Even before the Stop AAPI Hate movement, persons of Chinese descent have faced discrimination at work, at home, and more in the United States of America.
In this Imagine Talks Podcast interview, we sat down with Dr. John Jung, a psychology professor who reinvented himself in retirement to become a public historian of Chinese in America. John Jung recaps the history of racism that can hold people back from achieving their full potential. We recorded & transcribed this prior to Dr. Jung’s passing in 2021, and are now posting this in memory of him and his work.
John Jung grew up in Macon, Georgia, where he was born to Chinese immigrant parents who operated a laundry during the years before the U.S. Civil Rights era. After a 40 year career as a Professor of Psychology, in 2002, John Jung began to reflect on many aspects of his personal development and returned to a question that he had avoided many times: “How do I, as a second-generation Chinese American fit in a predominantly black-and-white society?”
Purchase John Jung’s published books at:
- Amazon:
👉🏻 Southern Fried Rice: Life in a Chinese Laundry in the Deep South
👉🏻 Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton: Lives of Mississippi Delta Chinese Grocers
👉🏻 Sweet and Sour: Life in Chinese Family Restaurants. And, a Chinese American Odyssey
👉🏻 Chinese Laundries: Tickets to Survival on Gold Mountain
👉🏻 A Chinese American Odyssey: How a Retired Psychologist Makes a Hit as a Historian
- Barnes and Noble:
👉🏻 Southern Fried Rice: Life in a Chinese Laundry in the Deep South
👉🏻 Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton: Lives of Mississippi Delta Chinese Grocers
👉🏻 Sweet and Sour: Life in Chinese Family Restaurants. And, a Chinese American Odyssey
👉🏻 Chinese Laundries: Tickets to Survival on Gold Mountain
👉🏻 A Chinese American Odyssey: How a Retired Psychologist Makes a Hit as a Historian
Introducing John Jung
Francis Kong: Welcome to Imagine Talks Podcast, achieving success, social impact, and overcoming obstacles. I am Francis Kong.
Tammy Tran: And I’m Tammy Tran. For today’s episode, we will be introducing John Jung, author of the memoir Southern Fried Rice: Life in a Chinese Laundry in the Deep South, which describes living in the South during the Jim Crow era.
He additionally has written Chinese Laundries: Tickets to Survival on Gold Mountain, a social history of the important roles that these businesses that once dotted the landscape held for the economic survival of Chinese immigrants.
Steven Chan: And I’m Steven Chan. John has also written Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton: Lives of Mississippi Delta Chinese Grocers, which examines the similar role of this family occupation for Chinese in the Delta.
Steven Chan: He’s also written Sweet and Sour: Life in Chinese Family Restaurants. And, a Chinese American Odyssey, a writing memoir about the process and experience of how he, as a psychology professor, reinvented himself in retirement to become a public historian of Chinese in America. Now, without delay let’s welcome John.
Steven Chan: Hi, John.
John Jung: Hello, happy to be with you.
The life history of John Jung—a Chinese in America
Steven Chan: Thank you so much for being with us. And we have so many questions we wanted to ask you because of your extensive experience and knowledge. So we’ll just start off with our first question. Yeah. As someone who was born in 1937, you have extensive knowledge of the experience of being Chinese in America.
You have witnessed many changes over the past century. So our first question to you is what was it like for you or an others growing up during this time period?
John Jung: I was born in 1937 and I lived in Macon, Georgia, right in the heart of Georgia until I was 15. And then we moved to San Francisco.
So those are like two really different aspects of my life history. Before I talk about what happened after I moved to San Francisco, let me focus on my identity and my experiences in the deep South. During the period before civil rights activism, Jim Crow laws were still very much in existence.
I grew up in a small town. We were the only Chinese people in the whole host city. Although there were some students who had come to a college there. In fact, in 1910 or 11 the three Soong sisters which include Madame Chiang Kai-shek, future Madam Chiang Kai-shek. They were actually in Macon in 1910. Of course, I didn’t know that until many years later. But as far as immigrants were concerned during the time period, my parents were there between the late twenties and early fifties, we were the only Chinese there.
