John Jung

I grew up in Macon, Georgia, where my family, the only Chinese in the city, lived above our laundry. After moving to California, I majored in psychology at U. C. Berkeley and went on to earn a Ph.D. at Northwestern University. Author of several academic textbooks, including Psychology of Alcohol and Other Drugs, I am Professor of Psychology Emeritus at California State University, Long Beach where I taught for 40 years.After retiring, in 2005 I wrote a memoir about my family's life in Georgia, Southern Fried Rice: Life in A Chinese Laundry in the Deep South. A second book, Chinese Laundries: Tickets to Survival on Gold Mountain, published in 2007,examines the significant role that their laundries had on the economic survival of Chinese immigrants throughout North America during much of the century from about the 1870s to 1970s.In Nov. 2008, I finished Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton: Laundries: Lives of Mississippi Delta Chinese Grocers which presents the social history of Chinese immigrants who came to this region in the late 1800s to run grocery stores mainly in black neighborhoods. It examines how they lived in a time and place of rigid racial segregation, how they improved their social status, and how they maintained their ethnic identity.Sweet and Sour: Life in Chinese Family Restaurants, published in 2010, is a social history of Chinese restaurants and the lives of families that operated this popular ethnic business for over a century.