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Southern Fried Rice: Life in a Chinese Laundry in the Deep South
This memoir conveys the experiences of our family, the only Chinese in Macon, Georgia from 1928 to 1956. It describes our isolation running a laundry, enduring loneliness as well as racial prejudice, explains why we moved to San Francisco's Chinese community, and how we adjusted to new challenges and opportunities. This edition adds an afterword describing the book's impact on readers and audiences at book talks and how it led to my writing four more books on Chinese American history. Review Excerpts "..fascinating and insightful account of Chinese-American family life...charming and information..." Paul Rosenblatt, U. of Minnesota "..woven with genuine scholarship...masterful bit of storytelling..."Ronald Gallimore, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, UCLA "...a unique view of ethnic identity.. fascinating insights...what it means to be Chinese when there is no Chinese community... and the way subsequent experiences in__and out__ of a Chinese community futher shape this process." Jean Phinney, Author, Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure. ...an intriguing and unique perspective on American immigration. Based on his experience as a child in the only Chinese family in Macon, Georgia in the mid-20th century, ... a fascinating account of the negotiation of personal and ethnic identity in a foreign environment. His narrative highlights many of the features of the larger society, including both government policy and situational practice, that shape the lives of immigrants, both then and now." Kay Deaux, City University of N.Y. Grad Center, Author, "To Be An Immigrant" ... delightful book opens a window providing a glimpse into the lives of one family born to Chinese immigrants in a small town in the South in the 1930s and 1940s. Being the only Chinese in town in a segregated society, their lives were certainly not mint julep and magnolias... Sylvia Sun Minnick, Samfow, The San Joaquin Chinese Experience Reader Comments ... It has a beautiful flow to it and an enriching quality that is easier to feel than it is to describe. Couched in humor, it deals with the painful and serious matter of day-to-day struggles of existence of a couple who came here with hardly anything more than faith in their hearts and steel in their spines. K. Saxena, Kensington, CA. Your book is the one that I had promised myself that I would write one day, but you went ahead and wrote it. You did a wonderful job! Henry Tom, Frederick, MD. Thank you for telling your story in such an engaging manner. …While your story is personal it is also universal because of its working class foundation laced with layers of Chinese ethnicity, family structure and dynamics, and the specificity of the South. Flo Oy Wong, Sunnyvale, CA. Enjoyed very much reading your family history revealing a unique experience yet sharing many of the same problems of families in Chinese laundries. …Yours is one of the few written accounts of the many family-run laundries in the U. S. Thank you for the careful documentation of this history, which would be otherwise forgotten. Tunney Lee, Boston, Mass. ... gave me insight into the lives of Chinese in the South, especially those living where there were no other Chinese... Your move to San Francisco must have been as much of a cultural shock for you as it was for me, an African American moving to the Bay Area from Memphis. Leatha Ruppert, Cotati, CA. I thoroughly enjoyed this book! I learned much that will hopefully give me some leads in searching for information on my paternal grandfather… your book has allowed me to gain some insight into what his life might have been l
233 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 7, 2006
About the author
John Jung
42 books22 followersI grew up in Macon, Georgia, where my family, the only Chinese in the city, lived above our laundry. After moving to California, I majored in psychology at U. C. Berkeley and went on to earn a Ph.D. at Northwestern University. Author of several academic textbooks, including Psychology of Alcohol and Other Drugs, I am Professor of Psychology Emeritus at California State University, Long Beach where I taught for 40 years.
Sweet and Sour: Life in Chinese Family Restaurants, published in 2010, is a social history of Chinese restaurants and the lives of families that operated this popular ethnic business for over a century.
After retiring, in 2005 I wrote a memoir about my family's life in Georgia, Southern Fried Rice: Life in A Chinese Laundry in the Deep South.
In Nov. 2008, I finished Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton: Laundries: Lives of Mississippi Delta Chinese Grocers which presents the social history of Chinese immigrants who came to this region in the late 1800s to run grocery stores mainly in black neighborhoods. It examines how they lived in a time and place of rigid racial segregation, how they improved their social status, and how they maintained their ethnic identity.
Sweet and Sour: Life in Chinese Family Restaurants, published in 2010, is a social history of Chinese restaurants and the lives of families that operated this popular ethnic business for over a century.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 10, 2011
WHAT READERS LOVE ABOUT SOUTHERN FRIED RICE (from Amazon.com)
Your book is a joy to read. It has a beautiful flow to it and an enriching quality that is easier to feel than it is to describe. Couched in humor, it deals with the painful and serious matter of day-to-day struggles of existence of a couple who came here with hardly anything more than faith in their hearts and steel in their spines.