John Jung didn’t know much about what it meant to be Chinese
Now, we were, contrary to popular belief, not mistreated. Perhaps because we were the only ones there and we represented no threat to the community. We were able to go to a white school. We were not mistreated or harassed or maybe, as my mom sometimes told me, maybe during the war years some people would come by and make derogatory comments. Like, she said, people would come by and tease and say, “Oh, Chinese, eat rats” or something. But that seemed to be about the worst of it.
Now, my parents didn’t know much English and so my first language was Chinese. And I knew I was Chinese, but I didn’t really know what that meant. Certainly didn’t have the same meaning to me that it would have had if I had grown up in San Francisco or New York Chinatown.
John Jung: I can honestly say I didn’t know much about what it meant to be Chinese. I had a different identity than probably most people, most Chinese people, in larger cities where they were China towns. We did maintain our culture in that we ordered food preserved foods from grocery stores in San Francisco, Chinatown.
My mom always cooked Chinese food with a wok and stir fry, but, as a child, I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that other people didn’t have a wok; I assumed other people did as well. It was a learning experience for me that I didn’t get to enjoy until I moved to San Francisco. In school there was very little discussion about the history of Chinese America.
A brief history of John Jung’s family
I don’t recall ever even learning about the Chinese building, the Transcontinental Railroad. There was certainly no mention about 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. My mom is the one who taught me all I knew about Chinese victimization because when she came, she was detained on Angel Island for an indefinite period. And it was a very unpleasant experience.
Whereas my father, maybe because he was working all the time, never, ever talked about anything related to what it meant to be Chinese in America. It was just not a topic of conversation. But my mom frequently warned us was signaling to us, that you’re going to face discrimination that their unfair treatment of Chinese. And when I was a kid, I discounted this a little bit. I thought maybe she was exaggerating sometimes.
I think she learned a lot about this because we subscribed to a Chinese newspaper and she would read them about incidents in other places where Chinese were mistreated. And she wanted to protect us by, forewarning us that we might expect some of these events to happen to us later.
A question to himself that led to John Jung writing history about Chinese in America
But as I said, I basically discounted it. And I’ll talk a little bit later about some of our other experiences on Angel Island that are relevant. We did have a few relatives in Atlanta and occasionally, we'd take a day trip, go up in the morning, visit for two or three hours, and then come back on the train the same day. And all of these Chinese that I knew in Georgia were basically running laundries and in Augusta maybe a few ran grocery stores. But in Atlanta and Macon, all we did were laundries and I was not smart enough to wonder “why is it that all the Chinese people I know run laundries?” And that's an interesting story in itself that I was not able to answer until many years later when I started writing about Chinese-American history.
So that kind of gives you a little bit of overview of what life was in South. This is an image of our laundry on the right in 1953, when I left.
We lived above the laundry and the place that you would least want to be in the hot humid summers of Georgia, is above a steam laundry.
That was our situation. Now on the left when I started doing my research, in probably 2000 or thereabouts, I discovered this photograph from 1906 and I’ve circled the same building that I grew up in. And later I found actually, there have been Chinese running a laundry in that very same building as early as 1885.
So that’s a little bit of a background that I’ll share with you about my experience in Georgia.
John Jung’s perceptions of the Chinese-American experience
Now, one of the questions that came up was, “what are my perceptions of the Chinese American experience?” So obviously, I can speak mostly about in the 1940s and on when I was growing up. But, to really fully understand this I think we need to go back a little bit. Even though we’re talking about the transcontinental railroad, which has been in the news a lot because of various celebrations and events of Chinese trying to reclaim their recognition for this.
Now, to build this railroad, at least 20,000 plus Chinese were brought over either from California or from China.
And it is much to their credit that they were able to achieve this tremendous success. But what happened next was when the railroad was completed in 1969, they had no more use for the Chinese. It was sorta like, “thank you, doll.” That created a lot of animosity among white workers, because all these unemployed Chinese, some of them went and worked on peripheral railroads across the country, but many of them were seen as potential threats because they were cheap labor.
And so while the workers were opposed to the Chinese, actually, capitalists like Stanford and Crocker, and the big four of Mark Hopkins and Huntington they actually capitalized on the Chinese. He said “Well, we want Chinese it here because they’re cheap. And so we can make a bigger profit.”
