The Voluntary Sojourner among the Overseas Chinese: Myth or Reality?

Abstract

yEARS AGO, Paul Siu defined the concept of the in an article in the American Journal of Sociology. 1 Subsequently, Rose Hum Lee used the concept to describe the China-born Chinese in the United States before the Second World War.2 According to these two writers, the sojourner is a migrant who is mentally oriented towards the home community. While he spends a major portion of his lifetime in the host society, working in a job that he may not like, he is in fact fighting for status at home. The sojourner usually leaves his home community on his own; even if he returns home to marry, he leaves behind his wife and children. Should any of his children be born in the host society, they would be sent home to receive an education or to marry. Clinging to the culture of his own group and resisting assimilation, the sojourner lives among his own fellow nationals in a ghetto outside the dominant social system. He lives a restricted life, his contact with members of the host society being related mainly to his job. Should he participate at all in social or political affairs, these would be related to his home community. While working in the host society, he maintains intimate ties with his home community by letters, remittances, and periodic visits. Usually extremely frugal in the host society, he becomes a big spender when visiting home, contributing heavily to welfare, public works, and education projects there. The sojourner typically invests any savings with an eye toward eventually returning home and assuming control of his various holdings or items of prestige-all tangible evidence of his higher social status as a reward for his year overseas. While the foregoing describes a typical sojourner, both Lee and Siu maintain that the length of sojourn in fact depends on the success or failure of the sojourner in the host society. Without a sense of accomplishment or some achieved security, the sojourner may not ever return home. Although all plan to go back after a short period of time, the