Abstract
Paul Siu’s dissertation on the experience of Chinese laundry workers in the United States is a hallmark study in the Chicago sociology of migration. Siu joined the Chicago sociology program in 1932, defended his dissertation in 1953, and had it published as a book in 1987. This article identifies Siu’s key contributions and discusses the relationship between Siu’s work and the Chicago sociology of migration. An immigrant himself, Siu offered an approach to migration that was closer to the migrants: an immediate and often intimate window into the subjective dimension of migration. While Siu’s closeness to the migrants allowed him to collect the kind of firsthand data associated with Chicago sociology, it also revealed elements of the migrant experience that stretched the boundaries of Chicago’s analytical framework. Siu’s understanding of migration as temporary, in particular, departed from Chicago sociology’s emphasis on immigrant assimilation. This article seeks to reexamine Siu’s contribution and underline its value for current and future research on migration.
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Notes
Siu was born in 1906 in Taishan County—the place of birth of many Chinese migrants: “Up to 1960, well over half of all Chinese in the Unites States came from this single county” (Hsu, 2000: 3). After his father left for the United States, Siu attended a missionary school in Guangzhou, where he was given the name Paul, graduating and teaching for a year (Tchen, 1987: xxv). Siu sailed from Hong Kong and arrived in Seattle on September 7, 1927. The arrival record indicates his occupation as “teacher,” but next to his visa number there is a handwritten note reading “student.”
Siu defended his dissertation on August 18, 1953. Professors Burgess and Blumer served on his committee. Burgess had officially retired from Chicago in 1952 but stayed one more year in the department. Abbott (1999) describes this period in the Chicago sociology department in detail.
The University of Chicago Press told Siu that his dissertation was not sufficiently “marketable” for publication (Tchen, 1987: xxxiv). Burgess told Siu that his dissertation “came out too late to be published by the University of Chicago Press,” as it was past the “golden age” of Chicago publishing (Tchen, 1987: xxxix).
The book has two dedications: “To Professor Ernest W. Burgess, teacher and friend,” by Siu—dated in Red Bank, NJ in 1986—and “To the memory of Helen Hwei Lan Ong Siu [Siu’s wife] and Paul Chan Pang Siu” by Tchen—dated in Chinatown, NYC in 1987. By the time Tchen found the manuscript, Siu was retired and living near his daughter in New Jersey. He learned of Tchen’s interest and was involved in the publication process but died in June 1987—only a few months before the book came out. Siu’s wife Helen also died in 1987. Burgess had died in 1966. The book cover features the same Life magazine photo of a laundry worker that Siu had used in the dissertation. The photo was taken by photographer Leonard McCombe in 1947. It shows a laundry worker at work. There is a clock on the wall and it is 10 pm. The laundry worker is yawning but there still is much work in front of him. The book was reviewed in the New York Times (Wakeman, 1988).
The appendix with the dissertations defended during the second Chicago School (1946–1965) lists Siu’s name incorrectly. He appears as “Chan-Paang Siu, Paul” (1995: 393) instead of “Siu, Paul Chan Pang.” The list was compiled from information made available by the Alumni Office of the University of Chicago (Fine, 1995: 387). Wacker (1995) does not mention Siu but cites Henry Yu’s dissertation (which discussed Siu’s work).
Huping Ling’s book on “Chinese Chicago” (2012) is dedicated to Paul C.P. Siu. The book devotes a chapter to Chinese students and intellectuals in Chicago from 1920 to 1960.
Yu (2001: 239) traces the “original spur” to pursue research on the Japanese and Chinese students at Chicago to a footnote in Tchen’s introduction to The Chinese Laundryman. Tchen’s footnote reads: “An assessment of the many Chinese students studying sociology at the University of Chicago deserves its own study” (1987: xxxvii). Yu’s book—Thinking Orientals (2001)—examined the experience of around twenty sociology graduate students of Chinese and Japanese background at Chicago between 1924 and 1960.
