The Chinese Laundryman: A Study of Social Isolation by Paul C.P. Siu (review)

Shorter Book Reviews 275 caused internally by a clash between pre-capitalism (the bonded ''mode of production'') and capitalism (landowners' producing for the profit market). Charles A. Ruud Department of History University of Western Ontario Paul C.P. Siu. The Chinese Laundryman: A Study of Social Isolation. New York: New York University Press, 1987. xiii + 311 pp. During the late 1970s, when Asian-Canadian and Asian-American studies were developing into a serious mode of scholarly inquiry, no scholar or student could avoid the theories of Paul C.P. Siu. His notion that Chinese immigrants in the United States during the mid-twentieth century had never wanted to remain in the New World and were always seeking ways to return to China because it was the true homeland evoked bitter controversy among many serious writers. One school of thought agreed that Chinese immigrants were merely "sojourning " in the United States or Canada as they saved "diligently" for a permanent return to China. The other school had both popular and scholarly support. One of America's best-known writers, Frank Chin, argued that the sojourner idea was basically a myth advocated by exclusionists and apologists for racism. They contended that the labelling of Chinese immigrants as "transients," "aliens" or "sojourners" by American racists made it much easier for the enactment of Chinese exclusion acts by these bigots. After all, as the argument went, if Chinese immigrants never planned to stay in America, it would be appropriate to deport the ones already in residence and stop others from coming in. Indeed, as this myth of the sojourner gradually took hold in the popular, scholarly and official imaginations of America, it became easier to deport and harass a people who supposedly never wanted to stay on and build a life as American citizens anyway. In Canada, most writers agreed with Siu. But a few argued that the Chinese immigrant as sojourner was a racist myth. Some of these studies were my own " 'Orientalism' and Myth Making: the Sojourner in Canadian History" in The Journal of Ethnic Studies ( 1981) and chapters in Gold Mountain: The Chinese in the New World ( 1983). The critical work that was the cause of all this controversy in Asian-Canadian and Asian-American studies was Paul Siu's initially obscure "The Sojourner," published in The American Journal of Sociology (1952). One year later, he 276 Shorter Book Reviews completed his Ph.D. thesis on the Chinese laundryman as sojourner. This New York University edition is the late Paul Siu's unrevised Ph.D. thesis. As a graduate work, it is compelling, certainly ahead of its time (the 1950s) in research techniques and conclusions. Most notable is the anecdotal exploration of the Chicago Chinese laundryman in his physical, psychological, social and sexual compexities. There are also chapters on the origin of the Chinese laundry, the laundryman's images of America, America's image of the laundryman, the laundryman as immigrant, gambler and, more provocative, as deviant. If this work had been published in the 1950s, it would have become a classic, mainly because nothing of this nature on Chinese America had ever been attempted. But to publish this volume thirty-four years after its completion merely perpetuates the obviously insidious stereotypes of the Chinese inherent in Siu's basic conclusions. They are sex-starved and deviant lonely men, whose visits to prostitutes and gambling with friends serve to fillthe rare non-working days while they wait fruitlessly for that fateful return to the ''Celestial Kingdom.'' As a piece of history with sometimes startling empirical evidence, the book is a gem of information. But any researcher, and especially students using this work should be wary of the many racial stereotypes that more recent writers have attempted to dispel. But there is an irony in the 1987 publication of this book on the Chinese as sojourner. The recent influx of Hong Kong Chinese immigrants to Canada and the United States has created the notion of the Chinese as sojourner. This is founded in reality, because many Hong Kong Chinese immigrants are using Canada or the United States as a mere sojourn, as a passport haven, before returning to Hong Kong or, more...