Near the corner of Sixth and King, Chinatown, the chief witness in a looming government bribery trial is shot twice in the stomach. Its September 26. He names his assailant, then dies. Days later, the police find his assassin hanged. The subsequent trial of Frank Tape produces a verdict of not guilty. Tape promptly flees town, abandons his house, wife, and considerable assets, and returns to the Bay Area. That was 96 years ago, as Columbia historian Mae Ngai recounts in The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26). During an era when discriminatory immigration policies sought to halt the Cantonese immigration boom (begun in the mid 19th century, its labor building the western half of the transcontinental railroad), the family of patriarch Joseph Tape (originally Jeu Dip) profited by assistingand sometimes exploitingthose who followed them. Assimilated English speakers Joseph and Frank often worked as translators for the feds, and their station allowed them to extort bribes from detainees hoping to reach Gold Mountain (as the U.S. was called). At the same time, however, the clan fought to educate its children in the California public schools where they were prohibited. If their journey to the upper middle class wasnt entirely honest, Ngai suggests, the Tapes were only as crooked as the system that made them. BRIAN MILLER
Mon., Sept. 20, 7 p.m., 2010