Krishan Saxena, Kensington, California
Your book is the one that I had promised myself that I would write one day, but you went ahead and wrote it. You did a wonderful job!
Henry Tom, Frederick, Maryland
Thank you for telling your story in such an engaging manner. While your story is personal it is also universal because of its working class foundation laced with layers of Chinese ethnicity, family structure and dynamics, and the specificity of the South.
Flo Oy Wong, Artist, Sunnyvale, California
Enjoyed very much reading your family history revealing a unique experience yet sharing many of the same problems of families in Chinese laundries. Yours is one of the few written accounts of the many family-run laundries in the U. S. Thank you for the careful documentation of this history, which would be otherwise forgotten.
Tunney Lee, Boston, Massachusetts
"Southern Fried Rice" is a well-written and factually documented memoir that gave me insight into the lives of Chinese in the South, especially those living where there were no other Chinese, as you did in Macon. Your move to San Francisco must have been as much of a cultural shock for you as it was for me, an African American moving to the Bay Area from Memphis.
Leatha Ruppert, Cotati, California
"Riveting - couldn't put the book down until it was finished - it mirrored many of my own childhood experiences growing up in New Zealand in the 50s. The Chinese immigrant experience must have been the same the world over."
Helen Wong, Auckland, New Zealand
I appreciated this book, because it has given me a deeper perspective in what it means to be a second generation Chinese American of emigrant parents who operated a Chinese laundry. I understand that all minorities that emigrated to the United States in search of a better life had their struggles with survival and discrimination, this book makes me not only value and respect my parents, but also other immigrant parents who desired their children to be prosperous.
Lou Lan W. Argueta, Carson, Ca.
WHAT SCHOLARS SAY ABOUT "SOUTHERN FRIED RICE"
"Southern Fried Rice tells the overlooked history of Chinese Americans in the Deep South through the author's account of his family's experiences in Georgia running a laundry from the late 1920s through the 1950s. This inside view of an immigrant family who struggled to make a living and to maintain connections with their Chinese heritage and homeland highlights the mutability and complexity of Chinese American identity and the frequently forgotten ethnic and racial diversity of the South."
Krystyn Moon, Assistant Professor of History, Mary Washington University,
Author, Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s-1920s.
"A humane and personal reflection on life as a young Chinese American growing up in Macon, Georgia, when Jim Crow segregation still ruled. This memoir has an incisive clarity that shines extra light on the mundane oddities and inhuman logic of everyday life in the South before the Civil Rights era. It provides a sense of what it was to be like to grow up an outsider in a rigid racial system that could not find a place for those who contradicted its premises and offers us a rare glimpse at the fairly common experience of those who found themselves in the impossible spaces of the American racial order, a world that is both thankfully distant and yet hauntingly familiar still."
Henry Yu, Associate Professor of History, UCLA and University of British Columbia, Author, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America
"Southern Fried Rice demonstrates the fluidity of regional and national identity and is both a construction and deconstruction of "Chinese-ness."...These stories offer much toward confirming and complicating popular notions of what it means to be "American" just as it traces the slippery identity shifts of what it means to be "Chinese" ... a valuable mirror that will help move the history of those who are neither Black nor White towards a more deserving central role in the national and international human story."
Stephanie Y. Evans, Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Women's Studies, University of Florida Author, "Black Women in the Ivory Tower, 1850-1954: An Intellectual History"
"John Jung provides an insightful account of himself and his family in the context of Chinese immigrants who lived in the American South during the 1940s and 1950s. The unique experiences and struggles of his family members serve both to confirm some principles from social science research on Chinese in America as well as to remind us of the importance of individual differences, yielding meaningfulness and substance to issues of culture, race relations, immigration, and identity development. This engaging, candid, and often humorous and heartwarming book is an important contribution not only to the fields of psychology, sociology, and history but also to literature. Social scientists and students alike will find the book immensely fascinating and satisfying."
Stanley Sue. Distinguished Professor, Psychology and Asian American Studies, University of California, Davis Editor, "Asian American Mental Health: Assessment Theories Methods"
"..rich with historical detail...engaging memoir ...insightful observation"
Barbara Kim, Prof., Asian American Studies Calif. St. Univ., Long Beach
"..fascinating and insightful account of Chinese-American family life...charming and information..."
