S., from Portland, Oregon, to Fargo, North Dakota, and then to the Delta, gave me more insight about the process by which many other Chinese ended up in the Delta.
Fall 2008 Visit to the Mississippi Delta
  As I was finishing "Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton," a concerted effort was made to invite me to visit the Delta by some of the Chinese who grew up in their family grocery stores in the Delta who were still living in the region.  While they were pleased to learn that a book about the Mississippi Delta Chinese grocers was in the works, they were concerned that my impressions from phone interviews and oral histories might not be accurate.
          Frieda Quon, a long-time librarian at Delta State University, along with active members of the Chinese community including Blanche Yee, Gilroy Chow, Audrey and C. W. Sidney, with the support of the National Citizens Alliance of Chinese Americans (C.A.C.A.). arranged for me to spend 16 days in September visiting different Chinese across the Delta.
Dilemmas of An Invitation to Tour the Delta
In researching background material for writing Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton, I used several different types of material ranging from academic scholarly work, other accounts about the Delta Chinese grocers, interviews, and a small set of oral histories from the Delta State University Archives recorded back in the 1970s or 80s. The latter material came from interviews of about 20 Chinese from grocery store families. The transcripts provided rich details of the daily lives of Chinese family life not only in store operations but also about the social interactions, relations, and community ties among this small population of less than 1,000 Chinese living miles apart from each other in numerous small delta towns around the middle of the past century.
           I wanted to include direct quotes from some of these documents in my book, and to make sure that I had not misinterpreted them or taken them out of context, I contacted the respondents so they could examine the materials I attributed to them.
One unexpected outcome was some concern among a few respondents that these never edited transcripts contained some mistakes and that the conversational nature of the comments might make the respondents come across as poorly educated and inarticulate.  Some even asked if they could "revise" the transcripts even though they were based on interviews from well over 20 years back.  I tried to reassure them that no one expects conversations to contain polished statements, free of grammatical flaws, repetitions, hesitations, etc.  And, I insisted that it would not be suitable for my research if they were to now re-write or edit what they had previously said over 20 years ago.
Frieda Quon was one of the individuals who was most engaged in this negotiation. Frieda was an about-to-retire librarian at Delta State University who grew up in her family's grocery store in Greenville.  She had read my memoir, Southern Fried Rice, and had very positive conviction that I could relate to and understand the lives of Delta Chinese, even though I had grown up in Macon, Georgia, where my family was the only Chinese in town, and we ran a laundry rather than a grocery. Frieda, along with Blanche Yee, Shirley Kwan, Gilroy Chow, and Audrey Sidney, among others, spearheaded a plan to invite me to 'tour' the Delta so I could meet Delta Chinese in person and get to know about their grocery store lives better than I could from reading documents and books.

Figure 15 Fried Quon and John Jung, in Memphis, 2011
I was ambivalent initially about accepting the invitation. Clearly, on one hand, it would be invaluable to visit the Delta in person even though I was at a stage in my thinking and writing about the Delta Chinese where I felt I had a firm understanding.
A visit, however, might show me that my views were not correct and I'd have to rewrite my book. That was a risk that I'd have to take, and was willing to do, but there was a greater risk that I feared.
Suppose I went down to the Delta, and while receiving 16 days of 'Southern hospitality' as house guests in towns up and down the Delta, I only got to see and hear the 'good side' of the Delta Chinese experience.  Would my trip bias me toward seeing only the good images that the hosts might display?  And, then if I wrote anything the least bit unflattering about the Delta Chinese, might they feel that I had betrayed them? Nonetheless I realized that the visit would be an invaluable opportunity for me to see the region and meet some of the people that I was writing about. I overcame my anxiety and looked at the trip as a challenge so I accepted the invitation.
Fortunately, the observations and conversations I had among the Delta Chinese generally were consistent with what I had formulated from my prior research and had already been writing in the book.  I did have a few disagreements about discussions on the sensitive topic of racial attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs between Chinese and the whites and blacks. I think I was able to persuade those with objections that any historical analysis of Delta society that ignored racial issues would seem seriously flawed even if the main goal was to depict Chinese family life.
To be sure, I was seeing only the remnants of the once thriving Chinese grocery businesses of the Delta, which by now, were no longer as prevalent as they had been a generation ago. I came away, however, with a better understanding and appreciation of the lives of this unique Chinese community that managed to survive in sometimes harsh circumstances for so long, but was now in decline with the passing of the older generation and the moving of many members of later generations to larger cities such as Memphis, Houston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
Using Social Media To Promote Delta Chinese History
The realization that this close-knit community of descendants of pioneer Delta Chinese grocers was rapidly dwindling due to mortality, relocation to other regions of the country such as Texas and California, and the decline of economic opportunities in the Delta for these businesses with the passage of the years galvanized some of the Chinese still living in the Delta to work to create some type of museum or historical archive about the Delta Chinese grocers and their families.
In 2010 I tried to assist by creating a Facebook group page for Delta Chinese to help increase contact and communication among the Delta Chinese who were now living in many other parts of the country.  Although at last count, it had 226 'members,' it was a mixed success as few people posted memories, comments, or photographs.  A limitation of Facebook is that older postings are soon buried by newer ones so unless members pay attention, they can easily miss some interesting posts.


Figure 16 Facebook Page for Mississippi Delta Chinese
Consequently, I created a website for the Delta Chinese where postings would be more readily accessible even at later dates.  It's too early to evaluate the effectiveness of these efforts. Some impact may occur but be difficult to detect; thus, instances occur where people not connected with, or even aware of, the Delta Chinese stumble upon the website via searches for other topics related to Chinese history. There is also anecdotal evidence that the Facebook and the webpage have occasionally stimulated renewed contact among Delta expatriates.









Figure 17 Website  for Mississippi Delta Chinese
A Second Visit to the Delta in 201
An unexpected outcome brought about by my visit to speak in the Delta in 2008 and their positive reception of Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton was an awakening among many Chinese from grocery store backgrounds who were still living in the region of the importance and urgency in  recording and sharing their unique history. Over the past several decades, the number of Chinese who grew up working in grocery stores to help their families earn their living dwindled drastically due to death of their parents, relocation of peers to cities with large Chinese communities like Houston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco with better employment opportunities. The few who remained began to assimilate and lose some of their Chinese identity to some extent.  In the past year, some leaders, realizing the decline of the Chinese network across the Delta, developed plans for historic preservation with a proposal for a Delta Chinese Heritage Museum or Archive.
         In the same spirit, Paul Wong and the late Doris Ling Lee organized and edited recollections from Chinese who had attended the Chinese Mission School in Cleveland during the late 1930s and early 1940s. The collection was published in August, 2011 at Delta State University, with a book release and signing event that attracted many Chinese connected to the Delta to come for the event.
          This increasing interest in the history of Delta Chinese led to my invitation to the Delta to speak again, not only about Delta Chinese but those in other parts of the Deep South, with opportunities to give presentations about at Delta State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Memphis.  Word about the contributions of the Chinese grocers to their Delta communities spread and attracted the interest of Mississippi Public Radio which produced a two-part broadcast of interviews by an award winning journalist, Sandra Knispel with Frieda Quon, Luck Wing, Harold Lum, and I on Mississippi Public Radio.
Ole Miss Talk on History of Chinese in the South
     The Sociology/Anthropology Department at the University of Mississippi in Oxford sponsored my presentation, On Being Chinese Where Everyone Else is Either Black or White, about some of the experiences of Chinese living in the Deep South during the era of Jim Crow laws.
        After the talk, I enjoyed Southern hospitality with delightful company at the well-known Ajax Restaurant on the town square, which features delicious Southern food with a down home atmosphere.
Talks at Confucius Institute, University of Memphis
I had an opportunity on Sept. 13, 2011 to give three presentations about the history of Chinese in the Deep South that were sponsored by the Confucius Institute at the University of Memphis.  This program, funded by the Chinese government, provides native speakers of Mandarin for Chinese language instruction to public schools. Many other universities in the U. S. and other countries have similar programs

Figure 18 What History Textbooks Left Out About Chinese in America




About a week before my trip the Confucius Institute asked if I would speak to a 5th grade class at the Campus School at the University of Memphis.  My initial reaction was one of sheer panic.  I had spoken about Chinese American history to adults, seniors, and college students, but never to elementary school students. Would I be able to hold their attention? How could I make the material relevant and meaningful to such a young audience.   I thought of trying to get out of the invitation, but upon reflection, I realized that this request was a golden opportunity. Why should 5th graders not learn about an important aspect of American history that their textbooks ignored? My only concern was whether I could develop a presentation that would be effective with 5th graders!
I figured I needed to start out with something to grab their attention immediately, and hope that I could get them actively engaged.
             I started with an image of the Statue of Library as I recited Emma Lazarus’ classic poem starting with the line, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free” welcome that greeted all European immigrants arriving at Ellis Island in New York. Kids were excited when I told them I supposed that they all recognized it.

       
Figure 19 Statue of Liberty

Then, in contrast, I showed them a picture of Angel Island and its Immigration Center, which none of them knew about, where all Chinese, and other Asian immigrants from 1910 to 1940 received a much less friendly reception.  Now I could begin to tell them the story of how the Chinese were detained and interrogated in depth at Angel Island when they arrived at San Francisco.
How effective was my presentation in affecting the students’ understanding of the plight of the Chinese immigrants, why it happened, and what the consequences were for Chinese for generations?  Without a followup, I’ll never know, but I was pleasantly surprised that during the Q & A one boy eagerly asked where could he find the (Angel Island) poems as he wanted to read more of them!
I was pleased with the attentiveness and curiosity that these youngsters showed during my talk.  One child was particularly interested in the example I showed of one of the bittersweet poems that an immigrant had carved on the wall while interned at the Angel Island Immigration Station.  He wanted to know where he could read some of the other poems that were discovered by a park ranger when the barracks were about to be demolished after the station was closed.
A second talk in the afternoon to a general audience of students and faculty and generated considerable interest in the topic of how Chinese came to settle in Mississippi and Georgia, how they earned their living, and how they were treated in the segregated South. It enabled me to meet and generate interest among Chinese in the university as well as in the community, both those with Guangdong and Taiwan roots.
The final talk was in the evening to students in the Honors Program. I spoke about my memoir, Southern Fried Rice, which described what it was like to be a member of the only Chinese family in our city, Macon, Georgia, during the 1920s-1950s. Students in this program, mostly non-Chinese, were open to learning about how Chinese immigrants like my parents were treated in America, a topic they had not learned about in their American history classes.






 5 Sweet and Sour
Although I have had the pleasure of many delicious meals in Chinese restaurants, my encounters have been as a diner and I have had no direct experience with what is involved in the operation of a Chinese restaurant.  The thought of writing a book on Chinese restaurants is not one that I would have ever had on my own just as I had no plans to write a book about Mississippi Delta Chinese.  But, as with that book, the suggestion and urging of a Chinese attending one of my talks is what started me on the path to writing about Chinese restaurants.  It was truly a case of lightning striking twice in the same area.
        I previously described meeting Henry Wong at the San Diego Chinese Historical Museum at my talk on Southern Fried Rice in 2007, and how he became a valuable resource for the Mississippi Delta book because he had relatives who had operated grocery stores in Arkansas.
Henry felt my work would be of interest in Chinese in the San Fernando Valley where he lived and offered to try to get me invited to speak at his church in Northridge, CA.  Unfortunately, his initial attempts to persuade his church that the topic would be of interest did not succeed.

Henry persisted and in late 2008 finally succeeded.  By then I had completed writing Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton, which was the book I planned to discuss in Northridge in conjunction with Southern Fried Rice.
Talking When Half the Audience Speaks Only Chinese?
         Located just north of Los Angeles, Northridge was about an hour drive from my home.  Traffic was as usual busy, and I just managed to arrive with about 2 minutes to spare.  As I was catching my breath, the organizer advised me that about half of the audience could only understand Mandarin and asked if I would mind if someone translated my comments into Chinese for this part of the audience. Needless to say, this was an unexpected surprise, but what was I to do? I had no choice but pondered just how disruptive this procedure might be and how I was going to survive.
Fortunately, the process was not as difficult as I first feared it would be.  My translator waited until I spoke for about 5 or so minutes and then she paraphrased (I am guessing since my Chinese language skills are not that good) what I said.  Mercifully, she condensed what I said into maybe 2 minutes rather than giving a word for word or thought for thought translation.
Once we got going, I got into the pace, and actually found that while she was translating, it gave me more time to think about what I would say next!  In retrospect, I am glad that I was told at the last moment rather than days in advance that a translator would be used as that would have undoubtedly given me anxious moments thinking of all the things that could go wrong.
Surprise… This Talk Led To A 4th Book and another Talk!
            After my ordeal of giving my talk with a Chinese translator shadowing my comments, I was 'rewarded' when my sponsor, Henry Wong, introduced me to his friend, William Lee.  After lunch, William was quick in getting to the point, saying, “You have now written books on Chinese laundries and Chinese grocery stores. Now you should write one about Chinese restaurants.” I was rather surprised, if not also amused, by his suggestion given that I knew next to nothing about the operation of Chinese restaurants.  I didn't agree with his reasoning because it takes a lot more than just having an interesting topic for one to be able to write a book about it.  William tried to allay my concerns by offering his services as a consultant because his background included running three Chinese restaurants in the past starting with a take-out only hole in the wall to a high-end restaurant in West Los Angeles.
            He ignored my reticence and asked if I would be free to have lunch the following week with him near my home.  I assumed this was not just a social invitation, but an opportunity for him to try again to persuade me to tackle this project. We had an amiable discussion at lunch but I could only promise that I would give it some thought before deciding whether I would feel competent to undertake this task. But whereas my interest in writing about Chinese restaurants would lie in portraying the lives of Chinese running small family-run restaurants, I could see that William was more interested in a book about the larger restaurants that catered to the more affluent clientele. We did not see eye to eye on this aspect of a restaurant history, so we agreed to 'disagree.'
            Yet, I realize that without William's suggestion, I would probably never have even considered writing a book on Chinese restaurant history.  He planted the seed that led me to spend several months doing research and developing the concepts represented in my eventual book, : Life in Chinese Family Restaurants.  It was eerie how my Delta Chinese grocers book, Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton, and my restaurant book both came out of the blue for me. Left to myself, I would have never considered writing either of them.  It was only in response to the coaxing and prodding of others that I dared to investigate the two topics.  Once I jumped in and started reading past research, gara

