The Lucky Ones
One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America
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2.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
This rags-to-riches history of three generations offers a “terrifically readable, compelling” look at the Chinese middle class and the immigrant experience (Publishers Weekly).
In 1864, at the age of twelve, Jeu Dip left southern China for America. In San Francisco, he reinvented himself as Joseph Tape, an immigration broker whose new life allowed his family to become one of the first of a brand-new social type: middle-class Chinese Americans.
As the Tape family’s rags-to-riches story unfolds, their history illuminates that of America. Seven-year-old Mamie Tape attempts to integrate California schools, resulting in the landmark 1885 Tape v. Hurley case. The family’s intimate involvement in the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair reveals how the Chinese American culture brokers essentially invented Chinatown—and so Chinese culture—for American audiences.
Many books have been written about the trials of coming to America, but as Mae Ngai follows the legacy of one family as they integrate into society over the course of generations, she shines a much-needed light on the Asian American experience.
“Mae Ngai tells a story we haven’t heard, and very much need. Provocative, groundbreaking, and revelatory, The Lucky Ones is a great read, to boot—as pleasurable as it is enlightening.” —Gish Jen
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A thoroughgoing look at the historical record of early Chinese immigration to San Francisco unearths the heartening story of one rags-to-riches family. Columbia history professor Ngai (Impossible Subjects) characterizes her work as history, situating the union of two young working people in San Francisco in 1875 within a larger frame of Chinese immigration, which had been encouraged by the California Gold Rush of the mid-19th century, attracting impoverished men mostly from the Guangdong Proivince. Jeu Dip, an enterprising drayman who had come over at age 12, and Mary McGladery, an indentured Chinese servant (mui tsai) who had emigrated as an orphan and was then rescued from prostitution at 11 years old, thanks to the Ladies' Protection and Relief Society, both became acculturated English-speakers and ambitious to live among the white middle-class. Despite recent legislation limiting Chinese immigration, and growing anti-Chinese racism due to the resentment from the displacement of the white workforce, Jeu Dip, renamed Joseph Tape, flourished as a deliveryman and broker for new immigrants; Joseph and Mary grew prosperous and even sued to have their daughter Mamie attend the local white public school. Ngai traces their descendants, especially their son, Frank, who was tried for extorting money from new immigrants, and his estranged wife, Ruby, who joined the Women's Army Corps (WAC) during World War II. Ngai fashions a terrifically readable, compelling work about the little-known middle-class in the Chinese immigrant experience.
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