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 the everyday spatial practices of his disenfranchised Chinese immigrant characters, particularly Tom Fong, Jr., as a strategy to claim their right to the city. Given Tom’s gender and age—thirteen when he arrives in New York City and turning eighteen by the end of the novel—he more than any other member of his family enjoys the freedom of urban exploration.
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