her sense of female propriety. When she is outside her home, something awakens in Eva: “On the streets and at school, she saw hustling, bustling, boisterous, screaming, yelling, scuffing, ball-batting children, girls as well as boys. . . . American girls yelled at the top of their voices, and how proud and straight they stood! How fast they walked, with free swaying strides! . . . On the park playground, she saw how the grown-up girls . . . stood in bloomers, arms akimbo, legs wide apart, beautiful, strong, unafraid” (51). Eva’s access to the city’s streets, parks, and public school enables her to witness different ways of being a female, ways that challenge the role of being a traditional Chinese nu-tsai prescribed by patriarchy at home. Significantly, Eva perceives liberating possibilities of being a female through an urban environment that offers her different models and alternative ways of being and thinking, which are unavailable at home. By the time she reaches seventeen, Eva has become “independent and self-confident.” “She walked straight and unafraid like American girls and with the American gait” (133). It is worth noting, however, that the formation of Eva as a confident female is supposed to be the result of her Americanization, which is equated with freedom, progress, independence, and individuality, eliding gender inequality in the United States and indirectly casting Chinese society as the opposite. Nevertheless, Eva’s development indicates the significance of mobility in the public space for women’s subject formation. Unlike several of the young immigrant women who are mostly confined to the domestic space in Sui Sin Far’s stories of an earlier era, Eva has much more mobility in the city, in part because of her age and her brother Tom, who is tireless in his eagerness to explore the city and who likes to invite Eva to walk with him. But Tom often ventures into the city by himself, and what he perceives on his walks defers from what Eva experiences. Both the act and effect of their walking in the city are gendered, producing different stories about their respective subject formations. These stories resist the exclusion of Chinese Americans and claim their right to the city even as they in part reiterate the assimilation myth.
URBAN EXPLORATION AND THE SUBJECT FORMATION OF TOM FONG, JR.
Much of the novel’s narrative is devoted to Tom’s exploration of the city, which is central to his coming of age and to his becoming someone other than a laundryman like his father or a shop owner in Chinatown like his uncle. Flânerie plays a crucial role in Tom’s 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
