Chopsticks in the land of cotton : lives of Mississippi Delta Chinese grocers

The story of how a few Chinese immigrants found their way to the Mississippi River Delta in the late 1870s and earned their living with small family operated grocery stores in neighborhoods where mostly black cotton plantation workers lived. What was their status in the segregated black and white world of that time and place? How did this small group preserve their culture and ethnic identity? "Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton"is a social history of the lives of these pioneering families and the unique and valuable role they played in their communities for over a century. In the late 1860s and early 1870s, small numbers of Chinese men from the province of Guangdong came to the Delta region (Mississippi and Arkansas) and settled there, originally to work as agricultural labor. Soon they turned their efforts to running grocery stores in the "Black" parts of segregated towns. Often, they were the only Chinese in town. Their numbers peaked in the 1960s (by which time there may have been as many as 1200). This book tells their story, based on as much oral history as the author could find