Burgess asked Siu to put together a list of curse words (“slangy expressions”) used among Chinese immigrants (Ernest W. Burgess Papers, Regenstein Special Collections, University of Chicago, Box 138, Folder 1). Unlike other Chinese students at Chicago, Siu came from the same region as most Chinese migrants in Chicago at the time of his research. Yu (2001) explains: “Because so many of the American foreign missions were in northern China, the Chinese students usually spoke Mandarin and often came from a very different background than most Chinese immigrants to the United States. The students tended to be from elite or educated families and usually form urban areas. In contrast, Chinese immigrant laborers were overwhelmingly Cantonese-speaking peasant farmers from poor rural areas of Guangdong Province in southern China” (115-6).
The material on the American public’s perception of Chinese laundry workers is based on a survey of Chicago students—the “average Americans” Siu had in mind were his Chicago peers. The material was collected by Professors Burgess and Blumer in their classes (Siu, 1987: 6).
Simmel (1911) famously wrote about the “adventurer” as a social type. Weber wrote about “adventurers’ capitalism” (Swedberg, 2005: 3–4). Robert Park wrote of migration as an adventure ([1926] 1950: 142) but differently from Siu. The difference is discussed later in this article.
Siu borrowed the term “sojourner” from Clarence Glick’s 1938 dissertation on Chinese migrants in Hawaii (“The Chinese Migrant in Hawaii: A Study in Accommodation”). Like Siu’s, the book based on Glick’s dissertation, Sojourners and Settlers: Chinese Migrants in Hawaii, was not published until much later (1980), though by then Glick had added considerably to the original study. Historians of Chinese migration to the United States have debated the use of the “sojourner” concept. Yanwen Xia wrote her dissertation on the “sojourner myth” (1993). Also Yang (2000).
Hamilton (1978) discusses the California Gold Rush as an economic adventure. Adventurers are “a distinctive type of migrants who seek wealth and fame beyond the geographical, but not the social, confines of their own society” (1978: 1466).
As its title suggests, Madeline Hsu’s Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home (2000) captures the experience of Chinese migrants hailing from Taishan County (the same place Siu and many of the laundry workers were from) in the late 19th and early 20th century in terms that resonate with Siu’s perspective.
Moving back and forth was not easy because of the immigration restrictions on the Chinese. Siu discusses immigration law throughout the book but particularly in Chapter 12 (187–193) and Chapter 13.
In historian of Taishanese migration Madelaine Hsu’s words: “Taishanese wanted to believe, despite evidence to the contrary, that by going to Gold Mountain men could make fast and easy fortunes, then return to Taishan and enjoy life with wives and sons. This dream persisted in spite of the thousands of men who sacrificed their youth and their health in decades of hard labor and, in the end, never went back to Taishan. Some did manage to establish new lives and families for themselves abroad; others clung to the hope of returning but never made enough money to realize their dream” (2000: 54).
In line with other Chicago studies, Siu included maps representing the distribution of Chinese laundries in Chicago between 1874 and 1940. Yu (2001: 179–181) compares Ting-chiu Fan’s—another Chinese student at Chicago—use of maps with Siu’s: “Ting-chiu Fan, as a Chinese student with little appreciation of the social experience of the Chinese in America, could only follow the Chicago sociologists’ understanding of physical dispersion as somehow weakening the physical distinctiveness of bounded Chinatowns. In contrast, Paul Siu’s personal identification with the laundrymen led him to see their spatial existence not as a breaking out from the ghetto of Chinatown but as a replication of its physical and social isolation. The distribution of laundries had nothing to do with a trend toward assimilation.”
Robert Park had retired when Siu entered the University of Chicago in 1932, but Siu recalled meeting Park at least once: “In fact, Park suggested that Siu study the phenomenon of gambling in Chinatown. Siu went as far as drafting an outline entitled ‘The Gambler: A Sociological Study of Gambling in Chinatown, Chicago’” (Tchen, 1987: xxxvii).
