The "Sojourner Hypothesis" Revisited

Abstract

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 of Sociology in 1952, which was largely extracted from his dissertation, entitled The Chinese Laundryman and completed at the University of Chicago in 1953. 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 of his 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).

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