The Chinese Exclusion Act
So anyway, because of all, this tension and hostility generated by so many Chinese competing for work. In 1882, as you probably know, there was the Chinese Exclusion Act that was passed, which lasted all, the way to 1943,
in which Chinese laborers were no longer allowed to come into the United States. You could be a merchant or you could be a diplomat, or you could be a student and you could get in, but you can no longer be just a laborer.
And so this created a tremendous problem for the Chinese community that, extended certainly until I grew up. Because, number one, the Chinese could not naturalize, they could not become citizens and therefore, they cannot vote. And this cartoon from somewhere in [the] 1800s, late 1800s with the caption, “Give it to him, he’s got no vote nor no friends.” And that is part of the heart of a matter of our problems. And fortunately, today we’re starting to see much more involvement of Chinese Americans and other Asian Americans in being able to influence policies through political action.
Steven Chan: Do you mind if I and also, you’re showing this amazing cartoon, for those of us who are listening on the audio version of our podcast it’s actually an image that shows multiple people with bats. The bats are labeled “Democrats”, “independents”, “Republicans”, and what does that say, “readjusters”. And they’re all pulling and it looks like they're about to actually beat one single Chinese person.
Propagating the victimization and demonization of Chinese laborers
John Jung: Yeah. This picture’s worth a thousand words. And unfortunately in podcasts, we can’t say it. So I’m glad that you described that. I didn’t think about that, but it certainly Yeah. Yeah. The caption says also “When politicians do agree that unanimity is wonderful.” So you can see, this is advocating this demonization and victimization of the Chinese laborer.
Steven Chan: I think that what you’ve shared is just a lot of history that oftentimes gets glossed over whenever we’ve studied US history. I certainly remember when I was studying for AP US history and AP World history. It’s something that certainly is not something I myself had reflected on, as to how far we’ve come in some ways, but also there are certain parallels for today’s current events. And I know that we’re going to dive into that some more later in the podcast. So thanks so much for the overview.
It’s all just history repeating itself
John Jung: History does have a way of repeating itself in some form or another. Now, because of this exclusion act, it had tremendous ramifications. That I think a lot of younger people don’t actually realize because they don’t learn this history and see how it has adversely impacted Chinese in America for decades.
So, for example, most of the Chinese who came were men; some of them were married where they left their wives and children in China.
One reason being that they expected to go back. They came here to strike it rich from the gold fields, which they didn’t. Yeah. They found that they would have it easier if the family stayed behind and be safer.
And so the men lived in society, which were entirely, almost entirely male. So they were separated from their families and more critically, since a lot of these men did not marry, we lost several generations of new children growing up. This is why, I guess a lot of the older Chinese men in the late 1800’s, early 20th century doted so much on little children whenever they saw them because they didn’t have any of their own.
This was a major negative impact on the Chinese in America. And it lasted all the way, as I said until 1943. Now, eventually, by the 20th century there were some growth of families. Some of the Chinese men who were merchants did have their wives and children with them. So there were some American born children.
Family development opportunities for Chinese in America
There were also many, well we don’t know statistically how many, but some, Chinese married Irish women in New York City because Irish and Chinese were both on the low end of the social totem pole.
And in some of the ones in South may have had a common-law marriage with African Americans. Although the term African-American is a more recent term, in those days, which term would have been “Negro” or “Colored.” But in any case, this provided the opportunity for Chinese American families to develop.
But the problem was, for these people growing up in the early part of the 20th century was, even if they were highly educated, there were no job opportunities for them, often very few. People would not hire them or they would only be limited to certain types of occupations. And here are a couple of influential books, probably the best-known one is Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter.
But on the male version, Pardee Lowe wrote a book as a reflection of the, I guess to some extent, respect and deference to male-dominated society to one’s ancestors. He wrote, what do you call it? Worship of Ancestors. And so these Chinese, at that point were often in some generational conflict as well. “Who am I ? Am I Chinese? Am I American? Am I mixed? Who am I?” And this was a struggle that I think many other people in that time had to deal with. They had to be deferential fathers out of respect. At the same time they were becoming Americanized and adopting American values.