Figure 20 Sweet and Sour Talk, Cerritos Library

A Social History of Chinese Family Restaurants
 Many aspects of Chinese restaurants could make for an interesting and worthwhile book. Most people would probably consider the culinary and gastronomic aspects of Chinese cuisine to be of primary appeal.   A history of the kinds of dishes that were prepared and served, how they changed over time and place, and techniques and tips on how to prepare delicious food would find a large and hungry audience.
        However, my primary interest in Chinese American history is the study of how earlier Chinese immigrants, despite the fierce racism they encountered for decades, managed to find economic niches in several forms of self-employment such as laundries and restaurants.
      A primary goal for my book was to include narratives of the daily lives of these pioneer Chinese who earned their living with small, often family-run, cafes and restaurants all across the country. Unless they lived in towns with a sizable Chinese population, their customers were mostly if not entirely not Chinese. They served a menu consisting primarily of non-Chinese food along with a few American-Chinese inventions such as chop suey, chow mein, and egg rolls, and later expanded to include concoctions aimed at non-Chinese tastes and imaginations like crab rangoon, General Tso's chicken, and sweet and sour dishes.
        I was less interested in what was on the menu than what life was like for those who labored behind the kitchen door. What did the work involve and how did family members including children contribute to the enterprise?  Since I had never worked in a Chinese restaurant, I was counting on finding and convincing a handful of people who 'grew up' helping out in their family restaurant of the importance of sharing their personal stories.  I wanted at least 10 people to write narratives of the restaurant life, but they had to come from as many different regions of the country as possible so that I could see what similarities and differences might exist for the different locations. Aside from finding and persuading people to write, there was still the question of how well they could write concisely, and to the point. These were busy people and it was not possible to predict how long each individual would need or take to write their story, and, how well they would respond to suggestions for re-writes.
 Using Networks for Finding and Recruiting Contributors
     In finding these contributors, I was fortunate to have established many contacts during the writing and speaking for my first three books. Often, I learned background information about my contacts that were irrelevant to my goals at the moment, but which paid rich dividends a year or two later.  For example, back in 2005 when I was just entering the field of Chinese American history, as I mentioned in a previous post, I met Joe and Liz Chan at the Branching Out the Banyan Tree Conference in San Francisco sponsored by the Chinese Historical Society of America. Liz, who I learned came from a Louisville laundry, was probably the first person to buy a copy of my memoir, Southern Fried Rice, about my laundry life in Georgia.
A year later when I decided to write my Chinese Laundries book, I remembered Liz's laundry background and contacted her to invite her to join about 9 others who were writing about their family's laundry life.  Now, in 2009 when I was starting to research Chinese restaurants, I remembered that Joe came from a restaurant family in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  Joe was very receptive to the opportunity to have 'equal time' with me to match Liz's contribution to my laundry book!
         Another contact from my research for Chinese Laundries was Bill Tong. I had previously e-mailed him after I stumbled upon his webpage on Chinese American history. In our exchanges, I learned of his family's restaurant background in Chicago, a fact that was not important to me at that time but which provided me with a second story when I later embarked on my restaurant history book.
            A third prospect was Flo Oy Wong, a Bay area artist whose portfolio included some impressive work related to the experiences of Chinese immigrants at the Angel Island Immigration Detention Station where they faced immigration authorities upon arrival from China.  She and her siblings grew up in Oakland Chinatown where their parents operated a restaurant.
She had previously contacted me in 2006 when she learned of my memoir, Southern Fried Rice, about my childhood in Georgia since her husband hailed from Augusta, Georgia. This commonality helped me later approach and convince her to write her story about her family's restaurant. An unexpected bonus was that when her sister, Nellie Wong, an acclaimed feminist poet, learned of the book she offered to let me include two of her wonderful poems about her Chinese restaurant experiences.
My choice of a fourth prospect was a no-brainer.  Karen Tam, a talented young Chinese Canadian artist who I mentioned having met via the internet in another post, came from a Montreal restaurant family. She had created some wonderful museum installations that were evocative of the interior decor of dining rooms of Chinese restaurants typical of an earlier period before WW II.  I contacted Karen to not only invite her to write about her family restaurant but to get her permission to use images of her artistic renditions of dining spaces in family restaurants in the style common around the '30s and '40s on the cover of my book.
I gained two more stories when I mentioned my restaurant history plans to Mel Brown in Texas.  Mel and I had exchanged e-mails for several years and become good friends, and he even hosted me for a few days when I visited Austin after a talk in Houston in 2008.  Mel told me that his wife Lorraine came from a northern California Chinese restaurant family in Lodi, a small town near Stockton, California. He connected me with Lorraine's cousin, Julie Wong Hornsby, who lives near San Francisco and had a fuller knowledge of the operations of the New Shanghai Restaurant. Lorraine's and Julie's grandfather began the Lodi family business in 1927 that was eventually operated by Julie's parents until the early 1990s and she was eager to share its story.
       Mel proved helpful in finding me another story about a Chinese cafe in San Antonio named John L's..  He was acquainted with the owners, John Leung and his wife, Dora.  Mel persuaded John L's widow Dora to write the story of their business that operated for over fifty years.
I still was searching for someone from a restaurant in the South, which I was proving difficult since there had not been many Chinese in that region.  In 2008, I ran into Jasmine Kar Tang, a history graduate student at the University of Minnesota, at the Asian American Studies Association conference in Chicago. I had been on a panel with her at a previous conference in Atlanta where her talk was on an immigration case of a Chinese in New Orleans.
During some small talk I inquired how she came to be so interested in the history of Chinese in the South and discovered that she had grown up in Knoxville, TN.  I then volunteered that I had two cousins in Knoxville, Dominic Lo, who ran a restaurant and Veronica Chang who was a pharmacist. That comment really caught Jasmine's attention as she exclaimed, "oh that must be "Auntie' Veronica." Jasmine was not actually a relative of Veronica but regarded her as an "auntie" because she had grown up as a close friend of Veronica's daughter.
Fast forward a year later when I was searching for Chinese who grew up in a Chinese restaurant in the South, I contacted Jasmine, hoping she knew of one in Tennessee. As it turned out she did not know of anyone who grew up in a Chinese restaurant in the South. However, she mentioned that the parents of her boyfriend, Darren Lee, had a Chicago Chinese restaurant, and that he would likely be interested in contributing his story. So, my contact with Jasmine proved useful even if not in the way I thought it would be. Instead of getting a story from her about a Deep South restaurant, I got one from the midwest!
And so, without undue effort coupled with some good luck, I was already hot of the trail of seven stories. However, I still needed stories from the South and the East coast regions to feel I had adequately covered major regions of the country.
Finding Restaurant Stories from the South and East
Since there were few Chinese in the South prior to the end of World War II, I figured it would be more difficult to find stories from people who grew up in a family restaurant, whereas I thought it would be fairly easy to find stories about east coast Chinese family restaurants. I was lucky in one sense about the South because my research on the Delta Chinese grocers led me to discover the How Joy restaurant in Greenville, MS.  But I was unlucky in that Raymond Wong, one of the sons of the owner, did not feel he could write an account without considerable assistance as he was recovering from a stroke that impaired his confidence in writing.  Fortunately, I had met his brother, Russell, at a talk I gave in Houston so he was more than willing to help put the story of How Joy together.
I got another unexpected break when I became acquainted with Chat Sue, a native of Greenville who was a retired university counselor living in Pensacola, FL. Chat had seen some of my posts on the Face Book page and on the website I created for Delta Chinese grocer history.  During the course of our exchanges on these sites, he learned about my difficulty finding a Chinese restaurant in the Southeast for my book. My good fortune was that Chat happened to know P. C. Wu, a Chinese city councilman in Pensacola who came from a Savannah restaurant background. P. C. was eager to share the story of his mother's restaurant.
My final story, one about a New York Chinese family restaurant came to me in another unlikely way.  I had contacted my Delta friend, Gilroy Chow, who I met during my visit to Mississippi in 2008, to inquire on behalf of noted Chinese cookbook author, Grace Young, about any adaptations of Chinese cooking in the South when using regional foods.  He and his wife, Sally, are accomplished cooks and even once gave a cooking demonstration of Chinese cuisine with a Southern twist at an event on the National Mall in Washington, D. C.
        When Gilroy understood that I was now writing a book on Chinese family restaurants, he informed me that actually his family had operated one in Manhattan that went back as far as the 1930s.  This was a pleasant surprise discovery. Who would have thought that I would locate a New York Chinese restaurant that was part of the family of someone I knew living in Clarksdale, MS.  I had made the faulty assumption that he had always been in the Delta. Gilroy was delighted to have the opportunity to tell the story of the family restaurant in New York.   I finally was ready to proceed with the book now that I had a set of 10 Chinese family restaurant stories that represented a good cross section of regions across the country!
The Web Led To the "" Book Cover
        One day, well before I even thought of writing a restaurant book, I stumbled upon a website that Sue-On and Bill Hillman of Brandon University in Manitoba, Canada, created for their many varied interests and talents. It not only gave details of her parents immigration to Canada, details about the history of Sue-On's family Chinese restaurant in Manitoba , but also information about their musical talents and recordings, and Bill's voluminous material on Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan.
Included among these many varied treasures on this site was a section devoted to physical recreations of the dining areas of family-run Chinese restaurants in the style common in the 1920s-1940s presented as art installations by talented young Chinese Canadian artist, Karen Tam, from Montreal. She, like Sue-On, grew up working in her family's restaurant. She paid tribute to this experience with her artistic exhibits.
I was so impressed from seeing her work that I immediately e-mailed Karen to commend her. In less than a few minutes after I sent the e-mail, I received a grateful e-mail acknowledging my compliment from Karen.  Moreover, to my great surprise she added that at the moment she was in the kitchen of my niece (actually my cousin's daughter). I quickly put 2 and 2 together, recalling that Karen had attended the Art Institute of Chicago where my 'niece' Amy Lau from Atlanta (actually my cousin's daughter) had also studied art.  So, what happened was the two classmates, Karen and Amy, were together at the moment my e-mail arrived.  When Karen received the e-mail, she shared it immediately with Amy, who was surprised and then informed Karen that I was her 'uncle.'  What a small world, and isn't it amazing how the immediacy of e-mail communication can have such dramatic effects!
Karen's artistic installations of interiors of Chinese restaurants were so fitting for the topic of my book, : Life in Chinese Family Restaurants, that I soon realized that photographs of her creative efforts would be perfect artwork for my book's cover. Karen not only generously agreed to give me permission to use them, but also agreed to write a narrative about her experiences growing up and working in her family's restaurant in Montreal that I would include in  along with about 9 narratives from other "children of the Chinese restaurant."
 Surprise!  My Relatives Ran A Cafe in Rural Canada
  In my research on Chinese restaurants, I learned that across the Canadian prairies, virtually every small town had a small cafe run by a Chinese family, as vividly illustrated in a documentary by Tony Chan.  Even though they served mostly Western foods such as hamburgers, steak, pork chops, and apple pie, with the only dishes faintly related to Chinese food such as chop suey, chow mein, egg rolls, and egg foo young, they were considered "Chinese cafes" as the owners and operators were Chinese immigrants and their families.
One day it suddenly struck me that some of my relatives from China that immigrated to Canada years ago but I never met in person may have actually had a cafe in a small town in rural Canada.  For quite some time, my mother received Christmas cards from a small Saskatchewan town from relatives that she had never met.  I believe her niece had immigrated to Canada back around the 1970s, and raised her family there. However, I never heard any mention of what she or her husband did to earn a living.  Could it possibly be that they were restaurant operators?  If that was the case, I just had to find out because here I was writing a book on Chinese restaurants!  I searched through old letters that my mother had received over the years, but never discarded.  I succeeded, much to my joy, in finding a Christmas card from the mid-1980s from a Quong family that lived in Norquay, Saskatchewan.  Now it was 2012, and I was unsuccessful in getting information from the town as to whether there had been Chinese living there in the 1980s and if so whether any of them ran a restaurant. If there had been Chinese there in the past, they were no longer there, so my search was in vain.
A few months later, I found a photograph on the Internet of a Chinese restaurant in a town near Norquay that I wanted to include in my book.  I contacted Joan Champ, the person who took the photo, and she readily consented to let me use the photo.  I asked her if she had been to Norquay in hopes that she might have known my mother's niece and family, but she had little contact there.  However, she did know someone there and gave me his contact information. With renewed hope, I called him and explained the nature of my search.  However, he had only been in the area for a few years and could not confirm my hypothesis but fortunately his wife had lived in Norquay for many years.  The good news was that she had known the family, which had in fact had run a cafe, but the bad news was that the parents were deceased and their children had all moved away.  She did give me a telephone number of some Chinese restaurant in a neighboring town because she thought the owners knew my mother's niece.  I then made about three more calls, each leading me to another source. I was getting warmer, but still was unsuccessful in locating any of the descendants.
      I was frustrated, and felt I was at the end of the search. Then a month or two later, the photographer mentioned earlier, Joan Champ, contacted me. She was a history museum archivist and had studied old hotels in Saskatchewan, some which had Chinese operated cafes in them, as she describes on her blog.   Joan took an interest in my quest and did some searching of city directories and located several people named Quong living in Regina.  I took a chance and called a likely telephone number but the woman who received my call was quite guarded and reticient to divulge any information to a stranger even though I explained my purpose and described the information I had from the old Christmas cards sent to my mother.  She finally admitted that she was the daughter of the family I had been searching for but did not give me much other information.  A few weeks later she visited her brother in living in Calgary and told him about my call.  He was more receptive and we had a nice conversation about our kinship.  I was invited to call on another brother if I was ever in Vancouver. And although that seemed an unlikely possibility, as I live about 1500 miles Vancouver, it so happened that about a year later I did visit Vancouver and was able to get together with his family for a delightful dinner.

Next chapter;
Jacqueline Newman, Flavor and Fortune Magazine Journal



6 One Thing Leads to Another
My history career has been full of unexpected but amazing connections, and I want to describe some of the most rewarding ones.

Georgia Literary Festival, Macon, 2006
Macon was selected to be the host city for the 2006 Georgia Literary Festival, an annual event in the state to celebrate writers with some connection to the host city, either because they lived there at some time or wrote about some aspect of it.  So, as a home town boy, I received the honor of being invited to come home and speak about Southern Fried Rice, the story about the life of my parents and their children in Macon.
A popular Macon newspaper columnist, Ed Grisamore, got wind of my impending visit and interviewed me by phone. He wrote a touching column about my homecoming,
  Who would have thought that a timid but smart little son of immigrant parents from China that grew up in their laundry would come back to Macon decades later to a receptive audience in his hometown to hear his story!
At the Literary Festival, I again reconnected with my best friend from elementary school, Richard Harris, as well as Tim Adams who I had not known previously.


Figure 21 Scenes from the Georgia Literary Festival in Macon, 2006
    Although Tim and I had attended junior high school together, because I was a year older, we were not acquainted with each other. However, Tim knew who I was even though we had not been acquaintances but he contacted me and graciously invited me to stay at his home during my visit to Macon.  Richard and Tim invited about 20 people from our cohort, some I knew and others I did not, to a lovely party in honor of my visit. This “Southern hospitality” made the homecoming especially delightful, despite the unfortunate occurrence of red eye during my visit.


My 2006 OCA Talk Led to 2010 National Archives Talk
         Little could I foresee back in 2006 when I spoke to the Organization of Chinese Americans (OCA) Chapter in Atlanta (described in an earlier post) that my contacts there would indirectly lead to an invitation for me to be the Keynote Speaker in 2010 at the "We Are America: Asian Pacific Americans in the U. S. South" Symposium held at the Southeast National Archives in Morrow, Ga.

In late 2009 I was trying to arrange opportunities to speak about my forthcoming book on the history of Chinese restaurants, ": Life in Chinese Family Restaurants."  I recalled how helpful Dennis and Teresa Chao, of the Atlanta OCA, had been in arranging my talk with their group in 2006. I made an inquiry to Teresa to see if OCA might be interested in inviting me. She was now working in New York, but she connected me with Tricia Sung, who was new to the region, but very active in Asian Pacific American programs and activities.
            The timing was fortuitous as she was a leader of the Friends of the National Archives Southeast, which was planning a symposium for the National Archives focusing on Asian Pacific Americans in the South for May, 2010, which was headlined with the presence of two leading Asian American Congressmen, Mike Honda, Democrat from California and Anh Joseph Cao, Republican from Louisiana. Cao was the first Vietnamese to be elected to Congress, but he served only one term.

Figure 22

Foo’s Ho Ho Restaurant 2010 Fundraiser, Vancouver
           My long time friend in Vancouver, Canada, and fellow psychology professor, Rod Wong, go back many years to our days as pioneer Chinese psychology grad students at Northwestern University.  When I mentioned to Rod in 2006 about my interest in writing a book on Chinese Laundries and was looking to interview Chinese, who like myself, had grown up in this common Chinese business, he put me in contact with Elwin Xie, who grew up working in his family's Union Street laundry in Vancouver. Elwin thus became one of the contributors to my book, Chinese Laundries: Tickets to Survival on Gold Mountain.
Fast forward to the spring of 2010, Elwin invited me to be on a panel of speakers with a personal background involving Chinese laundries for a fundraiser to support one of Vancouver's old Chinatown restaurant, Foo's Ho Ho, which had fallen upon hard times. Located in the  old historic Chinatown in the Pender Avenue area, a decaying neighborhood with the infestation of drug addicts, homeless people, and prostitutes, Foo's Ho Ho, like other Chinatown businesses, was facing financial difficulties.
A faithful following of patrons established Friends of Foo's Ho Ho to promote monthly cultural events at the restaurant to attract customers back to this nostalgic restaurant that featured favorite dishes from the village cuisine. Chinese Laundry Kids was the title of the fundraiser event Elwin Xie organized.  He invited me and Canadian author Judy Fong Bates, as fellow "children from a Chinese laundry" to share stories about our childhoods in our family laundries. Link?
            After enjoying a delicious dinner of Toishan village "soul food" dishes rather than the "faux" Chinese dishes concocted for the tourist trade, we each spoke about how the laundry was a central part of our childhood.   I shared some personal memories of my life growing up in our family-run laundry in Macon, Georgia, where we were the sole Chinese people in town, that were described in my memoir, Southern Fried Rice. In addition, since my Chinese restaurant book, : Life in Chinese Family Restaurants had just been published, and we were meeting in a Chinese restaurant, it was quite fitting that I also discussed parts of this social history.
A totally unexpected outcome of this event was that it fueled the interest of one audience member, Yvonne Gall, a Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) radio producer to consider doing a program on Chinese laundries.  After the event, she asked if I would be willing to be interviewed in the fall for a radio documentary on Chinese laundries. She came to southern California, where I live, in September, 2010, for the interview. I checked with my contacts and was fortunate to find one of the few Chinese laundries still in operation in the area and contacted them to arrange a visit. After the interview, I took Yvonne to visit to one of the few still fully functional Chinese laundries left, Sam Sing Laundry, in West Los Angeles where she met and interviewed Albert Wong, who runs the laundry. Albert is a grandson of the original owner.
An hour long radio documentary on Canadian radio includes segments based on the Sam Sing laundry visit.
(and RTHK 2012)
Crossroads Writers Conference and Literary Festival, Macon, GA.  2011
There was yet another visit to Macon in store for me in 2011 that came as a total surprise. Organizers of a new annual Macon event, the Crossroads Literary Festival and Writers Conference, invited me to participate.  It was Macon’s idea to extend the interest in writers generated by the success of the Georgia Literary Event that was held in Macon in 200??.  To be perfectly honest, I did not believe there would be very much interest in Macon in hearing about books on Chinese American history in the South, or possible most other places for that matter.  Fiction, such as mysteries, romance novels, and contemporary genres rather than nonfiction were the main topics of interest for this type of audience consisting primarily of college students and young adults with aspirations to become fiction writers.

