Just Us Girls The Kim Loo Sisters

Just Us Girls is the companion book to The Kim Loo Sisters, a feature-length documentary about the Chinese American jazz vocal quartet who became the first Asian American act to star in Broadway musical revues. Funny, feisty, warm and thoughtful, the “Kimmies” speak their minds in this memoir that is both a moving portrait of four sisters—daughters of a Chinese “paper son” and a Polish seamstress—and a vivid historical record of 20th-century America.

Alice, Maggie, Jenée and Bubbles share their recollections of the Jazz Age, when they cut their theatrical teeth in kiddie revues in their hometown of Minneapolis; the Great Depression, which they spent crisscrossing the country following the various vaudeville circuits; and the Second World War, years spent in Broadway musicals and Hollywood movies as a trio when Jenée left the act to marry the son of the vice president of China and lived through the horrors of the Second Chinese Revolution. As for her three sisters, they joined the USO and shipped out with the fleet to entertain American troops stationed in Europe. Their story—both on stage and off—is fascinating in and of itself, but it is also an important chapter in American history and a vibrant testament to the power of family and sisterly love.

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