American names vs. Chinese names
And they wanted to go into occupations that their parents disapproved of. You could not become an artist or ceramicist, as Yates did very successfully because your parents wanted you to become something that was financially stable, like being an accountant or, being a business person, merchant, or something like that. So, that was part of the consequence that extended from exclusion.
Now, paper identity refers to the fact that because of exclusion, many Chinese were able to buy paper documents, the paper referring to the immigration papers, from somebody else. In other words, my Americanized name is “Jung”, but actually, my Chinese name is “Lau” L-A-U, and that’s because my father was a paper son.
He came over as a “Jung” because he was able to purchase the documents of someone else whose name was Jung. So when he came, he was interrogated in terms of being the son of some merchant in San Francisco with the last name Jung. So that’s why I got the name, the American name “Jung” instead of the Chinese name “Lau.”
And, to a lesser extent, daughters were also having false documents. Fewer girls were brought over, but if there were, we could consider them as paper daughters.
And the problem with this was, if you passed interrogation you got in, if you didn’t you would get sent back. But the rest of your life, you were always worried that you might be detected, that they might be suspicious and interrogate you and you could be deported.
The burden that comes with being a paper-son or paper-daughter
So to some extent, this is why Chinese of that generation, and there were other reasons as well, did not get involved in any form of activism. You didn’t want to call attention to yourself because you’d probably get investigated and there might be the likelihood that you’d be deported.
So my mother told me all about this when I was a child in Georgia. She talked about my father being a paper son and what, and this was true for me Chinese and my generation, we had American-Chinese name and we had a Chinese-Chinese name, and it was always confusing. And I felt a little bit burdened by getting this knowledge, turns out when I talked to other Chinese Americans are my age, they had never heard of this. Their parents never told them about this. So if you stop to think about this, parents don’t want to burden the child with this knowledge. For one thing, they might blurt it out somewhere, so it’s safer not to tell them. I’m sure many of us were wondering, “Hey, how come my Chinese name and American names are different?”
So anyway, my mom made sure I knew, and that was a burden I carried for many years. I would not go to visit Angel Island. I felt so, so bitter and hostile just from all the things my mom told me about it.
In 1943, exclusion was removed and I include this excerpt from a newspaper that you can’t see on podcast,
but there’s a very small article, 1943 paper about the Chinese exclusion laws off the books. It’s three sentences, it says it’s over. And that little article is sandwiched on a page of ads for movies.
The Confession Program
So it’s not page one news. It’s “Oh, by the way, the Chinese exclusion law is no longer there.” As if it really wasn’t all that important, maybe to white Americans, but to Chinese Americans, it was a tremendous sea change because it enabled the Chinese to be more acceptable. But that lasted for maybe, at most, 10 years. That was honeymoon support and interest in Chinese Americans among all American citizens.
But when the communists took over in 1949 with Chairman Mao Zedong, there became suspicion that Chinese were spies, or some Chinese were spies. And, immigration knew that a lot of Chinese had entered falsely with the paper documents. So they create a confession program, which basically said, "if you want to come up and admit that you had false documents and your real name is such and such, we will allow you to correct the record and you can get your family names all straight."
Now, this created a tremendous problem in the Chinese community. There were people who burned all their documents, burned all their papers, because they were afraid that they would be used as evidence against them. Families were torn apart because if you want to confess it doesn’t only affect you. It affects every member of your family, all your relatives, because they’re related to you. So this created a lot of tension among Chinese in terms of the consequences of the confession program.
Eventually, after the liberalization of the immigration laws, and Chinese more readily accepted, Chinese were lauded as a model minorities, whiz kids.
Double-edged praise of model minority Chinese in 1970s
And so this was like a double edge thing. It’s like they were praising and Chinese. One of the motivations was, “Look, hey, these Chinese immigrants they work hard, they study hard, they don’t get in trouble. Why can’t other minorities be likewise?” So they were using this, in a way, as a wedge. Even though it was good for Chinese to get this recognition, but on the other hand, it was also difficult for many Asian Americans and Chinese Americans who were not themselves whiz kids.