Figure 23 Crossroads Writers Conference and Literary Festival
Still, I could not resist the opportunity and the honor so I accepted.  My low expectations were fulfilled.  At one session, only my best friend and host from grammar school mentioned earlier, Richard Harris, and one other person showed up.
A better turnout was present for a panel discussion on “Creative NonFiction” of which I was a participant even though I felt the issue was too philosophical for my taste.  A noted literary scholar on Robert Frost, Jay Parini, was the anchor for the panel.  The most provocative issue was whether memoirs are factual or fictional. I took the view that all memoirs are subjective, but most are reasonably accurate as to facts but not necessarily as to feelings.  Parini felt strongly to the contrary, arguing eloquently that all memoirs were fictional.  Insofar as memoirs are not entirely accurate, I could agree but to call them “fiction” seemed, at least to me, somewhat hyperbolic!

Figure 24 Panel at Crossroads Conference
At my session on the next day where I was to speak about Southern Fried Rice, only about a dozen attended, but among them were two schoolmates from grammar school, which made it all worthwhile.


After my talk, a man asked me how my brother George was doing.  I was surprised by the question, but since I described George's learning disabilities in my book, I assumed he was just curious to see what happened to George.  I answered that he is self-sufficient and lives alone in northern California.  He then told me that he and George were in the first grade together, and that George was a rambunctious kid and one day had accidentally punched him in the eye.  I put 2 and 2 together, remembering that one day George came home with a note from the principal that George had been expelled for some unstated misconduct.  So, I said, to the gentleman, you are the one that got George kicked out of school!  We had a nice chuckle. Who would have thought that over half a century later at a book talk, I would run into the guy who indirectly got my brother expelled from school!
My overall trip worked well because I had hedged my bets. Realistically, I knew that the Macon talks would not attract many people.  I decided to see if I could give a talk in Atlanta either just before or after my talk in Macon so that my trip to Georgia would not be a total loss. As experienced air travelers know, whether you are going to heaven or hell, you have to change planes in Atlanta. Thus my talk in Atlanta would incur no air travel expenses, and   there were no lodging costs as my cousin in Atlanta offered me not only lodging but also the use of a car for a weekend trip to Macon.  All I had to pay for was gas!

Figure 25 Emory University, Atlanta

         My Atlanta talk, which actually occurred two days BEFORE the Macon Crossroads Conference was well received,….  Also a radio interview with NPR Steven Goss,,,, re: paper sons…
Thanks to Tricia Sung of the Asian Pacific American Historical Society in Atlanta, an arrangement was made for me to give a talk at Emory University co sponsored by APAHS, OCA, and USCPFA.  I had a wonderful audience at Emory University as well as an interview on the local NPR radio station.
           Are there any future trips to Macon for me?  I don't know, but if there are, they may turn up some other fascinating discoveries.
         Tricia Sung, who had invited me to speak in 2010 in Atlanta at an event held at the National Archives for the Asian Pacific American Historical Society, was very helpful in working with other groups such as the Atlanta Chapters of the Organization of Chinese Americans, the National Association of Chinese Americans, and the U.S. China People's Friendship Association (USCPFA) to co-sponsor my talk at Emory University.
USCPFA National Seminar, Washington, D. C. 2012
           My Atlanta talk went so well that it led USCPFA Atlanta chapter President Peggy Roney to recommend to the organization's National President, Diana Greer, that she invite me to speak at the National Seminar to be held in Washington, D. C. scheduled for the following April in 2012.    
I was invited, but unfortunately, however, I would have to pay my own way as the organization could not afford the expense of bringing me from California.  Still, the opportunity to speak to such an important, and different type of group from the audiences I was accustomed to, was tempting.  The deciding factor for me was whether I could arrange a second talk to another organization during my D. C. visit.  That second venue would help me recoup my travel costs because I could sell a few more books!
Talk To OCA, NACA, and CACA Washington D. C. 2012
          It so happened that a few months earlier, Haipei Shuie, President of the National Council of Chinese Americans had contacted me to join the Mississippi Delta Chinese Facebook page.   He suggested that if I was ever planning to be in the D. C. area there would be interest in having me speak.  At that time, I did not foresee such a trip anytime soon.  However, now that I was thinking of going to D. C. to speak at the USCPFA meeting, I decided to contact Haipei to see if his organization would sponsor a talk during the same week. Combined with the support of another organization, the D. C. Chapter of OCA, of which his friend, Stan Lou, was a leader, and Ted Gong of the C.A.C.A., their combined groups sponsored my talk.
        The visit to Washington proved to be a great success. First, my talk at the USCPFA national seminar was well-received and the sessions included many fascinating topics at which I made good contacts with attendees from Chapters across the country.  One evening we toured the spectacular new Chinese Embassy for a reception given for USCPFA.

Figure 26 Reception at Chinese Embassy for USCPFA
       I had an opportunity to meet and present Ambassador Zhang Yesui (top right) with a set of all four Yin and Yang Books, which he graciously accepted, expressing the view that it is important that China know more about the history of Chinese in America. Without the persuasive and enthusiastic support of the President of the Southern Region, Peggy Roney (bottom left), who nominated me as a seminar speaker, this would not have been possible.

A day later, my talk at the Chinese Community Cultural Center in Chinatown was well attended and the audience enjoyed my presentation, which was the subject for a positive post by a blogger, Jay Roberts.

Figure 27 Speaking at Chinese Community Center, Washington
         My decision to travel at my own expense to speak in Washington, D. C. proved the adage of  'nothing ventured, nothing gained.'  I took the risk of funding my own travel with the hope that I could break-even with proceeds from book sales, which I did manage to achieve.  I was rewarded in having the chance to present my ideas to new audiences and the opportunity to make some valuable new contacts, several who made feelers for future talks in the D. C. area.
Consultant for Chinese Immigrant History Documentary
               In early spring of 2012, Annie Yau, a producer with Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) sent me an e-mail describing RTHK plans to shoot a 5 -part documentary on Overseas Chinese History.  She was the producer of the hour long episode centered on Chinese laundries and restaurants and wanted to interview me about my experiences growing up in a Chinese laundry in the American South as described in my memoir, Southern Fried Rice. As I had also published books on laundries, Chinese Laundries, and on restaurants, , she wanted my assistance in finding contacts for other interviews with people related to Chinese laundries and restaurants.
Annie contacted me since she knew about my books on these Chinese enterprises. It was encouraging to see that Hong Kong media recognized the value of producing more programs for their audiences about the lives of their ancestors and descendants who left Guangdong for North America in search of Gold Mountain.


Figure 28
        Annie came to Los Angeles in March, 2012 and I took her to visit several small family-run Chinese restaurants and to the Sam Sing Laundry in West Los Angeles, which I mentioned in an earlier post because last year I took Yvonne Gall of CBC-Radio in Vancouver, Canada there for an interview that was part of a radio documentary on Chinese laundries.  Annie then went to visit other sites and people, some of which I helped arrange, in Chicago and Toronto.
         In April, Annie announced the itinerary for her return for filming.  She and her film crew would arrive in early May to do an interview with me.  There was a slight conflict with my schedule because around that date I was going to be speaking in Portland, Oregon, about my history of Chinese restaurants, . This talk had been arranged earlier through the help of Bruce Wong, a cousin of Paul Wong who had helped me with my Delta Chinese research for CHOPSTICKS IN THE LAND OF COTTON. Bruce, who heads the Portland Chinese Scholarship Foundation, supported my visit and felt my visit would help draw a large audience for their annual spring fund raising drive.
       Although I knew I could not expect any travel funds from this organization, I felt the cause was worthwhile and my trip for the talk would also afford me with a  visit to see my niece, Liz, and her 2 college age kids, Lauren (who designed covers for two of my books) and Aiden, and her new husband of a year, Mark.  Being able to stay at their house, and hoping to sell enough books to pay for my airfare (which I did), I looked at the trip as a family reunion.
After her visit to the U. S. and Canada to meet me and other potential interviewees and film sites in early 2012, Annie returned in May with a 2-person film crew to conduct and film interviews with persons connected with several laundries and restaurants that dated back many decades in  the U. S. and Canada. I assisted her with background information as well as the story of my family’s laundry in Georgia from the late 1920s to early 1950s as described in my memoir, Southern Fried Rice.
        Annie adjusted her plans and asked if RTHK could come to Portland to film parts of my talk on Chinese restaurant history as well as film part of their interview with me in Portland and then finish it the next week in my home in California where they would also want my participation in the filming at the Sam Sing Laundry in West L. A.
The RTHK team also met me in Portland and filmed my book talk on my restaurant history book, , at a fundraiser event for the Portland Chinese Scholarship Foundation. I introduced them to Bruce Wong, whose grandfather had operated a landmark Portland restaurant, Hang Far Low, which no longer is in the family. They filmed Bruce and I at the Canton Grill restaurant eating chop suey prepared in their kitchen while discussing its important early role in Chinese American restaurant history.


Figure 29 Speaking at Portland Chinese Scholarship Foundation



Figure 30

          The episode was broadcast in Hong Kong, and can be viewed online with either a Chinese or English voiceover.  Add Links
            Much of the video is in Chinese, but most of the interviewees speak in English about the Chinese American and Canadian experience in these family-run businesses. It includes segments filmed in laundries and restaurants in Milwaukee, Los Angeles, Toronto and Brockville, Canada. It also includes an interview at China Camp, a historic shrimp fishing site near San Francisco with 86 year old Frank Quan who grew up there.
            I was interviewed during my visit to Portland about Chinese restaurants and then about Chinese laundries later in Cypress, CA. where I live. Being part of the documentary was a fascinating experience because I learned more about the complexity and challenge of creating a coherent, authoritative, and yet interest-holding film.  I did not realize how many ‘retakes’ would be needed, and how much editing occurs.  When I finally saw the completed documentary, I was glad that such highly talented professionals were involved in producing it. For example, their state of the art computer software  ’animated’ old posters and newspaper cartoons showing racist treatment of Chinese that increased the emotional impact of those images.

(a week later in LA….  I also introduced her to Jon and Albert Wong, father and son at the Sam Sing Laundry in West Los Angeles, which is one of the few full service Chinese laundries still operating by family members.

          In addition, Annie wanted to interview me together with long-time Portland resident, Bruce Wong, grandson of a Portland Chinese restaurateur who started the popular but now closed Hung Far Low Restaurant back in the 1920s. (Although its large landmark neon sign was recently renovated and remounted at its original location above the street level, the building is now occupied by a different restaurant.)
         Thanks to owner Fred Chin (CK), they were able to use another old time restaurant opened back in the 1940s, the Canton Grill, the day after my talk to film Bruce and I conversing while eating, what else, but chop suey!  First, the camera crew invaded the kitchen for over an hour to film the preparation of several iconic American-Chinese dishes, chop suey, egg foo young, and chow mein. Then, Bruce and I, seated in a booth in the dining room sampled the dishes as we conversed about the background of these dishes that were very popular with non Chinese customers.


Figure 31

Blog Compliments for Portland  Talk
       A local blogger stumbled upon my Portland talk and found, to his pleasant surprise, that he found it worthwhile and concluded:
"It may look like it should have been dull. Add that it was a history lecture and you might be certain that it was dull. The lecturer was Dr. John Jung, who was born in Macon, Georgia, where he and his family were the only Chinese in town. Dr. John Jung spoke about the history of Chinese immigrants, but he told it through the stories of Chinese restaurants and the families that operate them. He managed to work the Chinese Exclusion Act and chop suey into one sentence! (Chop suey is most certainly an American dish, but it helped popularize Chinese restaurants among whites, who were leery of the Chinese and their food.)
           As I have said before, history is not about dates, it’s about stories. If more people could have a teacher like Dr. Jung, maybe fewer people would run from history, and maybe that couple would have let me tell them about the peonies in bloom just around the corner."

KBOO Interview



Invitation to Return TO Portland in 2013


Figure 32

The next evening I addressed the Portland Chinese high school graduating seniors at a Chinese banquet.   I was pleased that the audience of 90 grads and their parents which exceeded 200, my largest audience ever, found my message of value!

Figure 33

USCPFA

My previous successful presentations to the U. S. China People’s Friendship Association in Long Beach, Atlanta, and Washington, D. C. led to an invitation to speak at the Western Region Conference of the organization.  Since the meeting would be held in southern California, I was pleased as it offered a welcome respite from the arduous travel by air, especially with the task of transporting copies of my books.

Figure 34 Western Conference, USCPFA, San Gabriel, CA.
         However, I viewed this invitation as an opportunity to challenge myself and move away from the comfort zone that I had developed from giving numerous talks about my four books on these important topics.
Inasmuch as USCPFA is concerned about broad issues related to U. S.- China relations, and many of the members are not Chinese, although extremely knowledgeable about  China, I chose to discuss the diversity of Chinese in America and its implications. Prior to the mid-20th century, most Chinese immigrants came from Guangdong province in southern China near Canton.  They came as sojourners who, out of economic necessity left home to find work to earn money to send back to their impoverished families. However, they intended to eventually return to China rather than settle permanently here.  For many reasons, many beyond their control, they did not return but raised families here. They, and their children, endured harsh lives, racial prejudice, and even violence, for decades before achieving better acceptance. and success
In contrast, during the last half of the past century and continuing still, the primary source of Chinese immigrants was no longer Guangdong but places like Hong Kong, Taiwan, People’s Republic of China, especially Fujian province, and southeast Asia. Many of these groups, unlike the pioneers from Guangdong, spoke Mandarin, had some English fluency, professional skills, financial wealth, and retained residences in the country of origin as well as in the United States.  To the non-Chinese, all Chinese in America are seen as one more or less homogenous group for many purposes.  In reality, these  subgroups with Chinese heritage are quite diverse and often indifferent to, if not at odds, with each other.
              In my talk I wanted to direct attention to this “changing face” of Chinese in America and speculate on its consequences for Chinese among themselves as well as how it affects the relations between Chinese and the rest of America.
              Initially, I was asked to speak about one or more of my books on earlier Chinese immigrant forms of self-employment such as laundries, restaurants, and grocery stores.



Figure 35

I soon had a second opportunity to speak about the “Changing Face of Chinese in America” at a meeting of the Seal Beach International Friendship Association.  The group’s program chair, Claire Yeh, had heard me give this talk a few months earlier at the U. S.-China People’s Friendship Association Western Regional conference and invited me to give the same presentation to the Seal Beach organization.
     The audience of around 70 was impressive in its size, but also in its composition of mostly non-Chinese, unlike my typical audiences that are sometimes 100 percent Chinese.  I welcomed this venue as I believe it is important that I have opportunities to speak to more nonChinese to increase their awareness of the history of Chinese in America and so that I am not always “preaching to the choir.”


Figure 36

           During the evening, I experienced not one, but three, fascinating “Small World” connections with some members of the audience. One woman, Julie, who heard me speak in San Gabriel last October had purchased a copy of my book about the Mississippi Delta Chinese as a gift for her Chinese friend in the Bay area, not knowing that this friend was born in Mississippi. When she related this coincidence to me a few weeks ago, I soon realized that I knew her friend, Nancy, as well as two of her siblings living in the South. Moreover, her friend was a friend of one of my friends, Sheila, whom I’ve known for about the past 50 years!   Julie brought, Cliff, Nancy’s son to the talk.
At the event I also met a Chinese woman, Mary Yuen who mentioned in passing that she was from Canada. To make small talk, I inquired, Vancouver? Toronto?  No, she said she was from a place no one has heard of, Outlook, Saskatchewan, a very small town in a remote area.  But as you might have guessed, I actually just happened to know about Outlook because I have seen a 1970s video of a small cafe run for decades in Outlook by a Chinese, affectionately known to the townspeople as Noisy Jim. Needless to say, she was as surprised that I had heard of Outlook as I was to be meeting a Chinese coming from there!
              Finally, a Chinese woman, Joan Eng, bought all four of my books. As we were chatting while I autographed the books, she mentioned she had grown up in Jacksonville, Florida, where her family, one of the two Chinese families in the area, had a farm where they raised Chinese vegetables.  Now it was a long shot, but I remember that my father would often order fresh Chinese vegetables like bok choy that were shipped to Georgia from Florida. When I described the wooden slatted crates that the vegetables were delivered in by Railway Express, she confirmed that my description matched the procedure that their farm used.  We were both stunned as we realized that sometime back around the 1940s my parents must had been customers of her parents!  So , it was a very exciting day for me with these many ‘small world’ experiences!
              Oh, I should add one other exciting event that happened earlier around lunchtime in Cerritos at a press conference for a local city council member who was being smeared in a vicious anti-Chinese political ad.  At this meeting I ran into Candy Yee, who I had met over a year or 2 ago at a talk I gave on Mississippi Chinese grocers.  In that talk I described a landmark lawsuit filed in 1924 by a Chinese grocer challenging school segregation against Chinese in the Mississippi Delta. The case went all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court, which in 1927 ruled against the Chinese, Gong Lum v. Rice.
               During the Q & A, a Chinese woman stood up and proudly announced that the daughter of the plaintiff in that historic case was her aunt!   On that occasion, I failed to get her name or contact information, and several times later I wished I knew how to contact her.
So, it was providential that she and I were at a meeting a year or two later and she came up and reintroduced herself.  I then proceeded to tell her that a researcher in New York had just called me for an interview because she was writing a book that focuses on the Gong Lum case. I was eager to tell Candy about this writer as she might have some useful memories from both her aunt and her mother.  To my surprise, Candy already knew about the planned book as the author had already tracked her down and was coming to interview her next month.

