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The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America. By Mae Ngai. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2010. xvi, 288 pp. $26.00, isbn 978-0-618-65116-0.)
In 1884 a young Chinese immigrant couple, Joseph Tape and Mary Tape, sued the San Francisco school board on behalf of their daughter, Mamie. The landmark California Supreme Court case Tape v. Hurley (1885) established the right of Chinese children to a public education in California. In The Lucky Ones Mae Ngai tells the story of the Tape family and its remarkable rise in America.
Joseph and Mary Tape were exceptional among Chinese in nineteenth-century San Francisco. Both arrived as children without parencs and lived outside Chinatown. Joseph worked as a domestic servant, and Mary grew up a ward of the Ladies'...