The "Sojourner Hypothesis" Revisited

Diaspora 9:2 2000 The "Sojourner Hypothesis" Revisited1 Philip Q. Yang Texas Woman's University Introduction The concept of "The Sojourner" is a very important and influential one in the study of early Chinese immigration to America and of Chinese Americans. The sojourner concept originated from Paul Siu's widely-cited article "The Sojourner," published in American Journal ofSociology in 1952, which was largely extracted from his dissertation, entitled The Chinese Laundryman and completed at the University of Chicago in 1953.2 Siu defined the sojourner as an immigrant who "clings to the culture of his own group" and who "is unwilling to organize himself as a permanent resident in the country ofhis sojourn" ("Sojourner" 34). Like the marginal man, the sojourner is also a deviant; but, unlike the marginal man, the sojourner does not "seek status in the society ofthe dominant group" (Siu, Chinese Laundryman 294). He "spends many years of his lifetime in a foreign country without being assimilated by it" (299). Detaching the sojourner concept from the context and main theme of Siu's study, migration researchers later developed the "sojourner hypothesis," which presumes that early Chinese immigrants in America were sojourners who intended to make and save money and then return to their home villages for a better life. Since its nascence, the sojourner hypothesis has had enormous impact on the thinking and writings of scholars who study Chinese Americans (e.g., Barth; Bonacich; Glick; Lee; Lyman; Sung; Wong; Zhou). The "sojourner" concept is almost ubiquitous in all major works on Chinese Americans published since the 1950s. For a long time, it was largely taken for granted that early Chinese immigrants were sojourners and that sojourning was a uniquely Chinese phenomenon , and the impact of this hypothesis extends beyond academia. Historically, opportunistic politicians and members of the antiChinese movement often used the sojourning orientation or the socalled unassimilability of Chinese immigrants as an argument to justify anti-Chinese legislation and activities. Today, the implication of the sojourner concept remains weighty, especially amid the controversy over illegal Chinese/Asian political donations. The Diaspora 9:2 2000 "perpetual foreigner" stereotype of Asian Americans is au fond a modern reprint of the "sojourner." The sojourner hypothesis warrants revisiting for several reasons. First, to what extent the sojourner hypothesis is valid for the early Chinese immigrants in America requires quantitative, empirical proof. Starting in the 1980s, some researchers began to cast doubt upon the accuracy of the sojourner hypothesis. For instance, Raymond Lou argued that the fact that Chinese Americans can trace their genealogy to as many as six generations in America contradicts the sojourner description (342-3). Sucheng Chan (This Bittersweet xx) called into question the claim that "all Chinese who came to America were sojourners." Nevertheless, these challenges rely either on reasoning or on qualitative descriptions based on a few cases. Without summary quantitative evidence, the extent of the sojourner hypothesis' validity remains an open question. Second, in the early debate over the sojourner hypothesis, key questions on the causes of sojourning and the exceptionality of Chinese sojourning have not been unraveled (see, for example, Barth; A. Chan; Miller; Woon) and require further systematic endeavor to untangle. Third, the sojourner hypothesis deserves to be revisited in part because historical Chinese immigration is so different from contemporary Chinese immigration and because the settlement orientation of early Chinese immigrants stood in sharp contrast to that of their contemporary counterparts. While the orientation of early Chinese immigrants is widely acknowledged, less well known is the fact that the sojourner is a myth, not a reality, for contemporary Chinese immigrants, and especially for post-1965 Chinese immigrants. The sojourner concept has been much less important in new Chinese immigration to the United States since 1965. As has been shown elsewhere (Yang) and in the present study, post-1965 Chinese immigrants tend to be settlers. Hence, there is a great deal of heterogeneity in historical and new Chinese international movement subsumed under the homogenizing rubric "Chinese migration ." This heterogeneity can also help us understand why Chinese diasporas in the real sense are forming now.3 Rethinking the sojourner hypothesis will help unravel the sojourner myth for contemporary Chinese immigrants and reveal the dynamics...