CAHS
2013






AAUW




Rosemead








Figure 37 Rosemead

Clothesline Muse




Figure 38  Clothesline Muse





 7 People, Places, and Events


People
Joe and Liz Chan   It was at the 2005 San Francisco Branching Out The Banyan Tree conference where I was 'baptized' into Asian American studies by giving a paper about the 19 male descendants of my great great grandfather, Fun Fai Lo, that ran laundries in the Deep South in the early half of the last century.  I also had the good fortune that Florence Hogan of the Asian American Curriculum Project or Book Store kindly agreed to display several copies of Southern Fried Rice at her book booth.
During the lunch, I happened to be seated at a table with no one I knew but one of the women, Judy Lee, became interested when I described my book.  She may have been my very first sale, because she excused herself after lunch to go buy a copy so I could autograph it for her.
        On the other hand, it is possible that someone else beat her to it. As I walked toward the book exhibits, I noticed a man waving at me and gesturing for me to come speak with him.  Joe Chan introduced himself, and told me that his wife, Liz, grew up living above her family's laundry in Louisville, Kentucky, and had purchased a copy of Southern Fried Rice. A few moments later, I met Liz, and got to autograph her copy.  They were both retired and told me that they served as docents at the Angel Island Immigration Station and offered to give me a tour if I ever came there.  My wife, Phyllis and I, did take them up on the offer a few years later even though we were unable to enter the buildings which were then being restored.
       Jumping ahead a year or two, when I was searching for people to write about experiences growing up in a Chinese laundry, I succeeded in persuading Liz to contribute the story of her family's laundry to my book, Chinese Laundries.   Similarly, a year or two later, when I wanted to get stories of growing up in a Chinese restaurant for my book, , Joe readily volunteered to write an account of his father's restaurant in Ft. Wayne, Indiana.  What a wonderful connection I made in San Francisco with the Chans in 2005. Little did I know then that I would be enlisting them to help me write my laundry and my restaurant books!
           . Not only have they shared stories in two of my books about their family businesses, laundry for Liz and restaurant for Joe, hey have attended several of my talks in places as distant as Atlanta, Ga., San Francisco, Ca., and Lake Havasu City, Az.
            In 2008, though Joe's aunt, I was invited to give a talk to the Desert Jade Women's Group in Phoenix where the Chans housed me in their 'snowbird' residence in Sun City where they went to get away from the 'winters' of Alameda, Ca.  I also was scheduled to speak to some classes in the Asian American Studies program as well as to a general audience at Arizona State University.
               But a week before I was scheduled to speak to Desert Jade, the event had to moved back one week because a key person in the Chinese community had died. Then, as I arrived at the airport for the new date, I learned of another funeral that would be held on the same day as my talk. I suppose there never is a 'convenient' time for people to die, so I was philosophical and fatalistic about my timing. However, as many of the mourners were still interested in hearing the talk, the hour was moved back to allow people time to get from the cemetery to where I was speaking.  Despite these unexpected happenstances, all went very well with the event and I had 'dodged a bullet."

Sylvia Sun Minnick

Hazel Wallace and USCPFA
          In Nov.2009, I gave an invited talk about my "retirement" career in Chinese American history to the College of Liberal Arts Emeriti at California State University, Long Beach, where I had taught since 1962 before retiring.  Inasmuch as I didn't think this audience would be as interested in the details of my books, I decided to trace the events and processes, many unexpected and beyond my plans, that unfolded and expanded after I retired from teaching psychology.
         One of the audience members, Hazel Wallace, found my work of especial interest and she also attended a talk I gave the following month at the Cerritos Public Library on "Chinese in the American South."  She introduced herself at the book signing following the talk as the President of the Long Beach Chapter of the U.S.-China People's Friendship Association (USCPFA), an organization that I knew little about then.  She asked whether I would consider speaking to her organization sometime.
        A year later in Dec. 2010, I was speaking in Irvine, which is an affluent city in Orange County with a large Chinese, and other Asians, population.  I was surprised, disappointed, and embarrassed, at the very small audience.  About 10 people came, and that included four of my psychology colleagues from Long Beach and my wife and two friends!  There were only 3 or 4 audience members that I did not know, and one person who wandered in by mistake and soon left.  It was definitely the low point in my book talk career!
      At the end, however, three people stayed to talk and ask questions.  None of them were Chinese but I discovered that all three were members of the Long Beach USCPFA who came at the urging of Hazel Wallace, the aforementioned President of this group. Fortunately, they must have enjoyed the talk immensely because a few months later, I was invited by this group to give a talk about "" in Long Beach at, where else, but at a restaurant named, Forbidden City!  Unlike the abysmal turnout at the  Irvine event, the audience filled the restaurant with the largest attendance that USCPFA Long Beach had ever attracted before.  It was especially gratifying after my disastrous event in Irvine!
That's not the end of the endorsements from my benefactor.  Hazel was also involved with the Friends of the Signal Hill Library and she convinced them to invite me to speak there near the end of the year.  That evening, however, started badly.  It turned out that, due to miscommunication or, rather lack of it, no arrangements had been made to provide a projector and computer for presenting slides.  I didn't panic, and just resolved to make the best of it.  Having been a professor for so many years, I felt confident that I could give a decent talk without visual aids although I knew that many of my images would greatly enhance the talk.  Fortunately, at the last minute, an able technician jerry-rigged a connection between a laptop and a medium sized LCD flat screen television!
At this talk, there was another surprise, one that was flattering.  I learned from one USCPFA member, Stanley Yon, that there was talk at the 2011 National Meeting in Kansas City to invite me to speak at the 2012 National Convention of the organization in Washington, D. C.  More about this in a later post!  Suffice it to say that having someone like Hazel Wallace be your advocate is invaluable!

Mel Brown

Frieda Quon

Soo Lon Moy

Grace Young, Queen of Woks
  One day about 3 years ago, I received an e-mail from a "Grace Young." I recognized the name, as I had a wonderful Chinese cookbook authored by someone with that name, but I wondered why, if it was this Grace Young, was she e-mailing me.  It turns out that it was indeed THE Grace Young, the one whose picture appears on her first Chinese cookbook along with her mother and grandmother.
        One of the many nice aspects of "Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen" was that it was more than a set of recipes.  It was also like a family scrapbook full of memories, photos, and anecdotes covering three generations of women.  The inclusion of recipes of many home style rather than banquet restaurant dishes appealed to me.
       Back to why she contacted me.  Grace was preparing another cookbook and in search of cooking techniques and recipes from Chinese who lived in the Deep South, and knowing of my book on the Delta Chinese, "Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton," she thought I might be helpful.  She also expressed interest in how I went about arranging venues to give book talks for my work on Chinese American history.  I shared my methods, but didn't think they would be that useful for her since her audiences were quite different from mine in many respects.  It turns out, as I was to discover, in the following months, that Grace needed no advice from me. Quite the contrary, as she was fully booked for cooking demonstrations and book signings all over the country.
       On a visit to New York in 2010, Grace and I found time to meet in person for tea in an Italian coffeehouse located, where else, but in Chinatown. Grace is a charming and gracious person with no airs about her at all, as one might think the "Queen of Woks" might be.  We had a too short but cordial conversation about our shared love of San Francisco, Chinese food, Chinese history, etc..  I learned that one of my favorite San Francisco Chinese restaurants, Sun Heung Hung, had been her father's business for many years on Clay Street just below Grant Ave.  Since then, we have formed a nice friendship and we have continued to share information and tips on promoting our work.

Places
  My friend, historian Sylvania Sun Minnick and author of SamFow, an excellent history of San Joaquin valley's Chinese, arranged for me to come to Stockton to speak about Southern Fried Rice in 2007.  
Hanford, And as an afterthought, she asked if I would be willing to stop by Hanford, CA. and speak there since it was on the way from southern California to Stockton.  This was a wonderful opportunity because Hanford, largely unknown even to Chinese in California, was once a center of Chinese population when railroad construction recruited hundreds of Chinese laborers.  Subsequently, around the 1960s Hanford became a mecca for devotees of Chinoise cuisine developed by Richard Wing, a local son who had served as General George Marshall's personal cook during World War II. His sister-in-law, Camille Wing, was my wonderful hostess and she gave me a tour of China Alley, where Wing's restaurant once operated and attracted celebrities and dignataries to come from far and wide.
Stockton, about Southern Fried Rice to a lively and attentive audience. Although Sylvia and I had attended the same high school in San Francisco, Lowell, and lived only a few blocks apart we never knew each other until we became acquainted via a mutual friend who taught at my University.  How odd is that?  Sylvia gave me invaluable advice during my writing of Southern Fried Rice, and we have since become very good friends.
Salinas    Following my Hanford and Stockton talks, I was able to coordinate my travel schedule so that I could speak to the Chinese American Citizen's Alliance (C.A.C.A.) in Salinas in the central valley, another once thriving center of Chinese immigrants, on my drive back down to southern California.
          My hosts treated me to a lovely dinner on the coastal village of Moss Landing prior to my presentation at the Confucius Church near the area where Chinatown once thrived.





Northern California Museum of Chinese American History

 In conjunction with the 129th Bok Kai Festival that honors the God of Water, Brian Tom, founder of the Chinese Museum of Northern California invited several authors of recent Chinese American history books to speak in Marysville in 2007. This historic site, located at the foothills of the mountains, was the launching point from where Chinese and other miners headed for the gold fields, hoping to strike it rich back in the mid 1800s.  
The 2 days of history talks in this festive atmosphere added to the enjoyable social and intellectual exchange between the audience and the authors.  I spoke on what life was like for Chinese in the American South during the Jim Crow laws era on Saturday after the big parade that was climaxed with a double dragon dance.  On Sunday, using my identity as a Chinese American as a case study, I illustrated how this important aspect of a person is not a fixed or invariant aspect but one that ebbs and flows over time depending on the ethnic diversity of in areas where I lived over the years.
        The annual event ended on "Bomb Day" and we stepped outside to watch the 'tossing of the bombs ' or firing of firecrackers in the main intersection of old Chinatown. This tradition of the Bai Kai Festival is somewhat akin to the running of the bulls in Spain, where crowds of young men jostle vigorously in the street to capture red rings containing lucky numbers that are propelled into the air from some of the hundreds of strings of ignited firecrackers.

Writers Group, Lake Havasu City, Arizona. This speaking engagement was due to the efforts by one of the contributors to my book, Chinese Laundries, Lucy Leonard, who wrote about her family's laundry experiences in Hawthorne, Ca.
       Whereas most of my audiences have consisted of older Chinese, the Lake Havasu City Writers Group was mostly "lo-fan" or caucasian, which presented a new challenge for me. Would I be able to involve a non-Chinese audience in a talk about Chinese immigrant life?    I decided to combine my presentation about the history of Chinese Laundries with a tutorial on the Print-on-Demand approach to publishing and some authoring software so that aspiring writers could take away valuable information for their own publishing ambitions.
      An unexpected surprise was the presence of my friends, Joe and Liz Chan. It may be noted that Liz was a contributor to my Chinese laundry book since her family owned a laundry in Louisville, Ky. They were spending the winter in their Sun City, Az. condo and had decided to drive over to surprise me at my talk. We enjoyed a delightful dinner later with Lucy Leonard and her husband, Bill, and my gracious housing hosts, Pat and Richard Agnew.
Houston Chinese Professional Club April, 2008
I got to give a presentation about two of my books, Chinese Laundries and Southern Fried Rice, after a fine dinner at a Chinese restaurant.  There were over 140 attendees including many Mississippi Delta expatriates.  As I was working on a third book, Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton, a history of Chinese grocers in the Mississippi Delta, I had arranged for a pre-dinner gathering with former Delta Chinese now living in Houston. I got to meet many people in person with whom I had had many prior e mail and telephone conversations about the Delta Chinese, especially Bobby Joe Moon.
       My friend, historian Sylvia Sun Minnick, of Stockton, Ca. helped in arranging the talk in that her brother, Philip Sun, was President of the Chinese Professional Club of Houston.  Phil and his wife Chen. architects, provided lodging during my visit in the beautiful home they designed.   It was especially nice that one of my brightest former students, Adriana Alcantara, now a professor at U. of Houston, attended the talk with her teenage daughter.
Houston 2009 Dinner Talk on Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton
It was a special opportunity to talk about my book on the Chinese grocers of the Mississippi Delta in Houston because so many in the audience had Delta roots.  Some of the audience had lived and worked in the Delta for many years before retiring to Houston.
It was wonderful to get to see many of the friends I had made from my Houston visit in the previous year and to make the acquaintance of others, including Raymond Chong, who has done some wonderful genealogical work and written beautiful poems about his Hoi-ping roots in Guangdong where his father came from to the U. S.  More will be mentioned about him in conjunction with the historic Far East Restaurant in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo in another post.
Chinese American Museum of Chicago
      It was exciting to get the opportunity to speak in 2008 at the Chinese American Museum of Chicago about my history of Chinese laundries since it was the site of the first and most definitive research, Paul Siu's The Chinese Laundryman: A Study in Isolation, on this important business among Chinese immigrants from the late 1800s until well past the middle of the next century. Furthermore, I attended Northwestern University in nearby Evanston to obtain my Ph.D. so I felt a personal connection to the city as well.
      It was an honor to have the poem, "Let Us Now Praise Chinese Laundrymen," I wrote for my book, Chinese Laundries: Tickets to Survival on Gold Mountain, included as part of an exhibit at the Museum on Chinese laundries.
               Insert

     Most unfortunately, the Museum suffered a major fire later that year and destroyed some important artifacts, including my poem, but in 2011 the Museum came back in greater condition thanks to the dedicated volunteer staff that has labored long and hard to create a beautiful Museum in the heart of Chinatown. They extended wonderful hospitality toward me and treated me to dinner after the presentation.
Second Visit to Speak In Chicago 2011

            My first visit in 2008 to the Chinese American Museum in Chicago to speak about the history of Chinese laundries was well attended and the response was very positive so I was delighted to be invited to speak there again in June, 2011. This time I gave a talk about my book, : Life in Chinese Family Restaurants, a social history of the thousands of Chinese immigrants and their families, including many descendants, who labored long hours in small restaurants across the U. S. and Canada to earn their living. Chicago was a major site of these restaurants and I was fortunate to persuade two Chinese, Bill Tong and Darren Lee, who grew up helping their parents in their family restaurants to contribute narratives of their experiences for the book.


Figure 39

        As part of the presentation, I invited one of these contributors living in Chicago, Bill Tong, whose parents had a restaurant on the northside of Chicago, to share his memories of what life was like operating their business.

Figure 40

       Earlier that same day, I had made the acquaintance of many members of the Culinary Historians of Chicago when I attended a splendid talk about Indian cooking. They graciously took me to lunch in Chinatown and then came to hear my talk after which they asked many insightful questions about Chinese restaurants.

Jacqueline Newman, Editor, Flavor and Fortune

Yong Chen
Susan Carter

Jack Peng


Steve Doi, Book Maven
At the 2008 Asian American Studies Association meeting in Chicago, I wanted to publicize my first two books on Chinese American history, Southern Fried Rice and Chinese Laundries, but the cost of having a display table was more than I could afford.  I asked Steve Doi, a dedicated collector of Chinese history ephemera as well as used and often rare scholarly books who has a booth at this conference each year if I could leave some flyers at his booth.  Not only did Steve readily consent to doing this favor for me, but he generously offered to allow me to leave a few copies of the actual books for possible sale.
Historian Greg Robinson    
I actually sold 1 or 2 books, which was probably more than I expected since my books were not 'academic' or theoretical discourses that would appeal to many professors who attend these professional gatherings.   But the most exciting experience came on the last day of the conference, at the very last minute before the book room was about to close. I was just standing outside the book area in the corridor when Steve came out searching for me to tell me that a professor was at his booth who was interested in and wanted to buy copies of both of my books.   This professor of Asian (Canadian and American) Studies at the Universite of Quebec in Montreal, Greg Robinson, had stumbled upon my books and found them worthwhile for his courses.  That made my day! And, I found out later that Greg was a prolific and leading scholar on Japanese American history, especially on the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
Greg has been a staunch supporter, friend, and mentor who has encouraged my work, and even generously wrote a nice blurb for my Chinese restaurant history book, .

