The lucky ones : one family and the extraordinary invention of Chinese America /

Joseph and Mary Tape became well known because of their attempt in the 1880s to enroll their daughter Mamie in a public school with whites in San Francisco. Historian Ngai (Columbia) explains that the couple lived outside Chinatown and eventually even moved across the bay to Berkeley. In their attitudes and lifestyles, the Tapes were a new type--Chinese Americans, who differed from their immigrant counterparts in Chinatown and yet were also different from their white neighbors. The Tapes were upwardly mobile and enjoyed the wealth and status of a middle-class lifestyle. Their offspring, the second generation, who benefited from this background, should easily have attained success as well, but the reality was far more complex. Despite a command of English and access to schooling, their children were tainted by scandal, experienced divorces in their marriages, and suffered other setbacks. In tracing the history of the Tape family, Ngai sees the invention of the middle class in Chinese America. The book makes a good case, although it fails to include the Chinese in Hawai'i, who certainly had attained a similar status much earlier. Suitable for a general public. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. F. Ng California State University, Fresno

"THEY met, the Chinese boy and the Chinese girl, in San Francisco in the spring of 1875. They met not in Chinatown, but in the 12th Ward, out near Van Ness Avenue, which was then at the fringes of the city's settlement. This was San Francisco's newest and most sparsely populated ward; hardly any Chinese lived there." So begins "The Lucky Ones," Mae Ngai's fresh portrait of Chinese immigrants, America and the past century, a deceptively novelistic and evocative opening to a book she warns is "neither fiction nor memoir, but a work of history." There is, however, drama here and plenty of it. Who are the "lucky ones" - and lucky compared with whom? Joseph and Mary Tape, as the boy and girl come to be known, are part of a wave of young Chinese who land in post-gold-rush San Francisco, mainly from Guangdong Province. Demonstrating a knack for reinvention, Joseph starts off as a houseboy, becomes a deliveryman and then transforms himself into a middleman and broker, providing a variety of services: delivering baggage and passengers to Chinatown, running a funeral business, arranging bonds for immigrants, and serving as an interpreter for railroad and shipping lines bringing newcomers to the Bay Area. Mary's tale begins more darkly. She arrives, Ngai speculates, aboard the steamship Colorado in August 1868, a lone 11-year-old on a vessel that carries "20,000 packets of tea and silk, along with 80 passengers in cabin class and 800 Chinese in steerage." Once onshore, she winds up in a Chinatown brothel before being rescued by Protestant missionaries, who install her in an all-white home for children. Joseph and Mary meet, then, in somewhat unusual circumstances, at a distance from the majority of Chinese in San Francisco's Chinatown. Early on, they are already adapting to the larger culture. Joseph's story, in particular, is an exploration of the opportunities that exist, narrow though they may be, on the margins of mainstream America, whose borders are reinforced by rabid "anti-coolie" violence, "yellow peril" hysteria and a host of exclusionary laws and practices. (The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which aimed to halt Chinese immigration and lasted until 1943, plays a pivotal role, both inhibiting and paradoxically enabling Joseph's career.) Early examples of hybridized Americans, or "in-between people," the Tapes help create what Ngai calls a Chinese-American "interpreter class." And this status serves them well, to a point. The family becomes a bellwether for the progress of the Chinese in America, a group of Zeligs who appear at defining moments. The Tapes' eldest daughter, Mamie, becomes the plaintiff in a groundbreaking 1885 civil rights case for public schooling in the Chinese community. Mamie, along with her husband and brother, also works in the Chinese Village at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, which helps create the familiar tourist-friendly, pagoda-peaked look of Chinatowns across the country. Mamie's brother, who leads a fast and roving life as an immigrant power broker and interpreter, is the first Chinese to serve on a San Francisco jury. But despite its successes, the second generation of the Tape family has its share of misfortune: failed marriages, legal troubles, an often contentious relationship with both the Chinese community and the American society that surrounds it. Ngai, a union organizer turned historian, has chosen to write what she calls a "middle-class" history, and while the Tapes' achievements are hard-won and impressive, they remain tinged with a sense of loss. What is the cost of success, the price of this family's "luck"? Where do they ultimately belong? These are questions Ngai only hints at. But while her imagination strains from time to time, trying to flesh out the picture she has wrested from family photographs, official records and various news clippings, this material still yields an absorbing story. Anderson Tepper, a member of the editorial staff of Vanity Fair, is also a contributor to the online literary magazine "Words Without Borders."

