Ngai, Mae
The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (New York)
2010
OUR SYNOPSIS: Mae Ngai shares the stories of the Tape family to shed light on Chinese American experiences during the exclusion era. At age twelve, Jeu Dip emigrated from China to America. He found work as a servant and worked his way to greater responsibilities. Then he met and soon married a Chinese American orphan named Mary McGladery. They became Joseph and Mary Tape. Joseph started his own business as a drayman and the couple achieved substantial economic success despite mounting anti-Chinese sentiment. When they had children and the local school would not admit them, Joseph sued and won the case. Mamie, the eldest child, married a Chinese American named Herman Lowe. They had a daughter in 1901 named Emily Gertrude, after Mamie’s two sisters. One of these sisters, Emily, married Robert Park that same year. Ngai chronicles the lives of these Chinese Americans, showing that “Three generations of the Tape family lived through the Chinese exclusion era, protesting and profiting from the legal regime of racial discrimination.” She argues, “The Tape family was exceptional, yet it was also archetypal of the first Chinese American middle class.” (223)
BIG QUESTIONS:
What do the stories of the Tape family reveal about intersections of race and class in the Chinese American experience during the exclusion era?
FEATURE QUOTES:
“To be Chinese American in 1875 was to be something new. No one yet used the term to suggest hybridity or assimilation. Nearly all Chinese in San Francisco were first-generation immigrants, and even the merchant families with American-born children lived and worked in the Chinese quarter and were not acculturated to American ways. Jeu Dip and Mary McGladery were different; they had come to America without Chinese parents and lived among Euro-Americans. Their ability to speak English, their manner of dress, and their everyday practice—he in the sphere of commerce and she in the domestic arts—indicated their acculturation. At the same time, they were the only Chinese in their respective worlds and were thus marked by a double difference—different from the white people around them, different from other Chinese.” (22)
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