Xu (2018) used Paul Siu’s original fieldnotes to reconstruct Chinese migrants’ sex lives in Chicago.
Four of the most important Chicago works on migration were published between 1918 and 1922. Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe and America was published in 1918–1920. Park, Miller, and Thomas’s Old World Traits Transplanted was published in 1921. Park and Burgess’s Introduction to the Science of Sociology was also published in 1921. The Introduction was a general sociology textbook, but its chapter on “assimilation” helped define sociology’s thinking about immigration. Park’s The Immigrant Press and Its Control was published in 1922. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 created the first quantitative limits on immigration. The National Origins Act of 1924 made the limits permanent. The last paragraph in Old World Traits Transplanted—published the same year Congress began to shut the gates—makes sociology’s commitment to assimilation clear: “Assimilation is thus as inevitable as it is desirable; it is impossible for the immigrants we receive to remain permanently in separate groups” (1921: 308).
Park and Burgess’s Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921) includes an excerpt by Sarah Simons (originally published in 1901) discussing the different meanings of the term and referring to assimilation as “a process with its active and passive elements” (1921: 741). Park and Burgess emphasized their view of assimilation as “a natural and unassisted process” (1921: 735).
The precise definition of the “race relations cycle” is not always clear. Some formulations have “conflict”—as opposed to “competition”—as the second stage. The difference is that conflict is a type of social interaction whereas competition is a type of nonsocial interaction describing economic activity (Ballis Bal 2016). Park and Burgess’s Introduction includes chapters on both conflict and competition (in addition to contact, accommodation, and assimilation). Here is the cycle in one short sentence: “As social contact initiates interaction, assimilation is its final perfect product” (Park and Burgess 1921: 736). The view of assimilation as taking place whether immigrants want it or not is particularly salient in what came to be known as the “ethnicity paradox” (Ballis Bal, 1990). The “paradox”—which Ballis Bal traces to Park and Thomas—was that the more immigrants tried to stick to their own ethnic background, the more quickly they would assimilate into American life. Ethnic isolation was thus the quickest path to ethnic assimilation. Assimilation was understood as an unintended (and paradoxical) consequence of isolation.
In many ways Chicago methodology represented a crucial stage in what Platt described as sociology’s “long march away from the library” (1983: 381)—even if Platt herself questioned whether the Chicago sociology focus on “firsthand data” was as distinct as it has been portrayed (Platt, 1994). The origins of Chicago sociology’s interest in the subjective experience go back to William James’s essay on “a certain blindness in human beings”—the blindness to what goes on in other people’s minds (Park, 1950: vi). W.I. Thomas’s interest in personal material has been traced to his interest in psychiatry and literature (Abbott and Egloff 2008). Chicago sociology studies of migration such as The Polish Peasant and Old World Traits Transplanted are packed with personal (“subjective”) material. The Polish Peasant famously presented and analyzed immigrant letters and an autobiography by Polish peasant Wladek Wiśniewski. Old World Traits Transplanted included “personal histories of immigrants to reveal the inner subjective life” (Bulmer, 1984: 93).
