formation as a Chinese American. Given his cultural background and social position as a Chinese immigrant forbidden by law to become a naturalized U.S. citizen, Tom, an urban explorer in New York City, reinvents the flâneur figure in Western urban literature, intervening in the privileged, bourgeois, white male gaze. Benjamin’s study of the relationship between the observer and the observed in the city and of the intricate connections among the economic, technical, and literary developments as a phenomenon of modernity provides a useful framework for understanding the role of urban exploration in the formation of Tom’s subjectivity. In his analysis of modern literary genres in relation to the development of capitalism and technology, Benjamin suggests that commercial arcades—glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors with shops and departments on both sides, extending through whole blocks of buildings—emerged in Paris during the 1820s and 1830s, giving rise to the figure of the flâneur and new genres of writings (Benjamin, Arcades Project). “Strolling could hardly have assumed the importance it did without the arcades,” observes Benjamin. “As flâneurs, the intelligentsia came into the market-place.” Subsequently, new topics and new modes of writing appeared: “Once a writer had entered the marketplace, he looked around as in a diorama. A special literary genre has preserved his first attempts at orienting himself. It is a panorama literature. . . . In this literature, the modest-looking, paperbound, pocket-size volumes called ‘physiologies’ had pride of place. They investigated types that might be encountered by a person taking a look at the marketplace” (Charles Baudelaire 36, 170, 35). Visual mastery of the cityscape and urban crowd is key to this new genre of city literature. Scenes and people in the streets become objects of study by the flâneur-writer, who categorizes types of people and constructs their identities according to their appearances through seemingly scientific observations and apparently realistic descriptions. The flâneur-writer’s relationship to the urban space also characterizes that of the participant-observer journalist and the cultural sociologist doing fieldwork.
Similar to the method of observation and the subject position of the flâneur “who goes botanizing on the asphalt” in the city (Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire 36), observation of life in the city was a primary research method of the Chicago school of sociology, on which Robert E. Park had a formative impact, especially during the 1920s and 1930s. Before he eventually joined the faculty of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Chicago in 1914, Park worked as a reporter and as an editor on newspapers in Minneapolis, Detroit, New York, and Chicago between 1891 and 1898.11 He attributed his interest in sociology to his journalist fieldwork in the city: “I have actually covered more ground, tramping about in cities in different parts of the world, than any other living man. Out of all this I gained, among other things, a conception of the city, the community, and the region, not as a geographical phenomenon merely but as a kind of social organism” (“Autobiographical Note” viii). According to his “earliest conception of a sociologist,” Park adds, “he was to be a kind of super-reporter, like the men who write for Fortune” (viii–ix). In his seminal article “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the City Environment,” published in the American Journal of Sociology (1915), Park proposes the notion of “the city [as] a laboratory or clinic in which human nature and social processes may be most conveniently and profitably studied” (612). Like the flâneur, the reporter and the Parkian sociologist assume the authoritative position of knowledge production. As an “institutionalised voyeur,” the historian Fred Matthews points out, “[t]he city beat reporter from the first fulfilled the role of informal and intuitive sociologist, acting as eyes, ears, and moral censor for the audience removed by size and distance from the direct exercise of their traditional communal roles” (qtd. in Lal 18). Detached from life in the street, the “institutionalised voyeur” maintains his distance from and his authority over what he observes. The writer, journalist, or sociologist as the flâneur—the urban stroller and spectator—then, is the privileged subject of observation, analysis, and interpretation, who assumes mastery and authority over the cityscape, including bodies marked by differences of gender, class, race, and culture. Moreover, underlying Park’s notion of the sociologist as a “super-reporter” and Benjamin’s discussion of the flâneur in urban literature is a simultaneous, mutually constitutive relation between the institutionalized voyeur’s subjectivity and the urban space, including the crowds in the streets.
But unlike the fieldwork of the urban sociologist or the reporter on the beat, the writings of the flâneur-writer are as much about the self as about the city. The subjectivity of the flâneur-writer and the cityscape are mutually informing and constitutive in writings about the city. Benjamin in his study Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism contends that “[w]ith Baudelaire, Paris for the first time became the subject of lyrical poetry.”12 Yet it is not only Paris but also the poet’s sense of his social alienation that the poet’s gaze reflects. As Benjamin states: “[Baudelaire’s] gaze which falls upon the city is rather the gaze of alienated man. It is the gaze of the flâneur . . . [who] still stood at the margin, of the great city as of the bourgeois class. . . . In neither of them was he at home. He sought his asylum in the crowd. . . . The crowd was the veil from behind which the familiar city as phantasmagoria beckoned to the flâneur” (Charles Baudelaire 170). Paradoxically, the flâneur who stands “at the margin of the great city” finds himself at home among the urban crowd:
For the perfect flâneur . . . it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow. . . . To be away from home, yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, yet to remain hidden from the world—such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial [!!] [exclamation marks in the original] natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. . . . We might also liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself . . . which, with each one of its movements, represents the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life. (Benjamin, Arcades Project 443)
As a detached, participant, invisible observer, the perfect flâneur enjoys the pleasure of voyeurism, of knowing through seeing without being seen. Embedded in Benjamin’s definition of the flâneur is the privilege of the bourgeois male subject, whose voyeuristic gaze is supposed to be neutral and inclusive. Indeed, “to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, yet to remain hidden from the world” and to represent “all the elements of life” is a gendered, classed, and raced privilege in cities, where women and racial minorities encounter violence in the streets, where people like Tom Fong, Sr., lower their gazes and look at the pavement as they walk the streets outside of Chinatown. The freedom of movement, the sense of belonging everywhere, and the power of interpretation constitute the flâneur as a privileged, authoritative masculine subject who produces meanings and constructs identities through seemingly realistic representations.
Critics of urban literature and urban studies have pointed out that freedom of movement in the city and its subsequent cosmopolitan experience are a privilege of class and gender. Richard Sennett emphasizes the flâneur’s privilege of both gender and class. For Sennett, Walkowitz notes, “[c]osmopolitanism, ‘the experience of diversity in the city as opposed to relatively confined localism,’ . . . was a bourgeois male pleasure. It established a right to the city—a right not traditionally available to, often not even part of, the imaginative repertoire of the less advantaged” (410–11). From a feminist perspective, Elizabeth Wilson highlights the gendered privilege of the flâneur: “[T]he flâneur as a man of pleasure, . . . who takes visual possession of the city, . . . has emerged in postmodern feminist discourse as the embodiment of the ‘male gaze.’ He represents men’s visual and voyeuristic mastery over women. According to this view, the flâneur’s freedom to wander at will through the city is essentially a masculine freedom” (65). Likewise, Walkowitz contends that “to stroll across the divided spaces of the metropolis, whether it was London, Paris, or New York, to experience the city as a whole” belonged to the “privileged urban spectator” who acts as “flaneur” (410). Rather than accept this privilege as out of reach, however, Lin uses