I have mixed feelings, because I liked this book as a valuable collection of oral histories but it really could've used an editor to polish up the text and figures.

I am the granddaughter of a southern Chinese grocery store owner (albeit in a different state), so when I read this, I see what my gung-gung and po-po faced, as well as Mom and my aunties and uncles. My maternal grandparents passed before I was born, so oral histories are valuable to me as a way to connect to them. The paperback copy has an extra foreword and end notes about exhibitions added in 2018, so it seems like an odd omission to not mention the AJ Youtube video interviewing some of the same Delta Chinese folks (though the YT video credits John Jung as a resource). The comments on that and other videos of Delta Chinese seem surprised at thicc Southern accents coming out of Asian faces, but to me they sound just like my aunties and uncles, from that same second generation.

Some of the end parts seemed extraneous (southern Chinese Americans: they do wedding banquets like coastal Chinese Americans!), but they do demonstrate the uniqueness of a community that's close knit while geographically spread versus the distinct neighborhood lines of Chinatowns. When you're a minority of a minority, you hold tight to familiarity, especially in such a structurally segregated environment. I also felt like this could have spent more time on the complicated nuances of having stores in Black neighborhoods while often cultivating anti-Blackness as an assimilation tool because it's something the Asian American community continues to struggle with today. ( )

Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton by John Jung is written in a textbook style. The chapters that I enjoyed the most were the ones that veered away from that. It is very well documented. What I learned about the Chinese who were originally from the Guangdong Province and settled in the Mississippi Delta was the tenuous tightrope that they had to tread daily. They had to depend on the blacks for their economic support but they aspired for a higher quality of education than what was available for the blacks.

This group of Chinese who came to the area in the 1860s to the 1870s despaired of the arduous farm work and little pay that was first offered to them at first. They saved what they could and often formed partnerships to start up grocery stores. With all the family including the children working long hours in the grocery, they were able to make some money. Often they could not figure out where they belonged in this white/black society. Which restaurants could they go to? Where do they sit at movies? Who could they date? What is the best strategy for survival?

Now I have some answers to some questions that I had not even thought about asking myself. This is a very thought provoking book. Why did the Chinese stay apart from the whites and the blacks? The answers are in this book. The only part that I was missing was what did it feel like? I have a mixed marriage. I can tell you that when we sold our house because of a broken window and unspeakable things written on our car, it really hurt. There still needs to be a book written about the emotional experience of racial hatred that exists today.

I highly recommend this book if you want to know more about the Chinese American history in the United States.

Although I won this book from FirstReads, that did not influence my thoughts or feelings in my review of this book. ( )