“Given his focus upon culture, communication, and the subjective dimension of social action,” Ballis Bal writes, “it seems surprising that Park has often been treated as an exponent of human ecology” (1990: 28). Ballis Bal emphasizes the subjectivist side of Park’s approach (Abbott, 1999: 24) and minimizes the importance of assimilation as an ecological process in the Chicago framework (Ballis Bal, 1990: 41). The chapter on assimilation in Park and Burgess’s Introduction includes a section on the “biological aspects of assimilation” (1921: 740): “Figuratively speaking,” Sarah Simons writes in one of the excerpts included, assimilation is “the process by which the aggregation of peoples is changed from a mere mechanical mixture into a chemical compound” ([1901] 1921: 741). She goes on to say, however, that the process of assimilation is of “a psychological rather than a biological nature” (741). Gaziano (1996) discusses sociology’s metaphorical use of ecology: “sociologists used biological concepts as tropes” (1996: 875) for purposes of gaining “credible scientific identity” (876). Gaziano does not seem to discuss whether the use of ecological metaphors was in tension with the subjectivist side of Chicago sociology. Wacker (1995) agrees with Ballis Bal (1990) that the “cycle” did not dominate Chicago research (1995: 138). The duality between the “subjectivist” and “ecological” approaches can be traced back to deeper dualities in Chicago sociology. Historian of American social science Dorothy Ross discusses the duality between more “scientific” and more “humanistic” versions of sociology at Chicago (1991:436-8). “For all their shared allegiance to scientism,” Ross writes, “Thomas and Park were trying to develop a science of the human experience” (371).
Chicago sociologists had not always shared this optimism about the assimilation of Asian immigrants. Thomas had discussed the differences between “Orient” and “Occident” (1908). Park had called attention to the fact that Asians, unlike Europeans, could not hide their differences—their “racial uniform,” as he put it, did not come off (1914: 611). “The ‘Oriental,’” Park stated, is “condemned to remain among us an abstraction, a symbol, and a symbol not merely of his own race, but of the Orient and of that vague, ill-defined menace we sometimes refer to as the ‘yellow peril’” (611). The “survey of racial relations” on the Pacific coast was a collaboration between Chicago sociologists and Protestant missionaries who were as or more interested than the sociologists in proving that Asians could and would assimilate into American life. Yu discusses this collaboration in detail (2001). This is Yu: “Based on the presumption of a great difference between Orientals and Americans, the missionaries and sociologists chose to use the example of Orientals to prove the validity of their theories about cultural assimilation” (2001: 67).
Persons (1987) discusses the origins of Chicago sociology’s commitment to assimilation: “The assimilating role performed in the name of nationality was to remain the self-assigned Anglo-American burden until well into the twentieth century. When American academic sociology arose in the 1890s this task was taken for granted, and assimilation was assigned a central place in Chicago ethnic theory” (6). The migrants’ temporary orientation (sojourn) suggested that migrants would not assimilate. As such temporary migration was “always anathema to Anglo-Americans”—it suggested “an individual seeking momentary advantage without aiming a permanent commitment to the host society” (Persons, 1987: 4). W.B. Bailey noticed sociology’s discomfort with temporary migration relatively early on: “Although most students of immigration seem to be united in their belief that this country should welcome able-bodied, normal persons of decent habits who desire to settle permanently in the United States, there is a general feeling that the ‘bird of passage’ forms a conspicuous exception to this rule and that this migrant to the United States is not to be encouraged” (1912: 393).
Goldberg (2017) traces the long career of the “marginal man” in American sociology.
Chicago sociology sought to portray the lives of “prostitutes and thugs, petty criminals and hobos, immigrants and delinquents” (Salerno, 2007: 6). Like most other immigrants, Siu would have been surprised at this list. Following Thomas and Znaniecki, Siu uses the concept of “social disorganization,” but in a different way. One of the key points in The Polish Peasant is that “social disorganization” starts back home—it is disorganization that leads to migration. On the other hand, Siu sees disorganization as a kind of fatalistic response to migration; disorganization (maladjustment) follows the migrant’s sense of being hopelessly trapped.
Park’s excitement about migration is hard to match: “This is today the most romantic period in the history of the whole world,” Parks writes in an article about Asian immigration to the United States; “not even the period of the discovery of America has influenced man’s imagination more” ([1950] 1926: 147).
Joanna Dreby’s Everyday Illegal (2015) is an example of this approach in current scholarship.
As Park put it: “It is in the mind of the marginal man—where the changes and fusions of culture are going on—that we can best study the processes of civilization and progress” (1928: 893).
