Through the Double Lens of the “Marginal Man” and Biography: Intellectual Diversity Among Chinese Students at Chicago

Abstract The “marginal man” is a classic concept developed in early sociological studies of immigrants at the University of Chicago. This paper selects the work of three Chinese students (Ching-chao Wu, Rose Hum Lee, and Paul Chan-Pang Siu) from the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago and comparatively analyzes their studies on Chinese immigration within the context of their life history. Although their research is based on the concept of the “marginal man,” their conclusions point in different directions. Among them, Wu turned the conflict that Chinese immigrants face between the old and new into advantages in cultural transmission and integration, thus emphasizing the positive role of the “marginal man” in the process of civilizational convergence. Lee, however, argued that the assimilation of Chinese immigrants in American society is not only possible but also necessary, and proposed that immigrants should strive to escape the embarrassing situation of being a “marginal man” and become completely Americanized. Siu proposed the concept of “sojourners” based on his decades of ethnographic observations of Chinese laundry workers and argued that compared to the “marginal man,” who is destined to assimilate, Chinese immigrants spend their entire lives pursuing return to their homeland rather than integration. These different observations of Chinese immigrants not only stem from differences in research methods and field experiences, but are also closely related to the personal life histories of the authors. Their own life histories in the United States are intertextual with their research, thus providing a rich source of empirical evidence for immigration studies.