So that was this like meditation, every time you saw a Chinese person, you expect a brain. There was a joke once about some kid going into a class, he looked in the class, he saw 90% of the students in there were Asian, so he didn’t take the class, because he thought that the curve would be too high.
Can’t a Chinese person be “American”?
Despite all the progress that the Chinese made, there was this infamous headline in a newspaper when Michelle Kwan, who was a world-class champion ice skater in 1998, she lost she didn’t get first blade. And the headline was in the newspaper, American beats out Kwan.
Now, what does that tell us?
Note that Michelle Kwan was, is an American. She was born in Torrance, California. So what does it mean to say that “American beat Kwan” as if Kwan was not [American]? So this fits in with that notion that we all been aware of that for some people, Chinese are forever foreign, that somehow people look at us and think “ where are you really from?” kind of thing. That they don’t seem to recognize that Chinese born in the U.S. are not the same as Chinese in China. There’s this tendency to conflate or confuse and equate Chinese Americans who were born in the U.S. with Chinese living in China. But we all know that we are Chinese Americans and we, as soon as we get off the plane in Hong Kong were spotted right away, they know that we're not Chinese. We're Chinese Americans if anything.
Now, in the last certainly 25 plus years Chinese and really opened up new avenues.
We’ve got prominent people in every major endeavor that we could think of, which would have been unheard of, say back in the 1940s, when the exclusion act ended. And this is a tribute to the dedication and hard work that these people have done to achieve these great heights.
Recognizing “Who is a Chinese American?”
But along with that, we have to recognize “who is a Chinese American?” We talk about Chinese Americans as if it’s a unitary thing. Now we have the Guandong pioneers, the people came over to build a railroad, the people came over in the early 20th century.
And then we had their children, the ABCs, the American born Chinese, and then maybe the, their children, the grandchildren of the Guandong.
But separate from that since the 1960s, actually 1950s, we have a lot of people from Hong Kong; and after the communist Chinese came to power, we had a lot of Chinese coming from Taiwan; and then we have Chinese coming from other places around the world. But these are all classifiable as Chinese Americans, but there’s so much diversity among these groups, which is both good and bad.
We have to recognize that all these subgroups really don’t even get along with each other. Sometimes, they don’t interact. They’re not a unitary thing. And so this is one of our problems that we have to face is how to deal with all this diversity among Chinese in America.
Street violence and attacks against Asian Americans
Now tell me really up to the current situation we’re seeing extremely disturbing incidents of almost random street violence and attacks against Asian Americans as exemplified in the cover of a recent New Yorker magazine, showing a Chinese woman looking at her watch apprehensively waiting for the subway to come.
She’s holding the hand of her daughter. They’re both on the platform alone. And this illustrates the fact that in the New York subway in recent months, a number of Chinese, women especially, have been attacked for no good reason at all. And so this exemplifies the current crisis we have now. And It is very troublesome and it is like a continuation of some of the violence that’s occurred over the past 150 years against Chinese, with the big difference being that these are isolated events, like one-on-one.
It’s not like a mob at some of the previous riots against Chinese where large numbers of people destroyed chinatowns burned them down, drove Chinese out of the city by midnight. But yeah, it still has some continuity that Chinese are easy to spot. There’s a lot of hostility toward Chinese now.
Not because they are taking away white jobs, but China's being vilified-- and there are good reasons for that in a way with all the human rights abuses in China-- but also there’s this threat that China, not Chinese Americans, China represents the threat to many Americans because America is used to being number one on everything.
Chinese in America: why it is important to know their history
China now is economically very prosperous. And that there’s fear or resentment or concern about the growing power of China. Add on top of that Trump’s association with China as being the cause of the COVID-19 virus. These are very explosive situations that is something that, we don't know how this is going to work itself out, but we need to find a way to look on this in a positive way as well.
It’s been noted that the characters in Chinese for crisis are two letters, two characters: one means danger and the other means opportunity for change.
So looking at it as an optimistic thing you could say, we have seen lots of activism in recent weeks among Chinese communities. People are demonstrating, people are petitioning, people are getting politically involved, and that’s a good thing.
