About Me

After a career of over 40 years as an academic psychologist, I started a new career as a public historian of Chinese American history that led to five Yin & Yang Press books and over 100 book talks about the lives of early Chinese immigrants and their families operating laundries, restaurants, and grocery stores. This blog contains more research of interest to supplement my books.

5/2/12

The John Jung Letters

A few years ago I was intrigued to learn that the University of North Dakota had an archive of "John Jung Letters," written in the 1920s by a young Chinese boy whose father ran a laundry in Devils Lake, a small town in North Dakota.  Fascinated by the fact that not only did this boy and I share the same name, but that we seemed to have a common life experience growing up in cultural isolation in a small town in a laundry run by our parents, I had to see these letters that were a collection of letters he wrote to  his fourth grade teacher after she moved to another town.  These letters, written over a span of about seven years open a window on the personal growth of development of John Jung as a Chinese boy in North Dakota where there were few other Chinese. 

I also had my own "John Jung letters, collected from the 1950s after I left my birthplace, Macon, Georgia, to live in San Francisco.  Unlike the North Dakota letters, my collection does not contain letters that I wrote but rather it is a set of letters I received and saved from one of my teachers and two other white adult mentors who were strong influences on my personal growth.

I wrote a paper for a meeting of the Association of Asian American Studies that discussed these two sets of "John Jung letters" and posted the paper on this site, The John Jung Letters.

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