At age 12, Jeu Dip emigrated from China to San Francisco during the tail end of the gold rush, ultimately finding work as a domestic. He faced the isolation, hardship, and discrimination against Chinese as they struggled to find a place for themselves among the burgeoning Eastern European immigrant population. He reinvented himself as Joseph Tape, an immigrant broker not above exploiting his Chinese clients even as he propelled himself into the middle class, living among whites and assimilating. The Tape family pushed against the restrictions on Chinese, integrating the public schools after bringing an 1885 landmark lawsuit, and helping to establish Chinatown's culture and commerce. Drawing on 10 years of research, historian Ngai documents three generations of the rise and influence of the Tape family during the era of Chinese exclusion (1882-1943), through the world wars and Great Depression, offering a record of the Chinese immigrant experience that is not as widely known or appreciated as that of other immigrants. Photographs help document the acculturation and prosperity of the Tape family.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist

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. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

The entrance of a new immigrant ethnic group into the American middle class is often studied through numbers and statistics; however, Ngai (history, Columbia Univ.; Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America) approaches the creation of the Chinese American middle class experience through a three-generation narrative of the Tape Family, beginning with Joseph Tape and Mary McGaldery Tape-or Jeu Dip (in Mandarin Zhao Qia) and Mary, whose Chinese name was never recorded. Their story encapsulates their complex mission to attain the comforts of middle class existence by adopting the culture of the American marketplace-anglicizing their surname, living away from San Francisco's Chinatown and other Chinese, and distancing themselves from the traditional manual labors of immigrants. The Tapes were crusaders of equal rights for Chinese and fought to desegregate the schools, yet their motives were as self-promoting as they were altruistic. VERDICT Ngai has written a remarkable chronicle of one particular multigenerational family. This scholarly, heavily footnoted book can be read by both laypersons and serious scholars interested in minority American history, social change, and ethnic studies.-Glenn Masuchika, Pennsylvania State Univ. Libs., University Park (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A century in the saga of a Chinese American family.In 1864, 12-year-old Joseph Tapeformerly Jeu Diparrived in San Francisco from Guangdong Province in China. Young Joseph worked hard, succeeded in business and married a well-assimilated Chinese American girl named Mary McGladery. Ngai (History/Columbia Univ.; Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, 2005) depicts the lives of the Tapes and their offspring against a setting of legal and illegal aliens and pervasive exclusion laws. The Tapes participated in the poorly managed "Chinese Village" in the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904 and were shaken by the San Francisco earthquake of '06. They saw the creation of San Francisco's Chinatown, an urban invention that flourished in several other cities, and they were litigants in a landmark lawsuit to provide public education to all. Their story encompasses both the Great Depression and World War II. At a time when movies presented Warner Oland as Charlie Chan and Boris Karloff as Dr. Fu Manchu, the Tapes were as Americanized as possible. Their son Frank, a translator and hustler, got involved in graft schemes. It was an ordinary family in many ways, with black sheep and marital discord. The author has mined the public records assiduously, but there's much conjecture regarding individual motivations and activities with a plenitude of "may haves," "perhaps" and "one imagines." Yearning to create a story emblematic of the American experience, the author presents a narrative that is no less, and no more, exciting than most other family histories.A bit too impassive, but a solid contribution to Chinese American history.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.