Charlie Chan

I have never read a Charlie Chan book or seen a Charlie Chan movie (except for the Neil Simon mystery spoof Murder By Death, in which the Chinese detective is played by Englishman Peter Sellers), but I was interested in reading Yunte Huang's comprehensive study of the fictional sleuth and his inspiration, a Honolulu policeman named Chang Apana.

Huang, a scholar born in China but now living and teaching in America, covers quite a few bases in his book. He starts with a brief biography of Apana, who was born in Hawaii, moved to China as a boy, and then returned for good, where he became a celebrated detective, using a bullwhip to corral the bad guys. The legend has it that an Ohio-born, Harvard-educated writer, Earl Derr Biggers, read about one of his exploits and got the idea to write a novel featuring a wise, inscrutable Chinese detective: Charlie Chan.

Huang gives us Biggers' story, as well as the development of his wildly popular creation as a movie character. There were silent films made, starring Asian actors, but they were unsuccessful. It wasn't until the talkies, and a Swedish actor named Warner Oland took the role, that he became a household name. Fox Pictures churned them out, as many as four a year, and made Oland a rich man, even though he ended up a hopeless alcoholic and dead at 57.

The part was taken over by an American actor, Sidney Toler, and then another, Roland Winters, before the series died out in 1949 (the very same year that Mao's revolt succeeded in making China red). But he persisted in American culture, featured in board games, radio programs, comic books, and a Saturday-morning cartoon series.

Huang's book also branches off into many other topics. The book is a brisk 297 pages, but only about half is directly about Charlie Chan. He discusses the history of Hawaii, Chinese immigration into America, the character of Fu Manchu (the dark side of Orientalism), and includes a long chapter on the Massie case of 1931, in which a white woman falsely accused a gang of Hawaiian men of raping her. They were let go after a hung jury, but one of them was murdered by Massie's mother, and she was represented by Clarence Darrow. It's a fascinating tale, but only tangentially involved with the subject at hand.

I might have been annoyed by Huang's frequent off-topic forays, especially when he starts writing about movies that simply have the world "China" in the title, but he's a wonderful raconteur, and I didn't mind. I liked that he frequently got personal, describing being a student in Alabama and working at a Chinese restaurant, and his epilogue, in which he hunts down the grave of Apana, is poignant.

The best parts of the book are about Chan and what he means to American society and Asian Americans in particular. Though I've never read the books or seen the movies, I know who he is--a kindly and sage detective who speaks in fortune-cookie aphorisms. Huang has collected them, and here are a few: "Mind, like parachute, only function when open," "Talk cannot cook rice," "Too late to dig well when honorable house is on fire," and "Advice after mistake is like medicine after dead man's funeral."

Huang clearly has affection for the character, but recognizes the anger the character inspires in Asians. He does point out that at the time, the character was popular in China--here was a virtuous, positive character, never mind that he wasn't played by an actual Chinese person. Keye Luke, who for years played Chan's Number One Son, dismisses criticism, citing he was a "Chinese hero."

But during the 1960s, when racial pride was exerting itself in all ethnicities in America, a streak of political correctness submerged Charlie Chan. Not too long ago a push to ban his films from being aired on television succeeded on the Fox Movie Channel, which then relented from counter arguments. Huang seems a little miffed at the consternation, writing: "When some people complain about Charlie Chan's deferential docility, especially in the presence of white men, they have simply underestimated the real strength of his character. Chan is a peculiar American brand of trickster prevalent in ethnic literature and incarnated by Mark Twain's Huck Finn and Herman Melville's Confidence Man (curiously named China Aster). It is a legend that also includes Jim Crow, the Bunker brothers, Al Jolson's Jazz Singer, and Stepin Fetchit and his numerous step-chillun. All these characters are indeed rooted in the toxic soil of racism, but racism has made their tongues only sharper, their art more lethally potent. This undeniable fact, insulting and sobering, has uniquely identified America."