As Levine put it: Park’s “marginal man” represents “a configuration notably different from Simmel’s ‘stranger’” (1977: 17). Park had been the first one to translate Simmel’s piece on the stranger from German into English. Borrowing a phrase from Guenther Roth, Levine refers to Park’s use of Simmel’s concept as a case of “highly inventive misinterpretation” (1977: 15). Everett Stonequist, a student of Park’s who wrote a book-length study of the “marginal man” (1937), did notice that Park’s marginal man was different form Simmel’s stranger, but the distinction was lost (Levine, 1977: 18).
Abbott and Egloff (2008: 253) suggest that W.I. Thomas saw himself in the migrants he wrote about: “In the last analysis, however, the core story of the Polish peasant—the disintegration of the rural household and the rise of individualistic personalities in the children who leave it—was the story of William Isaac Thomas himself.” Dorothy Ross describes some of the leading Chicago sociologists’ own personal journeys from rural areas or small towns to big-city Chicago to make a similar point (1991: 311).
“If Stonequist’s distinction between marginality and strangerhood was made only to be lost,” Levine writes, “it was inadvertently recovered by Paul C. P. Siu” (1977: 18). It is not clear why Levine thinks this was “inadvertent.” Levine: “Siu, however, did not use his findings to invalidate Simmel’s concept of the stranger. Instead, he returned to Simmel to raise the question whether the marginal man might not more aptly be viewed as one of a number of variant types of stranger” (1977: 18).
Lee (2017) discusses the somewhat dubious origins of this statement and warns against making too much of it in accounting for the methodological orientation of Chicago sociology.
Siu compares the Chinese migrant with the American missionary: “The missionary to China, for instance, is characteristically a sojourner like the Chinese laundryman” (1987: 300). Both migrants and missionaries stick to their background (they do not assimilate) and define their goals in their own terms (their life is back home). Siu had gone to an American missionary school in China. Missions were a topic of interest among Chicago sociologists (Park and Burgess 1921: 778–780).
The title of Paul Siu’s dissertation—The Chinese Laundryman—tentatively echoed the title of the foundational study in the Chicago sociology of migration. The parallel is not perfect—Thomas and Znaniecki’s title was The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, and “peasant” referred to what the Polish migrants were back in Poland, not in Chicago, while “laundryman” referred to what the Chinese migrants were in Chicago, not back in China. Still the two titles combine a country of origin with an occupation to define a specific migrant experience. The parallel suggests that Siu might have fantasized with inscribing his work in the legacy of Chicago studies of migration. More likely, though, Siu was following Chicago’s interest in defining specific social types based on occupation—what Park called “vocational types,” each with its “special experience, insight, and point of view” (Park, 1915: 585).
The letter is dated June 8, 1948 and can be found in the papers of Ernest Burgess (Ernest W. Burgess Papers, Regenstein Special Collections, University of Chicago, Box 17, Folder 10).
Burgess’s response (dated June 14, 1948) is in the same folder as Siu’s letter (Ernest W. Burgess Papers, Regenstein Special Collections, University of Chicago, Box 17, Folder 10).
Despite the differences between Paul Siu and Clifford Geertz, Andrea Cossu’s recent analysis (2021) of the relationship between Geertz and Talcott Parsons offers an illuminating contrast when considering how approaches breaking away from a school’s dominant framework are received.
Abdelmalek Sayad referred to migration as the “temporary that lasts” (2004: 58). Not unlike Siu, Sayad was an Algerian migrant in France studying Algerian migrants in France. Bourdieu and Wacquant thought of Sayad as the “organic ethnologist of Algerian migration”. He was “more than a scholar of immigration: he was the phenomenon itself” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 2000).
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Eilbaum, N. The Immigrant Sociologist: Paul Siu at Chicago. Am Soc 53, 465–487 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-022-09540-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-022-09540-5