Rose Hum Lee – another Chicago Sociologist of Chinese descent

Rose Hum Lee’s The Chinese in the United States of America, published in 1960 by Hong Kong University Press, is another example of a scholar who was entrenched in bothChinese-American culture and academia. She was a graduate student at the University of Chicago and eventually headed a sociology department.

The Chinese in the United States of America reflects the reigning historical and sociological approaches to immigration up to 1960, which focused on assimilation among immigrants. Lee recognized the obstacles many Chinese American women faced in achieving sexual equality and other social problems. Because she located their roots in Chinese culture, she saw the complete assimilation of the Chinese into American culture as the solution. As she writes in the book’s very first paragraph, “Many [Chinese immigrants] have become so integrated in the societies where they themselves or their ancestors settled that they are indistinguishable from the local population: that is the ultimate ideal to which all Overseas Chinese should aspire” (vii).

Lee seemingly analyzes her own role in writing this synthesis of Chinese immigration, assimilation, and integration: “The portrayal of the Chinese in America by one of themselves harbors more perils, impediments, and accusations of bias than if the writer were a rank outsider” (2). Though Lee then argues against the domination of the field by non-Chinese scholars, she clearly aspires to be as “impartial” as these non-Chinese sociologists and historians and often reinforced their critical views of Chinese culture.

Dr. Henry Yu of UCLA has analyzed Lee’s work in depth and argues the following:

“The need for Rose Hum Lee to erase her own identity within her study was not merely the result of the particular demands of the genre of sociological monograph writing; if she had not pretended that she had no relation to the people mentioned in her dissertation, it would have become immediately apparent that she had close connections to every single person she was studying. Her ability to refer to her family in such a detached manner, to the point of even referring to herself in the third person, is striking and serves as a wonderful example of how sociology as a discipline provided a number of ways in which its practitioners could distance themselves from their own lives. The rhetorical device Lee used of removing herself from her texts was not just a literary conceit; it reflected the manner in which the ‘sociological perspective’ of the ‘outsider’ could provide emotional and moral distance from events and people very close to the sociologist.”

Clearly, there is a lot of interesting material in Lee’s work as both an account of Chinese immigration historiography and as an example of the relationship between the Chinese-American writer and the Chinese-American subjects.