Paul Rosenblatt, Prof.,Family Social Sciences, University of Minnesota
"..woven with genuine scholarship...masterful bit of storytelling..."
Ronald Gallimore, Distinguished Professor Emeritus Department of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences, UCLA
"...a unique view of ethnic identity.. fascinating insights...what it means to be Chinese when there is no Chinese community... and the way subsequent experiences in__and out__ of a Chinese community futher shape this process."
Jean Phinney, Cal State Univ, Los Angeles, Author, Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure
"A charming and engrossing self-ethnography. More importantly, John Jung's book enhances the archive on Asians in the South as well as our understanding of how Jim Crow situated the Chinese between `white' and `colored.'"
Leslie Bow, English and Asian American Studies (Director) University of Wisconsin Author "Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women's Literature"
"In Southern Fried Rice, John Jung offers an intriguing and unique perspective on American immigration. Based on his experience as a child in the only Chinese family in Macon, Georgia in the mid-20th century, Jung's story is a fascinating account of the negotiation of personal and ethnic identity in a foreign environment. His narrative highlights many of the features of the larger society, including both government policy and situational practice, that shape the lives of immigrants, both then and now."
Kay Deaux, Distinguished Professor, Psychology, City University of New York Graduate Center, Author, "To Be An Immigrant"
John Jung's delightful book opens a window providing a glimpse into the lives of one family born to Chinese immigrants in a small town in the South in the 1930s and 1940s. Being the only Chinese in town in a segregated society, their lives were certainly not mint julep and magnolias...The author sees his upbringing and that of his siblings, as the challenging task of accommodating two wolds and, being more Chinese than not.
Sylvia Sun Minnick, Author, Samfow, The San Joaquin Chinese Experience
Your book is a joy to read. It has a beautiful flow to it and an enriching quality that is easier to feel than it is to describe. Couched in humor, it deals with the painful and serious matter of day-to-day struggles of existence of a couple who came here with hardly anything more than faith in their hearts and steel in their spines.
Krishan Saxena, Kensington, California
Your book is the one that I had promised myself that I would write one day, but you went ahead and wrote it. You did a wonderful job!
Henry Tom, Frederick, Maryland
Thank you for telling your story in such an engaging manner. While your story is personal it is also universal because of its working class foundation laced with layers of Chinese ethnicity, family structure and dynamics, and the specificity of the South.
Flo Oy Wong, Artist, Sunnyvale, California
Enjoyed very much reading your family history revealing a unique experience yet sharing many of the same problems of families in Chinese laundries. Yours is one of the few written accounts of the many family-run laundries in the U. S. Thank you for the careful documentation of this history, which would be otherwise forgotten.
Tunney Lee, Boston, Massachusetts
"Southern Fried Rice" is a well-written and factually documented memoir that gave me insight into the lives of Chinese in the South, especially those living where there were no other Chinese, as you did in Macon. Your move to San Francisco must have been as much of a cultural shock for you as it was for me, an African American moving to the Bay Area from Memphis.
Leatha Ruppert, Cotati, California
"Riveting - couldn't put the book down until it was finished - it mirrored many of my own childhood experiences growing up in New Zealand in the 50s. The Chinese immigrant experience must have been the same the world over."
Helen Wong, Auckland, New Zealand
I appreciated this book, because it has given me a deeper perspective in what it means to be a second generation Chinese American of emigrant parents who operated a Chinese laundry. I understand that all minorities that emigrated to the United States in search of a better life had their struggles with survival and discrimination, this book makes me not only value and respect my parents, but also other immigrant parents who desired their children to be prosperous.
Lou Lan W. Argueta, Carson, Ca.
WHAT SCHOLARS SAY ABOUT "SOUTHERN FRIED RICE"
"Southern Fried Rice tells the overlooked history of Chinese Americans in the Deep South through the author's account of his family's experiences in Georgia running a laundry from the late 1920s through the 1950s. This inside view of an immigrant family who struggled to make a living and to maintain connections with their Chinese heritage and homeland highlights the mutability and complexity of Chinese American identity and the frequently forgotten ethnic and racial diversity of the South."
Krystyn Moon, Assistant Professor of History, Mary Washington University,
Author, Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s-1920s.
"A humane and personal reflection on life as a young Chinese American growing up in Macon, Georgia, when Jim Crow segregation still ruled. This memoir has an incisive clarity that shines extra light on the mundane oddities and inhuman logic of everyday life in the South before the Civil Rights era. It provides a sense of what it was to be like to grow up an outsider in a rigid racial system that could not find a place for those who contradicted its premises and offers us a rare glimpse at the fairly common experience of those who found themselves in the impossible spaces of the American racial order, a world that is both thankfully distant and yet hauntingly familiar still."
