Jung traces about one hundred years of Chinese-American history in an excellent memoir that is inspiring yet told with a great underlying sense of humor.
Students of Chinese language and culture will find the Cantonese references and photos spread throughout to be fascinating easter eggs. For example, one of the more interesting, subtle things I noticed was the picture of a homework exercise from the author's mother's English composition book on p191 where various English words were "sounded out" using Chinese characters as a Cantonese phonetic basis which is precisely what someone learning such a different and unfamiliar writing system as the Latin alphabet would do.
Regardless of one's background with Chinese, fans of history will find this a fascinating, fun read that is hard to put down: I myself read it in one sitting. Jung bats a 1.000 with this one, bravo!

I appreciated this book, because it has given me a more 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.

"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."

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

“Southern Fried Rice offers a fascinating and insightful account of Chinese-American family life in the context of restraints on immigration and the U.S. racial and economic systems. This story of one remarkable family offers valuable insight about economic struggles in difficult times, intergenerational relations, continuing ties to Chinese culture and community, family obligation, gender, the key role of laundries in Chinese economic opportunity, and much else.” Paul Rosenblatt, Professor of Family Social Sciences, University of Minnesota Author, Multiracial Couples: Black and White Voices

"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

“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

A fascinating look into Chinese immigration history and into Jim Crow southern living from a unique perspective. The author, a second-generation Chinese American, considers the geographical and cultural shifts of one nuclear family and, by extension, an ethnic group central to national development but peripheral to national consciousness. ... Jung provides details about how one group of "Asian Americans" was created and how deeply the experiential and psychological variances are within one ethnicity. Southern Fried Rice, ... demonstrates the fluidity of regional and national identity and is both a construction and deconstruction of "Chinese-ness." This account of a Chinese family's laundry business in the segregationist South is truly an American story: it defies simple or static definition and is filled with intricate, bitter ironies that separate reality from myth.

John Jung's parents' immigration in the 1920s, as was the case for many others during the 61 years of the Chinese Exclusion Act, was an agonizing affair contingent on creation of a "paper" family. The legal dance of citizenship that Jung reveals in his inside account of historic U.S. immigration procedures matches the complicated steps the Jung family participated in when crossing the line between Black and White in the Jim Crow South. ... After being born and raised in Macon, where his was the only Asian family for 100 miles, John moved to California at the age of 14, where he was subtlety schooled in San Francisco's Chinatown on how to "become" Chinese. The individual stories of his mother, father, two sisters and one brother and how each adjusted differently to their social roles in shifting locations are intriguing. The background story of historic waves of access to the U.S and the larger narrative of national development between WWI and the 1960s is also interesting. ... These intertwining 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" or "Asian."

...The flowing narrative takes readers to the back areas of family-run Chinese laundries and offers an occupational and economic genealogy of how first generation immigrants created a legacy for their children that saw a transition from laundries to restaurants but that also saw an integration of Chinese people into American fabric beyond stereotypical definitions. ... His personal story is intimately linked to his mother's who navigated her gender roles and racial construct in vastly different arenas, and eventually ventured back to China to visit her 90-year old mother across unfathomable distances of time, place, and experience. The ongoing story of generational conflict, (as second-generation children became more American and less Chinese), begs imperative questions about identity development on individual, national, and international levels.

John Jung's Southern Fried Rice is a treasure trove of material culture ripe for comparative analysis. It is also 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, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
African American Studies and Women's Studies
University of Florida