BITTER ROOTS:
A Gum Saan Odyssey

It is 1875.  With boundless hope and bright dreams,  a young Chinese couple board a trans-Pacific steamship to meet their destiny.

This is their story….and California’s.

From the laundries and chop suey joints of San Francisco to the brutal heat of the Mojave desert where Yee Hay dynamites mountains for borax wagons and railroads, he and his wife Chan See “eat the bitterness” of hostility and heartbreak, disappointment and discrimination.  They finally put down roots in developing San Buena Ventura, as they give up a newborn child, raise four others, and later move to the  booming town of Los Angeles, to acculturate and blend their emerging history with that of California.

In January of 2005, excavation for the MTA Gold Line encountered human remains in the Chinese section of Los Angeles County’s potter’s field and Yee Hay’s descendants race against time and politics to find their ancestor’s grave.

92-year-old Chung weaves a vivid, compelling tale, richly colorful in historical and cultural detail, that is both a poignant love story as well as an encompassing family epic about his grandparents.  He traveled with family friend Earl Stanley Gardner to China to pursue his medical studies, returning to the U.S. to continue at Harvard Medical University, New York’s Bellevue Hospital and later became the Assistant Director of the  World Health Organization in Geneva.  In retirement, Chung wrote his first book at age 82.

Arthur Chung weaves a vivid and compelling Arthur Chung weaves a vivid and compelling story about his grandparents’ California odyssey, which is both a poignant love story as well as an encompassing family epic. Rich and colorful in its cultural detail, Bitter Roots is a moving tribute to the early Chinese immigrants whose “bitter strength,” blood, courage and resourcefulness made a significant contribution to the development of the American West.

           
“Bitter Roots is an important addition to the insightful and culturally accurate genre that includes Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club… Gus Lee’s China Boy… and Lisa See’s On Gold Mountain… focuses on the family while giving much more…wondrously rich prose about aspects of immigrant life not often given… exactly how the opportunity and money for the passage to California were obtained… gives detail after detail on what it was like on the ship that carried them across the Pacific Ocean…when narrating Yee’s work on a road building crew in the 100+ degree temperature of one of California’s deserts, Chung makes the reader feel the heat and taste the dust…” -From the Foreword by Thomas McDannold, Ph.D., Professor emeritus, Ventura College & Past President, Chinese Historical Society of So. California

Order Here

 

by Arthur W. Chung, M.D.
ISBN: 1-928753-25-6 ISBN-13: 978-1-928753-25-4
USD$18.00 + S &H
1-310-541-8818 1-888-810-9891 Fax: 310-791-9069
Hardcover 6x9 157 pages
PHBooks, Box 998, Palos Verdes Estates, CA 90274-0998
Ages: Young adult and up
www.PacificHeritageBooks.com

Pinnacle Award for Historical Fiction &
Mom's Choice Award

ARTHUR CHUNG was born in Los Angeles in 1913, the second child of Nellie Yee and Dr. Yick Hong Chung. Home schooled with his three sisters, Lillian, Marian and Marie, by their father in Chinese language, literature and culture, he developed a lifelong passion for China that had a profound influence on his life.

An excellent student he represented Los Angeles High school in the city-wide oratorical contest, winning third place. After graduation in 1931, he traveled to China with Earle Stanley Gardner by steamship to study at Yanjing University, majoring in pre-medicine. there he participated in many activities of the patriotic student movement, met and married schoolmate Sylvia Liang.

Chung’s training and career took him from shanghai Medical University to pathology at Harvard Medical school, pediatrics at Bellevue Hospital in New York where his children, Evelyn and Alvin, were born. In 1949 the family returned to China where he taught at shandong Medical University, followed by a move to head the pediatrics department at the China-soviet Friendship Hospital in Beijing. Chung was promoted to its Deputy Director in 1958.

In 1973, he led a delegation of medical experts to the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, where he gave presentations about medical and health care services in China. By March of the same year, he was appointed the Assistant Director-General of WHO. In 1976, Chung went back to Los Angeles to care for his 88-year-old mother while teaching Public Health at the UCLA Medical school.

He married Dr. Edna May Fong, a fellow pediatrician, in 1977. But because of his asthma, they moved two years later to Sonoma to be close to their blended family. In retirement, Chung was active in writing and lecturing. He wrote Of Rats, Sparrows, and Flies: A Lifetime in China at the age of 82, and on August 31, 2005, completed the manuscript of Bitter Roots: A Gum Saan Odyssey on an electric typewriter.