Henry Yu, Associate Professor of History, UCLA and University of British Columbia, Author, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America
"Southern Fried Rice demonstrates the fluidity of regional and national identity and is both a construction and deconstruction of "Chinese-ness."...These stories offer much toward confirming and complicating popular notions of what it means to be "American" just as it traces the slippery identity shifts of what it means to be "Chinese" ... a valuable mirror that will help move the history of those who are neither Black nor White towards a more deserving central role in the national and international human story."
Stephanie Y. Evans, Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Women's Studies, University of Florida Author, "Black Women in the Ivory Tower, 1850-1954: An Intellectual History"
"John Jung provides an insightful account of himself and his family in the context of Chinese immigrants who lived in the American South during the 1940s and 1950s. The unique experiences and struggles of his family members serve both to confirm some principles from social science research on Chinese in America as well as to remind us of the importance of individual differences, yielding meaningfulness and substance to issues of culture, race relations, immigration, and identity development. This engaging, candid, and often humorous and heartwarming book is an important contribution not only to the fields of psychology, sociology, and history but also to literature. Social scientists and students alike will find the book immensely fascinating and satisfying."
Stanley Sue. Distinguished Professor, Psychology and Asian American Studies, University of California, Davis Editor, "Asian American Mental Health: Assessment Theories Methods"
"..rich with historical detail...engaging memoir ...insightful observation"
Barbara Kim, Prof., Asian American Studies Calif. St. Univ., Long Beach
"..fascinating and insightful account of Chinese-American family life...charming and information..."
Paul Rosenblatt, Prof.,Family Social Sciences, University of Minnesota
"..woven with genuine scholarship...masterful bit of storytelling..."
Ronald Gallimore, Distinguished Professor Emeritus Department of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences, UCLA
"...a unique view of ethnic identity.. fascinating insights...what it means to be Chinese when there is no Chinese community... and the way subsequent experiences in__and out__ of a Chinese community futher shape this process."
Jean Phinney, Cal State Univ, Los Angeles, Author, Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure
"A charming and engrossing self-ethnography. More importantly, John Jung's book enhances the archive on Asians in the South as well as our understanding of how Jim Crow situated the Chinese between `white' and `colored.'"
Leslie Bow, English and Asian American Studies (Director) University of Wisconsin Author "Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women's Literature"
"In Southern Fried Rice, John Jung offers an intriguing and unique perspective on American immigration. Based on his experience as a child in the only Chinese family in Macon, Georgia in the mid-20th century, Jung's story is a fascinating account of the negotiation of personal and ethnic identity in a foreign environment. His narrative highlights many of the features of the larger society, including both government policy and situational practice, that shape the lives of immigrants, both then and now."
Kay Deaux, Distinguished Professor, Psychology, City University of New York Graduate Center, Author, "To Be An Immigrant"
John Jung's delightful book opens a window providing a glimpse into the lives of one family born to Chinese immigrants in a small town in the South in the 1930s and 1940s. Being the only Chinese in town in a segregated society, their lives were certainly not mint julep and magnolias...The author sees his upbringing and that of his siblings, as the challenging task of accommodating two wolds and, being more Chinese than not.
Sylvia Sun Minnick, Author, Samfow, The San Joaquin Chinese Experience
May 20, 2017
Interesting topic but not quite what I thought it was. The story of the author's upbringing in the US South sounded like an intriguing one. Many stories of Asian/Asian Americans often concentrate in areas where there are larger populations: San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, etc. But some place like Macon, Georgia? That is not a perspective I've read or heard about very often. So I thought this would be an interesting book.
Author Jung tells us about his life and times in Macon: how his parents met, why they ended up in Macon, his childhood there and his experiences with the South, how they forged a living, how they eventually moved to San Francisco, etc. Initially it sounded quite interesting, but unfortunately I didn't quite realize what it was, which is his life story. I didn't know anything prior to reading the book and realize now this wasn't the book I wanted to read.
While aspects of the book are interesting (how he and his family, as the only non white or black family in the area were treated better than black people but were definitely seen as not equal to white people), I really wasn't interested in his family and his life. It's a story that we've seen before but Jung unfortunately is also not the greatest writer either. I wanted to hear more about how many Chinese immigrants came to the US and ended up working in (for example) laundromats, how his family fit in (or not), more about what it was like to adjust moving from some place like Macon to San Francisco, California, etc.