         Chateau Cupertino

Figure 41













 8 Chance Happenings

Stumbling Into Family Differences of View
  I have been astounded by some of the intriguing, and sometimes bizarre, connections I’ve made over the course of writing my four books on Chinese American history.
            A reader of Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton wrote to tell me how much she appreciated learning more about what life was like for Chinese in the Delta because her aunt, who grew up there, had not talked much about it with her. By coincidence, I actually knew her aunt as we had attended the same university. Another oddity I discovered, quite by chance, is that a Chinese woman who lives about 5 houses down the street from me taught elementary school for many years with this woman from Mississippi.

Another fascinating experience happened when I had just completed Sweet and Sour: Life in Chinese Family Restaurants.  My host at a birthday party in Houston where I was giving a talk, aware of my book, introduced me to a Chinese man whose father had owned a restaurant in Chicago back around the 1920s or earlier.  In the course of conversation, I asked him for the name of the restaurant. It caught my attention because it was a distinctive name, Mayflower, which was precisely the name of a restaurant operated by the father of a young Chinese man, also from Chicago, who wrote about his experiences growing up in it for my book.  According to this source, his grandfather had operated the Mayflower. My first thought was, Could they both be referring to the same restaurant? Was it possible that by chance I had come in contact with two Chinese from different branches and generations of the same family tree! It would be such an unlikely possibility, but it seemed to be the case.
              My dinner companion told me about the origins of the Mayflower Restaurant that dated back to the early part of the last century.  He told me that his father and his brother (who was the father of my other younger informant) had been partners in operating the Mayflower.  He stated that when his father returned for a visit to China, his brother managed the operation of the restaurant. However, when his father returned from China, his brother refused to give it back to him. This account was exactly the opposite of what my other source told me.
               I was in a quandary over my discovery.  I wondered whether my two sources knew about each other’s existence and that they held opposing views about which brother, the father of one man or the grandfather of the other man, owned the Mayflower.  Of course, I had no way to evaluate the dispute or determine which account was the truth. I was hesitant to inform either of them about their conflicting accounts. I certainly did not want to stir up or create antagonism between my two informants.
              A few months later, I received an e-mail from the sister of the man who claimed their father’s brother had usurped ownership of this business when he went to China. She wanted to know where I got my “mis-information” about the ownership of the Mayflower Restaurant that I published in Sweet and Sour.  My only defense was that I published the view of her uncle’s grandson.  I did not know whether he even knew about the family feud.  Also, I debated whether it would be useful to tell him, or ask him, about the dispute. Each side of this family had its own view and I had no way to arbitrate the matter so while I felt badly to have stumbled upon these two conflicting views, I decided it best not to stir up bad feelings.
               Still, it is a fascinating story.  In addition to the substantial obstacles that Chinese immigrants had to deal with in gaining success in a society that was hostile to them, they sometimes also had to face internal conflicts within their own families.
Stumbling Upon A Former Student 40 Years Later
         When I attended the Association of Asian American Studies Conference in Austin, Texas about 3 years ago, I stayed with my good friend and fellow grass roots historian, Mel Brown (CHINESE HEART OF TEXAS).  One morning we visited a friend of his, Ron, who I learned was a devotee of blue grass music.  During the course of small talk, I mentioned that I had two undergraduate students back in the 1960s in Toronto who married and then went to Durham, N.C. for graduate work in sociology at Duke where both of them discovered and become dedicated fans of blue grass music.
      When I mentioned that the wife, Sharon Poss moved to some place in Texas after she was no longer married to her first husband, Ron surprised me by telling me that Sharon was actually in Austin and active in local blue grass music groups. She also was a part-time disk jockey on a local radio station.  As luck would have it, Ron knew that in a couple of hours Sharon's stint on the radio would be over and she would be headed to a local joint to jam with other musicians. We dashed over there to arrive before she did and had fun surprising her when she arrived!
              Finding a student at a book talk who was in the first class I taught at CSULB in 1962!

Helping The Cousin of Someone Who Interviewed Me on TV SIx Years Ago
         A few months ago, I received an e-mail from Ed Soon living in California, but who had grown up in Turrell, Arkansas and Greenville, Mississippi. A contact I had made several years ago in Sacramento, Eileen Leung, had suggested that he contact me because he needed help in publicizing some old newspaper articles that described the civic contributions of his father back in the late 30s and early 40s in Memphis where he owned a restaurant. He had organized fund raising events to contribute to China's struggle against Japan's invasion during World War II.
    I was pleased to be able to help by blogging about his father's efforts as well as about Ed's participation of his high school football team on a website about Delta Chinese. This association with Ed led to his eventual discovery from another website of mine that Oakland's Rosie Chu had conducted a t.v. interview with me in 2006 about my memoir, Southern Fried Rice.  Much to my surprise, he informed  me that   Rosie was in fact his cousin!
 A Friend From 50+ years Ago Notices Her Uncle is in “Chopsticks”
           Brenda Jue Chinn stumbled upon my website about Delta Chinese a year or two ago, She posted a message asking me to contact her because a photograph of her uncle, Ray Joe, was in my book about the Delta Chinese. Unfortunately I did not see the msg for over a year as I don't check for messages on my websites because they are so rare. I remembered Brenda from our teenage years, but had not been in touch for over 50 years with her either. I knew her father owned the Lamps of China restaurant in San Francisco and heard that her father was a prominent leader in Chinatown. Discovering that Ray Joe was his brother was fascinating because even though I never met him, I knew from my Delta Chinese contacts that Ray Joe was a very influential person in the Chinese community. Both brothers evidently came from the same cloth!
Surprise At Reunion of Chinese American Friends, Class of 1955
          Until last spring I had not seen or been in contact with Chinese  "kids" I knew from high school in San Francisco since we graduated in 1955. But one day, one of these classmates, Rosie Soo Hoo, who I remembered as an outgoing leader among the Chinese American students at Lowell High School, planned a dim sum get-together for a handful of classmates to renew acquaintances.  Insofar as I now lived in southern California, I was hesitant to make such a long trip for a brief gathering especially since I had not been in touch with these classmates for over 50 years!
            One added incentive for me in attending was that  one classmate, Richard Cheu, who came all the way from at New York (en route to some speaking activities) was also engaged in studying the lives of children of earlier Chinese immigrants. Richard had collected oral histories that date from around the 1930s, and is working on a book about their lives. His website, Excluded Americans, promises to be a major contribution to the literature of this understudied population. (I got to meet with Richard for several hours one day before our reunion when he came down to southern California to speak at a conference in Claremont.  It is remarkable, I think, that Richard and I, from the same home room in high school in 1955, were now both actively engaged in similar writing about Chinese American history!
              I managed to get invited to give a book talk in nearby Foster City for the day before the dim sum reunion so it made my decision much easier.  And, besides, I wondered what these old classmates would be like after "half a century."  We convened at the Soo Hoo's condo in Chinatown at the corner of Stockton and Washington Streets, which they used as a get-away residence when they were in town (their home being 100 miles away in Sacramento, Ca.).  After the group arrived, we headed down to a restaurant where we had a delightful dim sum and got to catch up a bit.  Amazingly, I could 'recognize' many personality characteristics in these classmates that I recalled from our youthful years.
Artificial Intelligence Reconnection To A Friend After 50 years!
      One day in the fall of 2011, I received a telephone call from Don Mar, a buddy from my high school days in San Francisco that I had not been in contact with for over 50 years.  The way Don happened to stumble upon my whereabouts after half a century is rather intriguing as it stemmed from Amazon's use of artificial intelligence to promote book sales.  Specifically, when you buy books from Amazon, their computer, using artificial intelligence, will generate from its database of your earlier purchases some "suggestions" of other books it "thinks" that might be of interest to you.   Some of its recommendations can be really off, showing that 'artificial intelligence' is often more like 'artificial stupidity.' An absurd fictitious, as well as I am aware, example might be if I purchased books like "Wind in the Willows" and  "Gone With the Wind," Amazon might recommend I buy books dealing with hurricanes in Florida. I have mixed feelings about these recommendations, but I must admit they have often been very helpful in guiding me to relevant books of which I was unaware. But back to how Amazon's artificial intelligence had an unintended non-book positive outcome for me.
       Don Mar had purchased a copy of James Loewen's Mississippi Chinese, which led Amazon to recommend to him that he might like my book, Southern Fried Rice, because both books are about Chinese in the American South.  When Don realized that I was the author of Amazon's recommended book, he decided to track me down.  It was a delightful surprise to hear from Don. We had an enjoyable time comparing notes on what had happened to each of us during the past 50 years as well as reminiscing about our friendship in our younger days. I'm sure that Amazon never realized how powerful its recommendations could be!
Two Small World Surprises At Once
        Last month, I was in the S. F. Bay area to speak in Foster City so I arranged a reunion with Don Mar. When I arrived at the restaurant, I was surprised that Don had invited Ed Sue, a pastor in Chinatown and also a successful architect.  As with Don, I had also not seen or heard from in over 50 years. Ed had learned from Don that I had become engaged in writing about Chinese American history so he asked if I might know Murray Lee. After I confirmed that I did know Murray, a historian of the San Diego Chinese, as I had spoken three times at the San Diego Chinese Historical Museum of which he is a curator, Ed informed me that Murray's wife, Gladys, is his sister!
          There are other similar 'small world' encounters that I've enjoyed on my journey into Chinese American history, but these several recent incidents should be enough to demonstrate that there are certainly far less than 'six degrees of separation' among Chinese of my generation in America.

Two Mel Lees

WGUISFCT
            A few years ago, I became acquainted with the fascinating research of Yvonne Foley who has dedicated years tracking descendants, who like herself, were of mixed racial heritage with Chinese fathers and British mothers through her website, Half and Half.   These Chinese men had been recruited to Liverpool from China to help man British ships during World War II. Following the war, they were abruptly and unceremoniously repatriated to China, some of whom had to leave behind wives, and children.  Some children grew up never knowing their fathers.
                 Yvonne and I became acquainted through a few e-mails about her research. When Yvonne, currently living in Australia. mentioned that she and her husband Charles would be visiting San Francisco in November, we arranged to meet in person since I also had plans to be there around that time.
I felt that some Chinese in San Francisco that I knew might welcome this opportunity to meet Yvonne and learn about her research so I arranged a luncheon ‘meet and greet’ lunch get together through  Emily Onglatco, a leading member of a Facebook group created by artist-photographer Leland Wong.  “We grew up in San Francisco Chinatown,” is an accurate, but lengthy name, which they shortened to simply, WGUISFCT.
By coincidence, David Wong, creator of a graphic novel on Chinese Canadian history, Escape to Gold Mountain, happened to be in the area that same weekend for a book signing. He was interested in joining  us, so now we had three scholars of Chinese immigrant history.


When the lunch get-together was announced on Facebook, noted historian Judy Yung expressed interest in joining the group along with her husband, the subject of her book, The Adventures of Eddie Fung: Chinatown Kid, Texas Cowboy, Prisoner of War.  We had now gone from 2 to 4 scholars coming to the event attended by about 25 WGUISFCT members. There was lively conversation among the group during lunch and discussion for well over another hour afterwards. It is safe to say that a good time was had by all at this loosely planned get-together at the Pacific Court Cafe in Chinatown.


     

The next day I had another highly unusual encounter, meeting with a different “Leland Wong,” also from San Francisco.  But that amazing experience deserves its own ‘post’ and will be described in a few days in detail.
Two Leland Wongs
             The day before the event described in my previous post in San Francisco with Leland Wong and his  We Grew Up in San Francisco Chinatown (WGUISFCT) Facebook Group,  my sister in Cupertino called me in southern California to say that she received an intriguing call from a Chinese man from near San Francisco who had  discovered that I had listed his father who operated a laundry in Chattanooga, Tennessee around the 1930s to 1950s in my family tree chart in my book, Chinese Laundries: Tickets to Survival on Gold Mountain.
               His sister had purchased the book at one of my book talks and shown him my chart that identified the 19 male descendants of my great great grandfather, Fun Fai Loo, that had operated laundries in the Deep South  in the first half of the last century.


Believe it or not, this man’s name was  also Leland Wong, the same as the creator of the Facebook Group, WGUISFCT!  The father of this Leland, Poy Wong, opened a laundromat in San Francisco in the early 1950s after retiring from laundry work in Chattanooga for many years just as my parents had done after closing their laundry in Georgia.   Oddly enough, both laundromats were located on Polk Street, only about 6 or 7 blocks apart, believe it or not!
              Leland had a friend, or perhaps relative, originally from Augusta who gave him the telephone number of June Loo, the widow of my father’s cousin, Loo Heung Sec, who had a laundry in Augusta for many years.  In turn, June gave Leland the telephone number of my sister Mary and he called her to find out how he could reach me so he could discuss details of his father’s immigration.  The timing could not have been any better than if we had planned it because I was flying to San Francisco that very day to meet with the Leland Wong of WGUISFCT.
                I was busy arranging details of my trip to San Francisco, so I  did not ask for  his name, or notice the similarity if it had been given to me. When we actually did meet, I finally realized that his name was the same as that of the graphic artist I had met with the previous day.  Since the second Leland Wong did not know I had met the previous day with the other Leland Wong, this coincidence could easily have gone by unnoticed.   But since I was wearing the trademark  T-shirt that artist Leland had designed for the  WGUISFCT group and previously given to me, this other Leland  asked if, and how, I knew artist Leland. He then informed me that the two Lelands were long time acquaintances, having attended the same junior high school.  Furthermore,  their bank accounts, held at the same bank, had been a source of bookkeeping errors on more than one occasion.
Leland had retrieved his father’s immigration file from the National Archives at San Bruno a while back.  He noticed that a Frank Wong, identified as the brother of his father, had testified in behalf of Leland’s father when he was interrogated for admission to the United States. Leland did not know anything else about Frank Wong, and hoped that I might be able to help.  At our meeting, which just happened to be at my brother’s house in San Bruno not far from the National Archives,  we examined his documents and discussed the possibility that this  Frank Wong could have been a paper, rather than a biological, brother.  It so happens that about 40 years ago,  my father came from San Francisco to visit me in Long Beach and asked me to drive him to meet a Frank Wong in Los Angeles who was either a relative or someone from the same village in China.   That might well have been the same man!  We may never know the answer to that question, but what we did disover was that Leland’s grandfather, Loo Gan Heung, and my grandfather were cousins.  We determined that Leland’s father, Poy Wong (Paul Wong) and my father, Frank Jung, were second cousins.
And, it was Leland’s grandfather, born in 1880, who operated a laundry in Chattanooga around the early 1920s or earlier that helped bring my father come to America via Chattanooga in 1921! A few years later, he helped his sons, Poy Wong and  Hay Yee, with  their immigration to come to Chattanooga where each of them ran a laundry.


Photograph of Leland’s grandfather, Loo Gan Heung.

From our conversation, I realized that I knew Leland’s cousin, Jimmy Yee, whose family also moved from Chattanooga to San Francisco in the early 1950s. I had lost contact with him and not known anything about him for the past 50+ years!  Leland put me in touch with Jimmy who sent me a photograph of their grandfather, Loo Gan Heung.

Photo: Leland Wong, my recently discovered relative, shares his family documents with my sister Mary and me at my brother’s house in San Bruno, less than a mile from the National Archives that holds the immigration records of thousands of Chinese immigrants.

In addition to learning more about Leland and the Chattanooga roots of his grandfather, father, and uncle, he told me about another Chinese laundryman, James Loo, who he had visited in his Charlotte laundry in 1977 during on a cross-country drive. Exactly how he is related to us is not clear.  According to his son, Wing, James worked in many cities in the South including Atlanta, Macon, Birmingham, Augusta, and Meridian, MS. before settling in Charlotte, N. C. where he had a laundry back in the 1940s.
 

Photo: James Loo as a young man and several decades later.

             I contacted Peggy Lore, another distant relative, although it is not clear exactly how, whose family had owned a restaurant in Fayetteville, North Carolina and was now living in Colorado.  She recalled visiting James Loo in Charlotte when she was growing up, and believes that he is a relative, but again, the exact relationship is not known.

         I guess the more you dig, the more you find!  When I wrote Southern Fried Rice, I thought I had exhausted my sources on family history.  There were several relatives who declined to share any information, fearing that disclosures might have adverse consequences.   Now, out of the blue, new information, although somewhat vague, has surfaced.  Seeing a photograph for the first time of Loo Gan Heung, the man who helped my father come to America, was exciting.




FANMAIL
         Writing is a solitary activity. Even after a book is published, the author does not directly interact with readers.  Some, but not most, readers may post numerical ratings that help the author see how readers feel about his or her work.  At book signings, you meet a few people who have read your book and might offer compliments but most of the audience probably has yet to read your work. I’ve been fortunate that once in a while I will receive a letter or an e-mail in which a reader offers detailed comments and generous praise.  Recently, I had two such e-mails that were extraordinary in that they included more than comments on the contents of my books.
       In the first instance, Stan Solamillo, a reader of Chinese Laundries who had done his own research about Chinese immigrants contacted me to thank me for writing the book. He shared an article he had written about Chinese laundrymen of the late 19th and early 20th century in Dallas. In researching his article, he had compiled a detailed list of Dallas Chinese from 1873 to 1940 based on several public sources of data that was not published with his article due to space considerations.  I offered to post the list on my website on Chinese laundries because we both felt that a list of their actual names, addresses, and occupations could be useful for other researchers someday.

      The second e-mail came from a woman who had attended one of my book signings where she purchased a copy of Southern Fried Rice.  In her e-mail, she related how meaningful my memoir was for her personally because when she was a child her family had made a move clear across the country that was the reverse of my family’s move from Georgia to San Francisco.  They went from the San Francisco Bay area where there is a large Chinese community to northern Virginia where there were very few Chinese and the region was not very receptive to minorities. She shared her surprise when she read the section about my older sister getting married in San Francisco. Upon seeing my sister’s married name, she suddenly realized that her mother and my sister had worked together a generation ago to develop Chinese cultural activities for children in their community.
      She thanked me for writing the book as it “made me feel a sense of connection which is lacking in my day-to-day existence and sense of identity.  I’ve spent the better part of my life, denying my Chinese heritage, trying to “prove my American-ness.”
Then only a week later, I received the following message on my Facebook page from an African American community college student in California asking for help in getting information related to her grandfather who had lived in the Mississippi Delta.  She apparently was familiar with my book on the Delta Chinese, Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton, which is probably what led her to contact me.

I’m a Japanese Major … I have been recently been researching the Chinese Mississippi Delta movement. My mother was born in Clarksdale, MS. My Aunt said that Her father spoke Chinese and I believe was also half Chinese due to his mother. He worked at one of the Chinese grocery stores that emerged at the time in Clarksdale. I believe my mom said it called Bing Li Way? I dont know much about my grandfather because he died when my mom was 10 in 1975. She said that the store was changed to a Piggly Wiggly. Does this store sound familiar? I really want to know more about this movement and about my grandfathers Chinese ancestry. I plan on buying your book too as well!!! This is so fascinating! Thank you so much! I hope to hear back from you!
N__
     

           Unaccustomed to receiving messages on Facebook, I did not discover her message until over a year later.  As soon as I read it, I immediately tried to get back in touch with her,
§
Hi N_thanks for your msg, which unfortunately I never noticed…that is why I am so slooow in replying. I will ask some of my Delta contacts if ‘Bing Li Way’ rings a bell.  And, yes, Piggly Wiggly (what a Southern name) was (is) a grocery chain. I do see there was a Joe Bing Grocery in Clarksdale back around the 1960s on 6th st. You might be interested in a webpage I created for the Delta Chinese…  http://mississippideltachinese.webs.com
best wishes,
John Jung

             Sadly, I did not get a quick reply from N__ nor anytime soon. Checking her Facebook page, I could see that she did not use it much.  I concluded she would probably never see my reply. Then, just before Thanksgiving, 2012, about 7 months after my reply to her, I received the following reply from N_.

11:04pm

 Hi Mr. Jung. I contacted (you) prior to the beginning of the year about a Chinese grocery store in Clarksdale, MS around the 60s & 70s that my grandfather had worked for. I did some more rearch through your website, and I found an oral interview with a Dan Bing, whose father was Joe Bing. It turns out that he did own Joe Bing Grocery, as well as a Bing Leeway store. When I read this in the interview, I cried because this is the same store that my mother had visited my grandfather! My granderfather, Jesse Lee Cooper, was a stocker at Bing Leeway. He himself, also owned a restaurant while working at Bing Leeway, called Fair Deal Cafe. My Aunt also remembers hearing my grandfather speaking Chinese in the store.
I would love to know more about the Bing’s and what kind of
people they were, as well as what other relations my grandfather had with them, if you know of any other information about them or how to contact them (Dan).
I appreciate your knowledge and research that is educating me about this time in history! It is important to me because the Bing’s treated my grandfather so well!
Thank you so much for everything!
Happy Thanksgiving!
N_

I was greatly relieved that N_ eventually checked her Facebook and found my reply and that she took my suggestion to access the website I created for the Mississippi Delta Chinese where I had included a link to the newly formed Mississippi Chinese Heritage Museum on the campus of Delta State University. The Museum has a collection of over 20 recent interviews of Delta Chinese about the lives of Chinese grocery store families in the Delta.
As N- noted in her above reply to me, one of these interviews was with Dan Bing who referred to the Clarksdale store of his father, Joe Bing, the very store where N’s grandfather had worked as a stocker back in the 60s or 70s.
I hope that N_ will be able to learn more about the past from Dan, but even if she does not, I believe she has gained a stronger connection with her family history.  For me, it is gratifying to learn that my writing has been helpful to others in many ways that I did not anticipate.  It is wonderful for an author to hear about such fascinating discoveries from readers. I hope more of them are in store in the future!

NEW Intriguing CONNECTIONS
         White mother of adopted Chinese girl contacted me for help in answering her third graders question about drinking fountains…

         The mixed race granddaughter of a St. Augustine Chinese laundryman seeking help in locating documents on him

         An woman in Georgia seeking info on her African American husband’s  Chinese g grandfather.  The father had been killed by the KKK in the 1920s, and the family fled Georgia

In 2013, I received an e-mail from a writer-journalist in New Delhi, Marina Bang, who wrote:
“I was thrilled to come across your website during a search for “Chinese laundries,” and read many of your entries with great interest. I have now ordered your books Chinese Laundries and Sweet and Sour and am looking forward to their arrival.  I am a South African but lived in Hong Kong for almost a decade where I worked as a journalist on the South China Morning Post.”



 9 Promoting Books
No matter how interesting and well written your books are, how do you inform the potential audiences that they exist and where they can get them?  Major book publishers invest in advertising and marketing for the books they publish, and hopefully recoup their expenses through profits on sales.  Few self-published authors, however, can afford that method.  However, the advantage that authors published by major publishers have may be exaggerated.  For one matter, these publishers have many books to promote, and unless your book is a best seller, after some initial promotion, they will ignore your book and turn their attention to promoting their newest books. In contrast, self-published authors can, and should, have promote their books over a longer period. when you are a self-publisher, as I am, you have to devise your own means of publicity and promotion, without which it is unlikely that you will sell many copies.  (And, you can’t count on relatives and friends to buy many especially since many of them expect complimentary copies.)
In Person Promotion At Book Signings
Since my books are on Chinese American history, a topic for which the market is arguably not very large and one that is concentrated in regions with sizable Chinese populations, I soon realized that I had to find ways to hold book events such as talks and signings to generate awareness and interest.  Although I anticipated some discomfort at having to ‘toot my own horn’ with such activities, I soon overcame these concerns and even came to look forward to them.  Once a professor, always a professor, eager to have an audience to lecture!  My 40 years of teaching often inattentive college students served me well in being at ease in giving book talks.  One venue enjoyed my talks enough to invite me four times, so I got to speak on each of my four books.  I have given 2 or 3 talks at about 5 or 6 other sites. Counting events through May of this year, I have surprised myself by making well over 50 public appearances to speak about my books across the country.  These events have not only led to book sales but the opportunity to meet many interesting people as well as contacts for other events.
One venue enjoyed my talks enough to invite me four times, so I got to speak on each of my four books.  I have given 2 or 3 talks at about 5 or 6 other sites. Counting events through May of 2013, I have surprised myself by making well over 50 public appearances to speak about my books across the country.  These events have not only led to book sales but the opportunity to meet many interesting people as well as contacts for other events.
How did I manage to arrange all of these talks?   Did I have a press agent or manager book these events?  Did the hosts for my out of town talks pay the airfare and accommodation expenses?  The story behind each event is somewhat different, with some events being a matter of dumb luck, others arranged through ‘connections,’ and some through my initiative and persuasion.  For some distant events, I actually received travel and lodging funds, or only airfare but lodging with hosts, friends, or relatives.






Figure 42
Using a ”piggy-back” strategy, I would try to combine business with pleasure.  For example, I arranged to do two or three talks on consecutive days at one site.  Or, I arranged for my New York talk to be on the day after I attended a 90th birthday party for a relative.  In a few cases, I was willing to bear all the costs of my travel and lodging because that venue was in a part of the country where I had not previously spoken.  More important to me than making a profit from my ‘career’ in history was spreading the word about the contents of my books, which I felt more Americans, Chinese and others, needed to know.  Fortunately, my talks have generally been very well-received and attended and I have been able to sell enough books to offset my travel expenses.
  If I had an agent or publicist to find venues for me to give talks about my books, it would be wonderful.  However, my opportunities for speaking engagements have come from a mixture of luck (being in the right place at the right time), chutzpah and aggressive cold calls, and having contacts from a growing network who are connected with various organizations and groups interested in Chinese American history.
2008 Visit to Speak in the Mississippi Delta
When word got around the Chinese in the Mississippi Delta that I was writing a book about their history, some of the long-time residents of the Delta naturally wondered who I was, prompting some to read my memoir, Southern Fried Rice, about my growing up in Georgia.  Even though my parents operated a laundry while almost all Chinese immigrants in the Delta were in the grocery store business, they felt that my southern life experiences reflected many of their own.  This feeling that made them comfortable with me, an outsider, writing about them and led them to invite me to come to the Delta in the fall of 2008 so I could have direct contact with them.



Figure 43

Thanks to the efforts of Frieda Quon and other members of the Mississippi chapter of the Citizens Alliance of Chinese Americans (C.A.C.A.), I was invited to give two talks about Southern Fried Rice at Delta State University in Cleveland and at a C.A.C.A. dinner in Leland.  I enjoyed some old-fashioned Southern hospitality for over 2 weeks and was housed by several hosts, Audrey and C. W. Sidney, Frieda Quon, Gilroy and Sally Chow, Luck Wing, and Blanche and Bill Yee as I toured the Delta.  What I learned from my interviews during this visit helped confirm and elaborate my views of the history of the Delta Chinese that were later published in Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton. During this trip, I was also able to give a presentation at Jackson State University, a historically Black institution, through a long time associate, Professor Pamela Banks, from our many years of directing mentoring programs at our respective universities funded by the National Institute of Mental Health.

Figure 44
           Two years later, Frieda Quon coordinated another visit in 2011 for me to give several talks in the region.   She arranged with Riki Jackson for me to speak at the Confucius Institute and to a 5th grade class at the Campus School at the University of Memphis, with Dr. Kirsten Dellinger to the Sociology Department at the University of Mississippi, and with Dr. Albert Nylander at Delta State University. Sandwiched in between was a radio interview with Mississippi Public Broadcasting.

Figure 45

Without the endorsement and encouragement of these network contacts in the Delta, it would not have been possible for me to receive these mutually beneficial speaking opportunities.  The timing was also important as each year there are fewer of the grocery store families and their descendants living in the Delta. My talks there, and the eventual publication of Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton, helped galvanize more involvement and activity in recording and celebrating the rich history of the Mississippi Chinese, a unique Chinese  community that despite being spread out across many miles in a rural area, managed to maintain a strong allegiance to Chinese traditions, culture, and values.

Connection to US China People’s Friendship Association
Different talks are often interconnected in unexpected ways rather than independent events.  For example, Hazel Wallace, a retired microbiologist from the Long Beach Department of Health and graduate from California State University, Long Beach, happened to attend a talk I gave to its College of Liberal Arts Emeriti where I had taught for many years.

     .

 Figure 46

Then she later attended a different talk I gave at the Cerritos Library, a talk that was made possible by my association with the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California as well as by a contact I had who was active in the Cerritos Chinese community.


Figure 47

Hazel enjoyed my two presentations and as a member of the Friends of the Signal Hill, CA library arranged to have me invited to speak there.  When she learned of another talk I was giving in Irvine, CA., she urged attendance by Rosemary Thompson and Stanley Yon, two members of an organization she was a member of, United States-China People’s Friendship Association (USCPFA)

Figure 48

I should note that the attendance for this event was weak, with only 9 people, including 4 colleagues and my wife. Needless to say, this occasion was a demoralizing low point, but fortunately the talk was very well-received by the USCPFA visitors because their endorsement helped me get invited subsequently to speak to the USCPFA chapters in Long Beach in 2010? and Atlanta in 2011?.  This unexpected reversal of fortune from my disastrous Irvine experience made me feel like a Phoenix arising from the ashes.




Figure 49

The following year, the US China People’s Friendship Association invited me to speak at the 2012 National Conference in Washington, D. C. in May.
Then organizers of the US China People’s Friendship Association invited me to speak in October at the 2012 Western Region Conference of in San Gabriel, CA.
I took advantage of being in Washington, D. C. to arrange to speak in Chinatown at an event sponsored by several organizations including the DC Chapters of the Organization of Chinese Americans, National Council of Chinese American Citizens Alliance for Chinese Americans, and the 1882 Project.


Figure 50

Speaking At A Vancouver Benefit for Foo’s Ho Ho Restaurant

When Rod Wong, my close friend in Vancouver who was a fellow psychology graduate student at Northwestern University learned of my interest in finding Chinese who grew up working in a family-run Chinese laundry, he introduced me to Elwin Xie, who grew up working in his parents’ Union Laundry in Vancouver.  I enlisted Elwin to contribute a narrative about the history of Union laundry and his experiences working in it during his youth for my 2007 book, Chinese Laundries: Tickets to Survival on Gold Mountain.
               Little could I know then that this association with Elwin would lead a few years later to his invitation to join him and another “Chinese Laundry Kid,” Chinese Canadian author Judy Fong Bates, to speak about our work at a fund-raising event to support an historic and beloved Vancouver Chinese restaurant, Foo’s Ho Ho, in the old and decaying Pender Street Chinatown. This was a festive event combining excellent talks, camaraderie, and delicious village food fare.


Figure 51

In attendance at this delightful event was Yvonne Gall, a producer at CBC Radio, who was intrigued by what she learned about Chinese laundries.  She felt that a documentary program on the history of Chinese laundries would be of interest and contacted me for an interview.  A few months later, she actually came to my home in southern California and following the interview, I took her to Los Angeles to one of the few old time Chinese laundries still operating, the Sam Sing laundry, a third generation business in West Los Angeles.


Figure 52

             Another person attending the Foo’s Ho Ho event was Judy Lam Maxwell.  About 2 years later, she contacted me to invite me to speak at the Chinese American Heritage Societies Conference, in Seattle in April, 2013. My presentation, Why and How A Retired Psychology Professor Became An Historian of Chinese America, gave an overview of my ‘retirement’ venture into researching, writing, and speaking on my 4 books on major aspects of the earlier Chinese immigrants working in laundries, restaurants, and grocery stores. I received many positive comments on the talk (and sold all of the books I had with me). I got to meet several writers, researchers, and activists that I knew by reputation but not in person.


Figure 53

                One cannot underestimate the power of connections formed from one event such as my participation at Foo’s Ho Ho that may lead to unexpected subsequent speaking opportunities.  When I chose to accept Elwin’s invitation to come to Vancouver, I did so because the event sounded interesting and worthwhile. It was not with any expectations that it might lead to other invitations.  However, thus far, it did lead to the two worthwhile events described here, and who knows whether it might not lead to even more opportunities in the future.
Other Forms of Book Promotion
Self-published authors must be resourceful. They first need to make efforts to identify and build networks of potential readers, a task made much easier than ever with the advent of popular free social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, where they can generate some ‘buzz’ or at least curiosity about your books. I post news and information relevant to Chinese American history that I discovered after writing my books. Also, when I post entries on my Yin & Yang Press Facebook page, I also post some of them on my Twitter account.
All this self-promotion is work, but also fun, if you like playing with Internet resources. Initially, I was reluctant to engage in such aggressive marketing, but when I realized that if I didn’t promote my books, they would not reach their intended audiences. As I gained experience, I found it easier to generate web material and the fact that so many people have told me that they found my books worthwhile reading overcame my embarrassment at engaging in sometimes shameless self-promotion!

Other free resources for authors to promote their work include Redroom.com, goodreads.com. where authors can promote their work using blogs, videos, interviews. Reader reviews and personal recommendations can also be found on these sites, which can affect sales of your books.
You don’t need to promote your book to the whole world to succeed, but should focus on groups that would have strong interest in your topic. In the case of Chinese American history, there are Chinese community organizations, historical societies, and Chinese American history museums for example, which would have more interest in this topic than the general public would.
                But it is also important to establish who you are and why someone interested in the topic should believe that you have the credentials or authority to write something worthwhile about it.  In other words, you need some degree of credibility to attract the identified audiences. As someone who had a long career as university professor, even though in psychology and not history of any sort, that background was still worth something especially since I had published numerous textbooks in psychology. I used a free website, About.me, that enabled me to create a ‘profile’ of “who I am” by describing my background and experience.

Figure 54
            Over the past 5 or 6 years the more than 60 book talks and signings so far on my four books has been a valuable ‘track record.’  It is useful in getting other invitations and convincing organizations that I could provide a good talk.  I used the web to advantage by creating a ‘book tour’ website to publicize my book events on weebly.com, one of the many excellent resources for free website creation.  On it I listed the places and dates where I spoke and included photographs of the events along with compliments from readers and audience members around the country that includes links to videos of some of my presentations. Sometimes I embedded the videos on my sites to increase the chances that readers will view them. Some of the videos are hosted on YouTube. By cross-linking these various sites, I can increase the traffic to all of them and hopefully create more awareness and interest in my books. As I gained experience in creating websites, I reformatted the book tour information on a second website that included other information about my books.

Also, SEE  yinandyangpress.webs.com

Figure 55

            Many people who want to buy a book go to the gorilla of book sales and marketing, Amazon, where any book with an ISBN number is listed, often with an option to LOOK INSIDE for a sample of the book and comments from some readers.  Amazon lets authors create their own Author page where they can post photos, a video, and feeds from a blog to further promote their books.


Figure 56

In addition, self published authors can create more extensive promotion of their work through an increasing number of free or inexpensive tools on the internet that can be periodically updated and expanded.  For example, I created one website that serves as a catalog of my four books, where I provide not only descriptive summaries but also excerpts and comments from readers, audiences at book talks, and scholars. I also include photographs of audiences and book buyers to illustrate the interest that the books generated.
I used another one of the free web creation resources, wix.com, to create a “catalog” website for Yin & Yang Press (the name I created for my book publishing “company”) to showcase my four books.

 Figure 57
I also placed free widgets from Freado,com and bookdaily.com on my websites that let me make sample pages from each book available for browsing.
I also included links to “Author pages” on book selling sites like Amazon.com, lulu.com, and Createspace.com .  Online book sales are increasingly vital as brick-and-mortar book stores have unfortunately become like dinosaurs, i.e., extinct.
Of course, while you save time and gas money by not having to go to a store, you have to pay shipping costs for online book purchases.  Enter the e-book, which has its pros and cons, but may be here to stay.  Although the price of e-book is much lower than paper books, and the profit is also reduced, volume of sales may increase because buyers may feel the e-versions such as for the kindle are more affordable. In other words, the book publishing field is rapidly changing and authors need to keep up to date and the newer technology.  Thus, all of my books I created kindle versions such as this one to try to reach a larger audience.  Authors must work hard to promote and market their books that they spent so much time and effort in researching and writing.
Even though most self-publishers can’t afford advertising and other expensive book promotions, fortunately the web offers many free resources that authors can use to generate some publicity about their books.  As previously noted Amazon.com allows authors to create a page on their website to list their books, which also allows posting a video, feeds from your blog entries, tweets, and author photos.

And just as Amazon authors can allow potential buyers to “Look Inside the Book” for a sample, other resources are available that serve the same function such as bookdaily.com and freado.com.

Figure 58



Figure 59

I created a separate website for each of my 4 books so that more additional information specific to each book could be added continually as supplementary material.
On each book site, I included a blog to provide interesting additional material related to the theme of each book so that interested readers would have reason to revisit each site. For example, a site on Chinese laundries includes photographs of many early laundries, excerpts from newspaper articles relevant to Chinese laundrymen, and other information of historical interest on the topic.

Figure 60
Promotion Via Media Coverage
When I gave a talk in Feb. 2012 at the Torrance CA Library, a reporter and film crew asked me if they could film parts of the talk and interview me afterwards. I received a short video later of excerpts of my interview but I never learned whether or when they broadcast their coverage until now (September, 2012).

Figure 61
So it was a pleasant surprise to stumble upon this China News video, which was much longer and ‘fancier’ than I imagined it would be.


Figure 62

Chinese Press Coverage
In May 2013, Emma Wong, a writer for a national Chinese newspaper, World Journal, e-mailed me to request an interview about my books. We met the following day for an hour to talk about what my books were about. Then the following day, she published an overview of our discussion (in Chinese, of course).



Figure 63


Promotional Giveaways
Now that I have four books to my credit, some people conclude Yin and Yang Press is a flourishing publishing company and send requests for donations of books for worthy causes. So far, I have donated copies of Southern Fried Rice to a fund raising raffle for a girls school in Hawaii, other titles to two Chinese historical societies, and a set for raffle prizes to an Asian American Studies program.

The past two years I have donated sets of all four titles to my alma mater, University of California, Berkeley, for a fund raising auction.



Figure 64

          And, this year I received a request to donate copies of , our social history of Chinese family restaurants as raffle prizes at performances of a comedy nightclub show, Kosher Kung Pao Christmas, in San Francisco!


Figure 65

I gain satisfaction that my books can help these causes as well as receive promotion and publicity for Yin and Yang Press books by making these contributions.

Also giveaway on Goodreads


CHSSC

Overseas Chines
e Museum
 10 Kudos


  A Reader Imagined Her Chinese Ancestor's Life
In 2007, a woman in Georgia searching for her roots without success e-mailed me after reading Southern Fried Rice.
"I truly appreciate your sharing your personal story.  It gave me a window into what life might have been like for my own family even though my relative most likely arrived in the 1870s.
I devoured your book with great interest!  I was reading with fingers crossed that perhaps a resource might pop up that might aid me in finding additional documentation of my ancestor(s).  There is a vague story of my great-grandmother being Chinese or half Chinese.  As a child she and her mother worked as seamstresses for a private family.  Her mother making clothes for the daughter while she made matching clothes for the doll.  I'm told that my great grandmother died from headaches that they believed came from her having been hit or beaten by those she worked for.  The details of the story shifts depending on who's telling it, but this is the story more or less.  There is no question there is Chinese ancestry amongst our varied heritage of African, Native American and European bloodlines as the physical features are imprinted on our faces."

 I received this unusual request for help from a Pennsylvania mother with an adopted daughter from China who recognized the racial ambiguity faced by people of Asian descent in the Jim Crow days of the Deep South.
(Explain)
I did not anticipate that Southern Fried Rice might be useful for this situation, but I was pleased to be able to provide advice based on my real experience with such encounters.
I was delighted to get this response from a Chinese graduate student in Canada about my books on Chinese in the Deep South.
'I found your wonderful blog, while doing some late-night internet searches for books and articles on Asian history, particularly in the South.
I have always had a personal interest in learning more about Asian identity and how Asian communities, in general, negotiate their identities in various settings, especially in places with deep racial conflict. I read with real enthusiasm about your personal experiences living in the South and about your motivation to write a book about your parents. I think I can relate to some of what you went through, being from an immigrant family and going through the settlement process."


My public talks about my books have generally been well-received but I seldom get as detailed feedback on my impact on audience members as I did in the e-mail one Chinese woman sent me.
      I very much enjoyed your presentation (about Chinese in the South) yesterday in Monterey Park.  I completely understood your sense of feeling "not being Chinese enough" (from being the only Chinese in town). Even today, when I am in a room full of Chinese adults, I feel like a foreigner, with too much "white" attitude to be Chinese. I think that it was my growing up, isolated from other CHINESE that caused me to have "confusion" and identity crisis of sorts.
      Not only was I the ONLY Chinese kid in Baton Rouge, La., I was also an only child, in a typical Chinese family (be seen but not heard), so I led a very lonely existence.  I did not make a Chinese friend until I was in the 4th grade, when we moved back to New Orleans.  Up until then I had very little exposure to any other Chinese family.  My mother did her best to keep the "Chinese" in me, forcing me to speak Mandarin and teaching me to write basic Chinese words, both of which I still can do.  (I am grateful now of course for her strict, strident rules!)
      Looking back, I had great experiences with prejudice but didn't know it at the time.  I did not turn to my parents (mother spoke poor English, father was always too busy in grad school) so basically I stood up for myself.  I was constantly "assaulted" by white kids, verbal taunts, name-calling, pebble throwing, etc.  Teachers turned a blind eye to all these events.  I knew something was wrong but had no clue if I had any recourse except to stand up for myself, which I did.
      There were a total of 3 minorities in my elem. school.  Myself, 1 black girl, Yolanda, and 1 Korean boy who just arrived from Korea, spoke no English, didn't even know the kids were picking on him.  Yolanda and I spent our time together far in the back of the "yard" under the pecan tree, away from the white kids who constantly picked on us.
      I think the only thing that "saved" me was I was a very successful student.  Well, we're all grown up now, and thank goodness things are much better for us and our children even in the South.

           Some wonderful feedback from audience members comes from bloggers who generously posted their positive reactions online:

 A nice compliment from Jay who attended my 2012 talk in Washington, D. C.:

 … arguably the heart and soul of Chinatown is the “Chinese Community Cultural Center.”   Active in many ways, the organization is reaching out to those with an immigrant story to tell.   In the program’s debut, the center hosted Dr. John Jung… a professor, lecturer and author of four books on the experiences of Chinese-Americans, including his own memoir – “Southern Fried Rice.”   In front of an audience of about 50, he spoke on the topic –  “The Value of Learning and Teaching the History of Chinese in America That School Books Left Out.”
…The author, who still retains a bit of a Southern accent, touched on a handful of themes.    Isolation is a common one for immigrants, his own made worse by the fact they were the only Chinese people living in Macon (Georgia) between 1928 and 1956.
…Jung spoke not as a bitter man, and in fact revealed a sense of humor on several occasions.  Nevertheless, he drew on a reservoir of stories that pointed out injustices, cruelty, and ignorance directed at him and his family.

Patrick McGraw made a post on his blog, PFMReports.com about a 2012 talk I gave in Portland, OR.   IS THIS A REPEAT FROM PORTL

“ ... It may look like it should have been dull. Add that it was a history lecture and you might be certain that it was dull. The lecturer was Dr. John Jung, who was born in Macon, Georgia, where he and his family were the only Chinese in town. Dr. John Jung spoke about the history of Chinese immigrants, but he told it through the stories of Chinese restaurants and the families that operate them. He managed to work the Chinese Exclusion Act and chop suey into one sentence! (Chop suey is most certainly an American dish, but it helped popularize Chinese restaurants among whites, who were leery of the Chinese and their food.)  As I have said before, history is not about dates, it’s about stories. If more people could have a teacher like Dr. Jung, maybe fewer people would run from history…”

Not everyone has the time or inclination to express their reactions to a book or a talk by an author.  So, it is always  a pleasant surprise when people who have read one of my books or attended one of my talks take the time to make comments, especially if they are positive.


Figure 66

              Thus, Tom Chan, who took many splendid photographs at my talk in Sacramento in 2009?, is a positive and energetic person who surprised me with a recent e-mail that began as follows:

John….You’re all over the internet & up to the minute.  I like your Gangnam Style of writing Chinese American History so it’s not dull.  Yeah, add some PSY zing to it.
                                     TOM… 93 year old guy

Not only are you a gifted raconteur, but you also tell stories that connect communities, and tell you something about humanity. There's something about you that allows the Chinese American story to be universal.  I can relate, empathize, sympathize, and identify with what you say.  My greatest hope as a filmmaker is to be able to do this.
Lana Garland, Producer, The Clothesline Muse



11 Some Lessons Learned
"Your Chinese Name Is Part of A Famous Chinese Proverb"

          Growing up in Georgia I never had the opportunity nor the interest in learning how to write or read Chinese.  When we moved to San Francisco, my mother promptly enrolled me in a beginning Chinese language class at a nearby Chinese church.  However, inasmuch as I was 15 years old, and all my classmates were about 6 or 7, and much faster learners than I, it was only a matter of days before I dropped out!
         At some of my book tour sites, I am asked what my name is in Chinese.  Although I can speak some Toishan-wa, the only thing I can write in Chinese turns out to be my name because my parents taught me how to at any early age.
Nonetheless, I lack confidence in my ability to write the Chinese characters correctly on the spur of the moment since I have rarely been asked to do that since childhood.  My solution is to always carry a printed copy of my Chinese name.

When I gave a copy of my name written in Chinese to someone after a talk to the Sacramento Chinese Cultural Foundation, I was informed that my name was very interesting in that it was part of a famous Chinese proverb.  I was startled by this revelation and curious to know exactly what my name meant.
My given name included Chinese characters that were part of this proverb, "When you drink water, remember the source." It suddenly struck me what a profound revelation it was.  My new career in tracing and celebrating the lives of the pioneering Chinese immigrants was in effect, an attempt "to live up to my name.

I realize that some people believe that a person’s name can have a prophetic effect as if they try to live up to some expectation attached to that name.  Others might react to people’s names in ways that increase the likelihood that the person would behave in ways to match expectations.  However, in my case, I did not know that my Chinese name had any symbolic meaning so I could not have been consciously trying to live up to my name by studying the roots of my family history. Yet, there is no mistaking that my four books on Chinese American history were at least by coincidence relevant to the notion that my research reflected the proverb associated with my Chinese name.
Audiences Can Ask The Strangest Questions
I have been fortunate to have many generous positive comments from audience members at the over 50 talks I have made about my books across the country over the past 6 years.
 I can generally predict what questions will come up after a book talk.  Whenever I speak about Southern Fried Rice, my memoir about how our family lived as the only Chinese in Macon, Georgia back in the 1930s to 1950s, invariably someone will ask how or why were we in Georgia anyway.  Or, they want to know whether I attended a white or a “Colored” school or where did I sit when riding a bus.

           At a talk I gave at the Torrance, CA. library on my book, Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton, the history of Chinese in the Mississippi Delta, several questions dealt with race relations, mostly between Chinese and whites, but also one person asked about Chinese-black interactions. Such questions are not surprising since many west coast audience members have never been to the South but know about the strong racial divides that existed there for many decades.
   
Figure 67
            I also got a few unexpected questions. Were the Chinese actively involved during the civil rights activism?  Did Chinese kids enjoy blues music?  How did blacks and Chinese get along socially? Did Chinese kids engage in the practice of martial arts?
These were challenging questions and I did not have definitive answers to some of them because my book focused on the history of Chinese in the Delta prior to the civil rights activism of the 1960s. Clearly, there is more work to be done to examine more recent history!
Bizarre Questioners
But I also have had rather odd questions as well, questions which called for calm and polite replies.  In the first case, a woman prefaced her question with the compliment that I knew a lot and then asked me how, in view of my knowledge, would I propose to solve some of the major problems in the world today. It was immediately clear that she was not trying to heckle me so I did not take offense. At the same, I felt I owed her some reply that would not be a put-down rather than ignore her and proceed.  I simply noted that her question was important but that it was beyond my "expertise."  After the talk, another member of the audience came to offer apologies for the woman who had a reputation of asking off-the-wall questions.
Then, during the Q&A following a talk about Southern Fried Rice, a very serious woman asked where my parents were naturalized.  After I responded that my father was naturalized in Macon, Georgia, and my mother in San Francisco, she accused me of lying. I was taken aback, to say the least, and asked her for why she felt I was not telling the truth. She claimed that she knew my parents were naturalized in Alabama, which I knew to be false.  But aside from simply telling her she was wrong, I could see no point in belaboring the discussion and moved on.
After the session as I was gathering my unsold books, I noticed a CD on the corner of the table that was not mine. It had been marked with a Sharpie pen, "Jung."  Apparently, the challenger had surreptiously left it on the table for me.  When I got access to a computer, I let my curiosity get the better of me (for all I knew, the disk contained a virus).  The CD contained a page from the 1930 Alabama census and listed a Chinese couple named "Jung."  My adversary had mistakenly jumped to the conclusion that these Jungs were my parents.
What still puzzled me was why she was so determined to show me up.  She had looked up this information in advance since she even burned it onto a CD.  It was a strange encounter; the librarian later told me that this woman had engaged in other confrontations with speakers in the past, I guess her mission in life was to try to embarrass or challenge speakers!
Ups and Downs of Book Signings
           Many people think of book signings as glamorous and happy occasions for authors, which they can definitely be, but one should realize there are also downsides for a small independent author/publisher. How many books should the author bring to the event? If you bring too many, there is the hassle and cost of taking them home.  If you bring too few, you disappoint some people and lose some sales. The latter has so far not happened because being an optimist (?), I have always brought too many books. If the event is local, I can easily put the unsold books in my car and take them home.
But, as has been the case on several occasions in places like Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, and San Francisco, I found myself with more unsold books than I could readily carry back on the plane (especially with the airline charges for baggage). I have been very lucky in all of these cases to have local friends 'store' the surplus books until the next time I came there to speak.
If the event is not within driving distance, you must also make sure the books arrive IN TIME.  Nothing worse than having your books shipped ahead but arrive a day or two AFTER the event.  Well, a worse outcome is to have shipments that never arrive, as was the case for a box of 30 books that I mailed to one event in Mississippi but got lost along the way. Once I dodged a bullet in Houston when another box of books 'split open' due to rough handling by the Post Office; fortunately, the books were not damaged and they were still sufficiently contained in the busted box that the Post Office was able to deliver them in a plastic bin.
I also had an instance in San Francisco where a box did not arrive in time even though I sent it 3 weeks in advance of the talk at the Chinatown library. Fortunately, I learned about this problem the day before the talk and was able to hand carry a box of books on the plane.  Later, in checking with the Post Office, I learned that the books had actually been sitting IN the Post Office.  Apparently, they tried to deliver it ONCE to the local library without success and they never tried to deliver it again.  By the time I learned the books were there, I had already left San Francisco so my books and I were 400 miles apart.  Fortunately, I had relatives in town who were able to retrieve and hold them for me since I was coming back in a few months to give another talk in San Francisco.
      These problems don't exist for really well-known authors because their publishers arrange to have local bookstores handle all the heavy lifting, bringing and selling the books.  But then you generally have to give a hefty percentage of the sales to the bookstore, around 50 percent generally.  As an independent small publisher, with inexpensive books to sell and travel costs to bear, there really is no way I could afford those costs.
Dodging Other Bullets At Book Signings
It may seem like it is a lot of fun giving book talks, but it not always an easy task.  I have encountered some frustration and aggravation many times!  If I had a marketing manager, I wouldn’t have to worry about arranging to deliver copies of my books to various venues.  But since I don’t, I have to do that task, like many other tasks associated with book talks, myself. Here are several examples of what can go wrong.  One entire box of books I mailed to Mississippi “went missing” (I find this term a rather bizarre one, as if the books had minds of their own).  Did they get stolen? Probably not. Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton, is good, but not that good! I had a near miss in Houston when a box of books split open from the not so gentle handling by the USPS.  Fortunately, the books did not get ‘separated’ from the addressee ‘s name and the USPS did manage to still deliver them otherwise undamaged.  So, I suspect that perhaps the missing book of Mississippi books might have had a similar fate, except that the P. O. couldn’t figure out where to send them.
After the Houston near miss, I started using more packing tape around the perimeter of the shipping boxes and using smaller boxes.  Finally is the case of the phantom box of books that arrived in time for one of my San Francisco library talks, but never got delivered by the P. O.  Fortunately I discovered this problem before I left for San Francisco and managed to bring a replacement box on the plane.  The following week we discovered that the box was still sitting in the San Francisco branch post office! The P.O. claimed they tried to deliver them once but no one was there at the library to receive them.  This explanation seemed rather suspicious, especially since they left no notice to the library of this attempt.  I had since left town, but luckily I had a local relative go by to retrieve the box of books and store them for me for some future talks in the Bay area.
Getting myself to the talk venue can also be hair-raising.  A friend, whose name will not be mentioned to avoid embarrassing him or her, drove me to one event.  With about 10 minutes. to spare, the friend realized that we were headed to the wrong restaurant and had to make a U turn and speed to get to the actual site just in the nick of time.  Similarly, once when driving to San Diego for a talk, I allowed myself three hours for the drive based on past trips to give talks there which took roughly 2 hours.  However, on this particular date, the freeway was clogged with weekend bumper to bumper traffic for mile after mile. We had to phone ahead to say we would be late, but fortunately, we managed to get there only 5 minutes late.
Arriving at the correct venue on time doesn’t mean you are home free yet.  In Hanford, for some unknown reason, I could not get the cable from my laptop to plug into the projector.  After 10 or more minutes of frustration, I decided to just forego showing any slides and proceed. During the talk, which actually was going pretty smoothly, one of the staff members was kneeling in front of the podium trying to connect other cables to the computer while I spoke. We never got it connected.
After that talk, I never took my laptop and relied on the venue providing the equipment.  That usually worked, but on one occasion at Signal Hill, CA., it backfired.  Not only was there no laptop, there was also no projector or screen!  I mistakenly assumed they would be prepared for a slide presentation; I learned from this experience to be explicit in stating what equipment would be needed.  Again, I dodged a bullet here because the student assistant was clever enough to use her own laptop and connect it to a large screen lcd television in lieu of a projector.
One other example is from my second visit to Portland in 2013. Someone forgot to unlock the cabinet under the podium to provide access to the laptop.  Security came but they did not have the right key.  At the last minute, someone found a staff person who knew where the right key was and we dodged another bullet.
O.K., can you relax once you have arrived at the correct place on time and  the computer equipment is up and running?  No, because once I found that the computer could not ‘read’ my power point file on my zip drive, which was formatted for a Macintosh and could not be read by a PC.  Fortunately, being paranoid, I had brought an extra zip drive in case I lost one.  This other zip drive just happened, fortunately, to be PC formatted.  After that experience, I learned to arrange to send my powerpoint or prezi file electronically a few days in advance to the venue and ask them to preload and test it before the day of the talk.  This procedure also saves precious time as I have often seen speakers lose 5 to 10 mins. of speaking time while problems loading files are solved. What’s that saying … If it can go wrong, it will?
How To Fund Travel To Give Talks
One has to be lucky, clever, imaginative, or have some combination of these factors line up, to arrange venues for book talks successfully. You need to find an audience that would have strong interest in your topic, but you still need that 'connection' to someone who will recognize that your topic and your experience as a speaker would be desirable for that audience.
As an independent (someone with a shoe-string budget) author/publisher, I have no funds for advertising, promoting, or travel as a well-recognized author published by a major publisher might have.  Either I only give local talks where I don't have to incur lodging or air travel costs or I have to find ways to combine a talk and a visit to that area with personal business or recreation, not an easy achievement because advance planning is needed to coordinate the talk and the other purpose for travelling to that site


12 Macon Revisited


Was That Confederate Soldier Statue Moved, and Why?

Back in 2006 when I was invited to my hometown of Macon, Georgia, to speak about "Southern Fried Rice" at the Georgia Literary Festival (see earlier), I had a startling experience or two in seeing, or not seeing, some of the landmarks in the town. A few years earlier, I had been shocked to see that the building on Mulberry Street, which housed not only our family laundry, but also our living space above it, had been razed to the ground which had been paved over to serve ignominously as a parking lot, complete with meters.  This time, however, that lot itself had been upgraded with a "lovely" red brick enclosed parking structure!

            Whittle School, my elementary school, no longer existed but the building, with a modernized facade, still stood on its original site and operated as an office complex. Gone 'with the wind' was the Ritz Theatre where I spent many a Saturday afternoon watching a double feature of B grade cowboy movies, Three Stooges cartoon, and serialized episodes of Dick Tracey, Superman, etc. The only theatre that allowed "Coloreds" to view movies, the Douglas Theatre (no relation to Frederick) on the other hand, had been totally refurbished and was a beautiful venue for all types of stage events. Moreover, non-Colored people were allowed in it!
             But perhaps the most startling experience was seeing the old Confederate soldier statue that I recall passing everyday when I went to and from Whittle School.  It had stood, apparently since 1896 or thereabouts, atop a small mound of grass "smack dab," as locals would say, in the center of the intersection of my street, Mulberry, and Second Street, only a block away from one of the main street of Macon.

Figure 68

       However, during my visit to Macon in 2004, the statue was not where I remembered it when I walked past it countless times as a boy wherever I went to the picture show, 5 and 10cent stores, or to and from Whittle School.  It was now no longer in the middle of the intersection and stood on a triangular plot of land where Second St. collided with a diagonal street, Cotton Ave. only about 50-75 ft. away from its original site. Yet it looked so much as if it belonged in its 2006 location that I began to wonder if my memory could have failed so badly. I stared at the middle of the intersection where I felt it should have been and noticed that in its place, left turn lanes had been installed to permit cars on Second St. to more readily make left turns onto Mulberry St.
      Aha, now it all made sense. When "push came to shove," pragmatic needs triumphed over the sanctity of monuments to the past.
         This was not the only transformation of the landscape that caused me to do a double take. In the center of town at the corner of Cherry and Third Streets there was a circular wading pond of about 10 yards diameter with a water fountain in its middle at the end of the Third Street park opposite the J. C. Penney Store and Citizens and Southern Bank on one side and the Dempsey Hotel on the other side of Third Street.  I used to make paper boats   to see how far they would float across the pond on a summer afternoon.
       
Figure 69  Did the Third Street Fountain and Pond Move?
In 2011, I came to Macon to give a talk at the Crossroads Writers Literary Festival. My host and best friend from grammar school, Richard Harris, took me one afternoon to a lunch reunion with a few of the guys I had gone to junior high school with.  When we entered the City Grill Restaurant on the corner of Third and Cherry Streets, I had a sense of déjà vu and finally realized that this restaurant occupied what was the J. J. Newberry 5 and 10 cent store when I was growing up in Macon.  I used to spent time, and a little money, buying toys from the toy section in the basement.
         During lunch, I glanced out the restaurant window and noticed a circular pond with a center fountain in the Third Street median park that looked familiar, but it seemed odd because it was not where I remembered it being located during my childhood.  I could have sworn that it was located in the section of the Third Street park median on the other side of Cherry Street than where it now was.  Richard assured me that it had always been where it presently was located. A birds eye view of the intersection shows the pond at the bottom left but I recalled it being across Cherry St. toward the spot marked Dempsey Park

Figure 70

I looked up some old photos (see below) that confirmed my memory was correct.  On the left is a picture postcard showing the fountain and pool was located in the 1940s, not where it had been relocated in 2011.  A 1930s photo of the part of Third Street where it had been moved to shows no fountain-pool.
 
Figure 71


 13 Some Closing Thoughts

My 1943 Meeting* With Madame Chiang Kai-Shek in Macon
            In Chapter 1, I mentioned the visit of Madame Chiang Kai-Shek to Macon back in 1943 when I was only 6 years old. Still, I vividly recall that it was a typical June hot and humid Georgia afternoon when my three siblings and I, the only Chinese children in town, somehow found ourselves standing in the broiling sun amidst an overflow crowd waiting for what seemed to be forever to catch a glimpse of Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, easily the Jacqueline Kennedy of her day, at the ceremony honoring her at the Wesleyan College Conservatory in Macon, Georgia.


Figure 72
           Being only 6 years old at the time (I am circled in red in the picture below), I did not know who this celebrity was, why she was in Macon, and most importantly, why I had to be there!  The newspaper coverage shown below was extensive, gushing with pride that this most influential woman in China, and possibly, along with Eleanor Roosevelt, in the world was in Macon.

  Although I was too young to know how important this woman was, the journalist wrote that it was “a big day for the four tiny Jungs,”eager to see “their heroine.” This event occurred during the historic visit of Madame Chiang to the United States to rally support for China’s struggle against the Japanese invasion.  She addressed the Congress and visited major Chinatowns to raise financial support for China, and it is thought that her presence had some influence on the repeal of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.

Figure 73

          It would not be until half a century later that I discovered, with the aid of a local archivist, Chris Stokes, that when Madame Chiang Kai-Shek was a young girl, she not only lived in Macon with her two older sisters for several years, but in 1910, when Mei Ling was 13, she was denied admission to a local school because she was “an alien.”

Figure 74


          Fast forward about 30 years.  In 1943, Mei Ling, the same little girl who was not allowed to attend a white public school in Macon, returned as Madame Chiang Kai Shek, perhaps the most influential woman of her day in the world, to receive an honorary doctorate from the Wesleyan College for Women. How the times can change!
In hindsight, I have to wonder if this brush with Madame Chiang, in some mysterious manner influenced my eventual fascination with the history of Chinese in America that emerged over half a century later? My memory tells me that we never actually got to meet Madame Chiang and probably never got within 100 yards of her.  My older sister, Jean, more or less confirmed my suspicion that we were just brought in as window dressing just in case Madame Chiang wondered if there were any Chinese in town!
Challenges in Constructing Chinese Family Histories
The primary information for tracing family histories generally comes from what parents, older siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and other older relatives tell us about the family relationships, events, and experiences.  Unfortunately, however, due to misremembered details, suppressed as well as embellished accounts, and forgetting, family histories can be highly inaccurate.  Information about the family’s past from outside sources like acquaintances and friends allows some cross-checking. Even here, however, if there is disagreement among sources, how does one determine which account is valid?
          Official records such as birth, marriage, and death records could be helpful sources for corroborating the retrospective recall of relatives. Archival records such as transcripts of immigration records might be useful except for Chinese, many of whom used false identity papers during the years of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943). However, the testimony in these files, assuming one can even locate them, is invalid for determining true family relationships for immigrants with false identity documents that entered as paper sons. Family relationships in their testimony applied to the family of the person whose papers they had acquired, not to their own family.
  Locating the immigration file for a Chinese immigrant can prove difficult for many reasons, including looking in the wrong archive.  Thus, there was the case of one immigrant who first entered at San Francisco and subsequently made several trips to China.  He sometimes re-entered at Seattle and at other times at San Francisco.  The daughter searched in vain for his immigration file because she was confused about the port of original entry.  She was not looking for his file in the right place, but I was able to find his file by searching the archive for the port of his original entry,
Knowing the names of immigrants, true or false, may not be sufficient for finding their files. Immigration officers and census takers sometimes recorded Chinese names incorrectly because they were not familiar with Chinese names or their order of last name first unlike American names.  Illegible handwriting by census takers might lead to errors in transferring them to databases For example, in one file, the father’s first name was recorded as “Quikzip” but a check with a descendant revealed that his real name was Tuck Yip.
I found complicated situations that illustrate why it is so difficult to determine family histories for Chinese immigrants.  For example, when immigrants came as paper sons using false papers, siblings of the same parents could end up with different surnames.  I know one family where each of the 3 sons entered with different surnames.
In another case in which parents arrived with several young children, the mother entered posing as a sister rather than as the wife of her husband so that her identity corresponded to the false identity papers she was using. The children were cautioned to refer to their mother as their aunt in the presence of immigration officers.
In another instance one immigrant benefited from the unfortunate death in his village of the son of another family because his father was able to purchase the identity papers of the deceased boy for his son to use to come to the United States.
         Another story involved the switching of identities between the same aged sons of two distant relatives.  A son of one man came to the U. S. using the papers of his uncle’s Number 2 son. A few years later, when the uncle brought his Number 2 son over, he could no longer use his son’s own papers and he had to use the papers of the number 3 son who came over three years later (but no mention was made of how he got papers).
        Other complications existed because some men had children by different wives, some families adopted children especially boys if they had no sons of their own.
Some Commonalities Across Ethnic Groups
A common reaction to my story is amazement that we survived as the only Chinese in our town. But, I discovered that our experiences were in many years similar to people of other ethnic groups who were living in isolation from the cultural groups. For example, when I spoke in Atlanta, an African American woman came up afterwards to thank me for my talk and commented that she really related to our cultural isolation.  Seeing perhaps a puzzled look on my face, she quickly added that she grew up in a small Maine town where her family was the only one of African American background. Similarly, I met an East Indian woman who felt isolated growing up in Africa and a Polish woman who grew up in a small midwestern town with no other people of Polish heritage.  Finally, I learned about a young Chinese boy who lived in cultural isolation in Bismarck, North Dakota, during the 1920s where his father had a laundry.  By an odd coincidence, his name was also John Jung. He felt a bond with one of his elementary teachers and he wrote regularly to her after she moved to another city.
 Readers of Southern Fried Rice who had experienced similar isolation, irrespective of their ethnicity or where they lived, identified strongly with my experiences growing up in Georgia.

Have I Become More Chinese As I Got Older?


Figure 75

Growing up in Macon, Georgia, where I had no meaningful or extended contact with a Chinese community or peers, my social interactions were by necessity with either black or white people. As I was neither black nor white, I was always more or less an outsider.  Race or ethnicity became an issue that I tried to avoid under these circumstances.
Even after moving to San Francisco at age 15, and coming in constant contact with scores of Chinese Americans of my own age as well as with the larger Chinese community, ethnicity was not a primary concern for me.

It has been the study of the history of how Chinese came to North America and how they were so terribly mistreated that I began to become more personally involved with educating others about this history.  Some people argue that history is the past, and we should let bygones be bygones.  In one sense, this is true, and lamenting past injustices can be an exercise in anger and resentment.
Racial matters have greatly improved over the past generation.  Nonetheless, residual aftereffects of past attitudes and stereotypes still exist.  History can not be fully erased or deleted the way one can reformat a disk drive on a computer.
Chinese, and other Asian, Americans are still seen by some as forever foreign, an earlier attitude that refuses to die.  Knowledge of the awful past is important, not only for later generations of those who were previously oppressed, but also for those whose ancestors were the oppressors. Only when all parties are aware of and regret these past injustices can real progress be made toward a more equitable society



 Bibliography




Index