WHAT READERS LOVE ABOUT SOUTHERN FRIED RICE

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 Leading 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