Life In A Chinese Laundry In The Deep South

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jrjung.tripod.com/ Whenever people discover that I, a Chinese American living in California, was born and grew up in the middle of Georgia, they frequently ask something like, how did you ever end up living in Georgia?

Most people, even other Chinese, simply assume that because I am Chinese I was born or at least grew up in San Francisco or some other place in California where there are large Chinese populations since. The simplest answer is that when my parents immigrated from a small village near Canton, China to the United States in the 1920s they did not know anyone who could help them get settled except some Chinese from their village who was already living in the Deep South. But that answer only leads to the next question about how that Chinese person got to be in the South.

Upon further analysis, it is not surprising that many of the Chinese laundries scattered throughout the South in cities such as Chattanooga,Charleston, Birmingham, and Augusta, Atlanta, and Macon, Georgia were operated by Chinese immigrants who came from the same villages in the rural areas of Guangdong province in southeastern China. As each new immigrant, like my parents, was highly dependent on the assistance of earlier immigrants from their village upon their arrival in this land so strange to them, it is reasonable that they would end up more or less in the same region of the country.

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CHINESE LAUNDRIES: TICKETS TO SURVIVAL ON GOLD MOUNTAINISBN 978-1-4303-2979-4Yin & Yang Press, 2007. $15 Order Online: www.lulu.com/Chineselaundries Also by John Jung: Southern Fried Rice: Life in a Chinese Laundry in the Deep South Let Us Now Praise Chinese Laundrymen In search of Gold Mountain, you, your sons, and brothers came,Some helped forge the rail that links the land from coast to coast,Then, for problems not of your making, you were held to blame,Racism denied you basic rights and liberties accorded to most,You were taunted, assaulted, and then excluded from the land,Undaunted, you persevered and worked long hours into the night,Resourceful, you learned to survive by doing laundry by hand,For many, apart years from wife and children was your plight,You slaved, skimped, and saved to have money to send back,Resilient, you endured hardships with a determined attitude,Of courage, endurance, and determination, you did not lack,For which your children, and theirs, owe you lasting gratitude.Chinese immigrants coming here in the mid 19thcentury to seek work faced dis-criminatory barriers, and the hand laundry became their economic meal ticket thatenabled them to survive on Gold Mountain. This book tells why and how Chineselaundries originated and determined the economic, psychological, and social status of the laundrymen and, for some, their families. First- and second-hand accounts ofwork and life in their laundries, where many lived in the back, help us see and ap-preciate how much they achieved despite racial prejudice, hardship, and culturalisolation. Today, however, they have all but vanished, making it imperative to ac-knowledge their significant impact on Chinese in America.From the Foreword¡°... What is remarkable is this combination of historical per-spective and his social psychological descriptions and analyses of laundrymenand their descendants. The personal life stories, with their inner thought, feeling,values, attitudes, work experiences and survival hardships, are skillfully pre-sented with penetrating insights and observations. These perspectives present anoverall picture of the history and the life and work of the laundrymen. ¡°Ban Seng Hoe, Curator Asian Studies, Canadian Museum of Civilization

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Chinese Laundry Blog
__Let Us Now Praise Chinese Laundrymen__
2007 Feb 06

In search of Gold Mountain, you, your sons, and brothers came,


Some helped forge the rail that links the land from coast to coast,


Then, for problems not of your making, you were held to blame,


Racism denied you basic rights and liberties accorded to most,

You were taunted, assaulted, and then excluded from the land,


Undaunted, you persevered and worked long hours into the night,


Resourceful, you learned to survive by doing laundry by hand,


For many, apart years from wife and children was your plight,


You slaved, skimped, and saved to have money to send back,


Resilient, you endured hardships with a determined attitude,


Of courage, endurance, and determination, you did not lack,


For which your children, and theirs, owe you lasting gratitude''



'' From John Jung, Chinese Laundries; Tickets To Survival On Gold Mountain
Yin & Yang Press 2007.
''

A Link to my favorite Chinese laundry
2007 Feb 06

OTHER BOOKS by The Author:

Southern Fried Rice: Life in A Chinese Laundry in The Deep South

This is a memoir about our Chinese family, the only one in town, living in Macon, Georgia where my parents ran our SAM LEE LAUNDRY before the Civil rights era.



SOUTHERN FRIED RICE: Life in A Chinese Laundry in the Deep South, is my account of how my parents