However, we don’t know how long this will last. Will this be a short-term activism and then it’ll abate? Especially, if the problem recedes a bit. But other people have proposed that, “Oh, the problem is we don’t have an education of our history.” Now, I’m not opposed to education; I think it’s really important that the history of Chinese in America received more attention than it has received in the past. But I don’t think that’s going to be the big solution. Education about the Chinese American history I think it’s primarily of importance to Chinese Americans, to the younger generation, because they don’t know that they need to know that I understand our past because the past is going to influence the future.
AAPI hate: how can we stop it?
As far as education goes for violent people who are aggressive against Chinese, I’m not optimistic that’s going to be the solution. I think there’s a lot of people who are attacking Chinese who would not differ at all if they knew the history of Chinese America. But probably the thing that we need the most, that doesn’t seem to be occurring at as great a level as I’d like to see, is more support and more activism on the part of non-Chinese and non-Asian groups, white groups, black groups, Brown groups. We need them to also see this as a problem that affects the whole country and not just the Chinese. When we can get more involvement of all groups I think that will make it a major thing.
And I hope that’s something that will transpire in the coming months. So those are my main observations about the past the present, and it’s hard to predict the future, but I thought I would make that point.
Steven Chan: I think that based off of our facial reactions, you have taken our breath away. And you have, yeah, I see that, one of, one of our co-hosts has just shown the mindblowing hand gesture, John.
And I want to thank you so much for summarizing, but painting a picture, of all the struggles that Chinese Americans have faced, Asian American, certainly as an umbrella term. And you on your slides for those who haven’t who don’t have the visuals, you’ve shown how heterogeneous and how diverse even subgroups are.
The glimmer of interest f John Jung in writing out and doing research about Chinese American history
Your slide on how Chinese have achieved a new areas. You list mayors, artists, governors, lawyers, fashion designers, journalists; we have all sorts of folks who are achieving in new areas, new careers. And you’ve also enumerated the changing face of Chinese in America, some of the terms, ABC, Taiwan parachutes, FOB and Hong Kong, Chinese later PRC.
A whole host of terms and a lot of different experiences that, you know, that some people try to lump all in together, but really it’s very heterogeneous too. So I want to thank you so much for that. And I know we’re we’d love to ask a few questions about how you got involved and also today. So we would just like to ask you about that,
John Jung: Right, I was trying to answer those questions, but I wasn’t quite sure how to fit it in with the flow. And I’m glad you asked that because I know you expressed interest in that. It wasn’t until after I’d been retired from teaching psychology for four years, that I even has a glimmer of interest in writing out and doing research about Chinese American history.
As I mentioned earlier, growing up in Georgia, I didn’t really know what Chinese really meant. So when I retired, one of my thoughts was to write my memoir about growing up in the South. Because over the years, a lot of people, when they heard that I was from the South, they would all be amazed. And so “Oh, wow that must’ve been interesting.” I’d probably roll my eyes a few times.
The development of John Jung as a public historian of Chinese in America
But when I retired, I thought, yeah, maybe it is of interest. So I took a stab at it and I wrote Southern Fried Rice. And that was the only one I was going to do. And I remember people would say “What’s your next book?” And I’d say “There is no next book. I only have one life to write about.” But because I was a academic and used to doing research to back up what I was doing, even when I was writing my memoir, I was looking up research. And I learned from doing that, that there were hundreds, if not thousands of Chinese laundries in the U.S. and Canada and many other places.
So that led me to do a second book that focused on Chinese laundries in general. And one of the situations that I made later was, at the time Chinese were looking for work and not getting it, in the like late 1800s , they turned to doing laundries. And it was probably a unique time that they got into this because the country was moving from rural to urban. Well maybe not urban, but to small town. There were a lot of small towns and there was more need for laundry services. And especially in big cities people lived in a rooming house, boarding houses, they had no washing machines, they had no facilities.
So this created an opportunity for the laundry industry to develop. Which you wouldn't need if everyone’s living on a farm. You wouldn’t need clean clothes to go out and till the soil. So then like maybe a hundred years later, everyone’s getting home washing machines. And so the opportunity for opening laundries or running launderies, would have been diminished considerably.
How Chinese found their niche in America
That’s an interesting footnote on timing being so important in terms of Chinese being, I want to say at the right place at the right time, but that’s how Chinese found their niche. And then later they got into other things, which is the subject of one of my other books, the Chinese restaurant.
All those things have a historical precedent. Chinese restaurant was not initially popular; it was mainly in Chinatowns where the clients were mainly these bachelors, these bachelor men, who would go to Chinatown for some soul food. They were not eating gourmet Chinese food that you’re not finding out high-class place today.
They were eating foods that they ate in the villages back in China and chop suey was the thing that turned the tide around. When chop suey got a lot of publicity in the news, because the Viceroy of China came and supposedly anecdotally endorsed it because allegedly had never had it before, this created tremendous interest among the foodies of the day.
They would go down to Chinatown at night in groups, because it was dangerous to in Chinatown, there were Tong wars, there were, it was, dens of inequity. You had this interesting thing of people running down to Chinatown because they wanted to check out this thing called chop suey and it caught on.
And then that, since opened the door for Chinese to start marketing Americanized Chinese food to a larger population and providing a source of economic income for many Chinese. Chinese preferred obviously preferred but enjoyed the self-employment because they don’t have to worry about getting fired.
An author’s challenges
Many of the children, by the way, who grew up in laundries like myself, or like some of my friends who grew up restaurants, we didn’t always appreciate it because we had to work. We had to help out in the family. It was family enterprise. But on the good side, we learned a lot of discipline. We learned how to deal with customers. And parents didn’t have to worry about where we were, we were there working. So in hindsight, it turned out to be a good thing, but as we were growing up, it was not the most desirable thing.
And then one other book that I mentioned would be the Mississippi Delta Chinese Grocers, which is a very unique community. I was very fortunate to get involved with that. I met a couple of people from the Delta and they were really interested in someone writing a book about their experience. And it was a real challenge to do.
Partly because I was writing about people who were still alive. Whereas, my other books were about people who had gone before. So it’s more of a challenge when you’re writing a book about a community that is probably on its way out; everyone is aging out, all the children have moved on to California, New York, Chicago, or whatever, because there's not much economic opportunity for them in the Delta anymore. But it’s a, it’s an amazing story of a unique Southern Chinese community. So that’s how I got involved. I found it very rewarding to do this in my retirement.
John Jung’s Chinese-American Experience Today
Tammy Tran: That’s great. That’s actually really awesome. To build upon what Steve was saying earlier very happy to learn about all of the experiences that you’ve shared with us, your knowledge and it's just amazing. And all the books, I do recommend everyone to go out and buy his books, read it, to learn more about the Chinese American history. John, in talking about this, based off of what you shared with us and your extensive knowledge, can you tell us about the Chinese American experience today and what you think about it?
John Jung: We’ve come a long way. There’s still a ways to go. I think there’s greater recognition of the achievements of Chinese in America. We’re still facing, as I pointed out before, that there are some people who still refuse to accept us as fully American and that’s a problem. But things are going to change in a sense that as time goes by, especially with more mixed marriages-- and I’m not saying I’m opposed to mixed marriages in fact, I was married to a Jew-- the definition of identity is going to come much more complicated as the social structures evolve and change.
I think the breakthroughs recently in the media for many American artists in the movies and stage and things like that, are very salient. For better or worse, people generally pay a lot of attention to sports heroes, movie stars, less so, to say maybe scientists or academicians or scholars.
The Asian American coalition serves a useful purpose
Yeah. I think that Chinese Americans are becoming more salient. And a lot of this is also applicable to other Asian Americans as well. Of course, Asian American is a term that came up during activism. There is no easy definition of “Asian American”. When people ask me “What are you?” If I had to choose between “I’m an Asian American” versus “I’m a Chinese American,” I would always say Chinese American.
So Asian American is just a useful coalition. Because we share certain problems and issues. And because our numbers are so small relative to other groups, it’s good politically to have Asian Americans as a group working together rather than against each other. But this is also part of the problem because there’s so much diversity among Asian Americans in terms of education, background, political issue orientation and the like; so these are real challenges that we have to deal with.
Steven Chan: And you also were mentioning too about how activism and civil rights movements were really not a strong focus in the early century, early 20th century, because of the McCarthyism and a lot of other scare tactics that are going on. And this year we’ve seen a lot of anti-Asian events as you have discussed with the attacks and assaults on elderly and persons who are Asian in suburbs, urban settings throughout the country. So I’m just curious what you think about the specific movement Stop AAPI Hate and a lot of the activism that you’re seeing this year.
The Behavioral Contagion
John Jung: I’m encouraged by the growth of the activism, definitely. Because as I alluded to, earlier generations would not have been able to do that because of fear of deportation, but now we’re beyond probably the paper sons and daughters cause we’re now many years past that. So it was less concerned about getting deported and being organized and having greater numbers is really important. The other thing I want to mention as an aside here is that the media has a powerful influence. It could slat things one way or another, or what it covers.
Now certainly all of these atrocious crimes and attacks on Chinese Americans. And for that matter, anyone who’s attacked in that type of manner where you’re walking down the street and someone comes and clubs you in the back, or you see a picture of some elderly Chinese man standing in front of his garage and someone just comes in body, slams them, and man ends up dying.
Those have to be reported, they have to be publicized. But on the other hand, there’s a dilemma because there are a lot of what we call “copycats.” There are people who never thought of doing this, but now they say, “Oh yeah, that looks like fun.” Or maybe that’s overstating it, but they get the idea from what they see on the media.
But so that’s the conflict. You can’t not report it, but on the other you have to worry about what psychologists call behavioral contagion, “ I didn’t think about doing this before, but hey, there are a lot of other people doing and they’re getting away with it.” So definitely there needs to be more apprehension and penalties, sanctions against people who are perpetrating these unconscionable acts.
John Jung’s advice
Steven Chan: You know, I appreciate you labeling that, the contagion of actions that can occur behavioral contagion, and I think that gives us some pause to make to realize that this is not going to go away, that something needs to be done. You’ve given a wealth of context and certainly a wealth of knowledge about all the things that are going on over the past certain century and even today too. We just have a final question and it has to do more with your advice and your guidance for a lot of our listeners and viewers. If you have any advice for our listeners and viewers today, what would you give them?
John Jung: Oh, my gosh, that’s the $64,000 question. I don’t know that I have a crystal ball or that font of wisdom. I think we’re in a crisis mode, obviously. We can shrink and hide and stay indoors all the time, but that isn’t going to work. I’m hopefully, cautiously optimistic that the activism will be stable, it will grow it will get results, positive results. This is uncharted territory.
We’ve never had this much activism historically. We obviously must do something and spending a lot of time trying to debate “Oh, was that a hate crime or was that not a hate crime?” That might be important for legal purposes, but in terms of the consequences for people on the street, if someone bumps me on the head it matters little in one sense, whether it was truly a hate crime or, just a thing that was against me personally.
There are times when Asian ethnicities are difficult to distinguish
But yeah, Chinese Americans feel like they have targets on their back now. It’s funny that not like funny “haha”, but that Korean legislator in Texas “I’m not Chinese-American I’m Korean.” And I can say this well, what I would say to her is if you walk down the street in Chinatown, they’re not going to be able to tell the difference between you and a Chinese and a Korean.
So you, you were at risk too, you may also be attacked because someone thought you were Chinese.
Tammy Tran: I agree with that. A lot of Americans can’t tell the difference between the different Asian ethnicities. And so I’ve myself have been mistaken as Korean or Japanese when I’m actually Chinese Vietnamese American.
So yeah, I can, I totally agree with that statement. But thank you so much, John, for being on this podcast, giving us
John Jung: My pleasure. Yeah.
Tammy Tran: And giving us a history of Chinese American life in America. So I, I would like to put a couple of plugs for your book to our readers who would like to know more about what John was talking about. Please read his books. His first book is called Southern Fried Rice: Life in the Chinese Laundry in the Deep South. Second book, Chinese Laundries: Tickets to Survival on Gold Mountain. Third is Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton: Lives of Mississippi Delta Chinese Grocers. Then his fourth book is Sweet and Sour: Life in the Chinese Family Restaurants and his fifth book, A Chinese American Odyssey. Please go out and buy his books, they are very interesting. And you will learn a lot more about the Chinese American history that John has written about and shared with us.
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