So this book wasn't quite what I was looking for. As a first person narrative it certainly seemed interesting and might be a good fit for someone looking for this type of story. But I'll definitely not be as eager to read his other books and will be looking to buy them used if I can't find them at the library.
Author Jung tells us about his life and times in Macon: how his parents met, why they ended up in Macon, his childhood there and his experiences with the South, how they forged a living, how they eventually moved to San Francisco, etc. Initially it sounded quite interesting, but unfortunately I didn't quite realize what it was, which is his life story. I didn't know anything prior to reading the book and realize now this wasn't the book I wanted to read.
While aspects of the book are interesting (how he and his family, as the only non white or black family in the area were treated better than black people but were definitely seen as not equal to white people), I really wasn't interested in his family and his life. It's a story that we've seen before but Jung unfortunately is also not the greatest writer either. I wanted to hear more about how many Chinese immigrants came to the US and ended up working in (for example) laundromats, how his family fit in (or not), more about what it was like to adjust moving from some place like Macon to San Francisco, California, etc.
So this book wasn't quite what I was looking for. As a first person narrative it certainly seemed interesting and might be a good fit for someone looking for this type of story. But I'll definitely not be as eager to read his other books and will be looking to buy them used if I can't find them at the library.
April 3, 2011
I absolutely loved this book. The Jung family, and their challenges, struggles, isolation and their prevailing against tremendous odds, is inspiring and moving! Would loved to have read more about their interactions with African Americans, but all in all a great read.
I learned quite a bit about Chinese Immigrant culture -- this book provides a good education (particularly in The End Notes)!
I learned quite a bit about Chinese Immigrant culture -- this book provides a good education (particularly in The End Notes)!
June 25, 2025
Definitely an interesting topic but the way it was framed was…lacking? I was looking forward to getting into the nitty gritty of race relations in Macon but we honestly didn’t get much. Of course, Jung was a small child and 14/15(?) when he left for San Fran; don’t really expect a child to completely understand racism. I suppose I was a bit turned off with the way he described relations? This wasn’t the contemplative book I thought it’d be. Jung presented the issues in a simple way but didn’t take the time to reflect on the situation for more than a paragraph. And so, after leaving Macon for San Fran, I don’t remember nor care about anything from Georgia. There’s a disconnect between what it meant to be a person of color in the south (even though Jung claims the Maconites were largely neutral to his family and considered them white-ish).
One line that tripped me up (and made it a little hard to finish the book) was about the KKK having a “peaceful protest.” Not sure if Jung was stating this from his child-self but there’s no way that the KKK, a literal hate group, can ever do anything peacefully. Jung’s lack of reflection on this was a real turn off and hint at the larger disconnect and his lack of real narrative structure when it came to social problems. Honestly, it seems inauthentic for him to frame the book around Macon but not to really delve into the culture. “We were Chinese in Georgia, people treated us fairly well except some obvious racists, the Black workers were understandably illiterate but unreliable for working in our laundry, and now my family is moving to San Francisco.” I know that’s not all the book was but that’s the easiest way I can describe it. Overall, a lot of good information in the book; but it could’ve done with a narrative swipe and a buttload of editing for grammar and syntax and overall readability.
One line that tripped me up (and made it a little hard to finish the book) was about the KKK having a “peaceful protest.” Not sure if Jung was stating this from his child-self but there’s no way that the KKK, a literal hate group, can ever do anything peacefully. Jung’s lack of reflection on this was a real turn off and hint at the larger disconnect and his lack of real narrative structure when it came to social problems. Honestly, it seems inauthentic for him to frame the book around Macon but not to really delve into the culture. “We were Chinese in Georgia, people treated us fairly well except some obvious racists, the Black workers were understandably illiterate but unreliable for working in our laundry, and now my family is moving to San Francisco.” I know that’s not all the book was but that’s the easiest way I can describe it. Overall, a lot of good information in the book; but it could’ve done with a narrative swipe and a buttload of editing for grammar and syntax and overall readability.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 18, 2019
Nice, interesting. The editing took a steep dive after the first half, but it was still an interesting read.
July 31, 2011
Very enjoyable. This was interesting to see how this family survived in a very racially divided south. Wonder why there were so many Chinese Laundries? This book will explain the difficult work that running a laundry was and why the white people in the south were okay letting other people do that strenous work. This was a quick read.
August 13, 2014
Super duper!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews