Yunte Huang | Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History / 2010

pursuing poetry

by Douglas Messerli

 

Yunte Huang Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010)

 

Yunte Huang begins his engaging study of all things Charlie Chan with an amusing anecdote. Upon the publication of his book, Transpacific Displacement, a secretary in the English Department at Harvard, where he was then teaching, whipped up a collaged flier for his Harvard Book Store reading. As Huang describes the flier:

 

        My name and the book title were highlighted in bold, with a map of the Pacific

        Rim fading out in the background. A silhouette of Warner Oland, the Swedish

        actor playing Charlie Chang, peered menacingly in the direction of North America,

        placed atop the sprawl of the vast Asian continent.

 

      The secretary, a Caucasian woman in her late fifties, innocently announced that she had been great fan of the famed detective, and Huang, an inveterate wisecracking professor, reminded her somewhat of the aphorism-spouting hero. Huang resisted telling his friend that this image of Chan would be highly offensive to most Asian Americans. “Instead, I thanked her in my polite Chinese manner for her sprightly design. And now I have written this book about Charlie Chaplin, in part to carry on my imaginary dialogue with this well-meaning lady.”

     For the reader who expects, however, to encounter in the rest of this book a diatribe against American racism, I suggest he or she put it down. There are plenty of such texts to read, as Huang later reminds us, from Jessica Hagedorn’s significant anthology of contemporary Asian American fiction (wherein she declares “Charlie Chan is dead” and describes the super-sleuth as “our most famous fake ‘Asian’ pop icon…and a part of the demeaning legacy of stereotypes”) to  Frank Chin’s provoking essay “The Sons of Charlie Chan” (where he describes Charlie Chan author Earl Derr Biggers as “the reincarnation of an antebellum southern cracker overseer sitting on the verandah, sippin his mint julep, listening to the happy darkies chopping cotton in the fields making racial harmony….”). Huang clearly understands and sympathizes with their positions, and throughout this book he effectively points to the hundreds of racist attitudes and laws toward Asians in the US from the settling of Hawaii up until our own times.

      Yet Yunte Huang—a Chinese-born scholar who left his home country shortly after the massacre at Tiananmen Square and who soon after discovered himself in Tuscaloosa, Alabama trying to run a fast-food restaurant—makes it clear that he recognizes—to coin a Chan-like phrase—“reality, like a copper penny, always have two sides.” Having discovered a set of Charlie Chan fictions while he was a student in Buffalo, Huang read them and became a fan of their hero. It is clear that Huang has not only read all the books, but seen nearly all the 47 Charlie Chan movies!

      Part of this book’s pleasure, moreover, centers on the author’s journeys throughout the US and elsewhere to track down the various figures who shaped and created the successful sleuth. Simultaneously, Huang’s travels are connected, at times eerily (both he and Chan author E.D. Biggers grew up outside of Canton, he in China, Biggers in Ohio) and at other times whimsically, with the author and his own life. In Charlie Chan, accordingly, cultural history, biography, literary texts, motion picture history, and autobiography are blended to create an adventure that is far more than its constituent parts.

      Charlie Chan begins with a real Chinese immigrant, Chang Apana, an Hawaiian cowboy later hired by the Honolulu police department for detective work. How author Biggers first heard of Apana is not clear (Biggers claimed that he first read of Apana in a newspaper while sitting in the reading room of the New York Public Library, but the dates of the paper he claims to have read do not match the episodes of Apana’s life), and after traveling to Hawaii in April 1920 to work on his third detective novel, Biggers determined to introduce a new, if minor, character into his work; thus Charlie Chan was born. The actual scene in that fiction, The House without a Key, is fascinating for what it reveals about the society and the new creation. Three men enter, the “third man” being the Chinaman:

 

                  As they went out, the third man stepped farther into the room, and

                  Miss Minvera [Winterslip] gave a little gasp of astonishment as she

                  looked at him. In those warm islands thin men were the rule, but here

                  was a striking exception. He was very fat indeed, yet he walked with

                  the light dainty step of a woman. His cheeks were as chubby as a

                  a baby’s, his skin ivory tinted, his black hair close-cropped, his amber

                  eyes slanting. As he passed Miss Minerva he bowed with a courtesy

                  encountered all too rarely in a work-a-day world, then moved on

                  after Hallet…. “But—he’s a Chinaman!”

 

As Huang points out, everything in this short passage is loaded. Miss Minerva, obviously a closet racist, is shocked by the fact that that an Asian man could be a detective. The man himself is described as fat, a large man with slanting eyes, and with an effeminate walk to boot. The politeness of his bow is seen by some as docility or even submissiveness. When Chan does speak his sentences are ungrammatical, “reminiscent of fortune-cookie witticisms, [which] sounds hilariously funny to many but racially parodic to others.” In short, as Huang summarizes, “All things Charlie, it seems, are radically polarizing.”

     Yet even as a minor character, Chan became so immediately popular that Biggers had no opportunity to kill him off. Chan movies soon followed, but the first three were so badly edited and conceived that it seemed he would never succeed as a cinematic hero. Yet the brilliant casting of Swedish actor Warner Oland, who already had played the evil Asian villain, Dr. Fu-Manchu—a figure Huang argues is the negative image of Charlie Chan—changed all that in his gentle presentation of a man of great ratiocination working on behalf of the good.

     Back in Hawaii retired detective Apana was recognized as the original Chan, and when Biggers traveled there again in 1928, he was photographed by the Honolulu Star-Bulletin with him. As Biggers noted, “He has turned out to the ideal ‘original’ for Charlie Chan.”

     By 1933, the year Hollywood produced the fourth Charlie Chan movie, Biggers had died. Various script writers and actors, including Sidney Toler and Roland Winters, would continue creating new Chan incarnations until almost mid-century. Chan, widely popular through the United States and Europe, was also a hit in China, whereas the Chinese detested the depiction of themselves as represented by Fu-Manchu and others such as Chinese-American actress Ana May-Wong, who played his evil daughter.

    Huang attributes the great success of Charlie Chan in the US to be inextricably intertwined with the polarities of racist attitudes and an increased fascination with the exoticism of all things Asian (he devotes a chapter to “Hollywood’s Chinoissserie,” including the famed Grauman’s Chinese Theatre).

      More importantly, however, were the underlying mythologies of these works which often served as what Huang calls “Racial Parables,” in which figures of various ethnicities are pitted against “greedy white men,” whom they cleverly, albeit, subtly outwit. In the end, Huang sees Charlie Chan as a figure in a long history of racial stereotypes who outwit their enemies and teach their friends:

 

               Like a multilayered Chinese box, Chan is a character whose strength and

               virtue extend well beyond a mere chimera of the benign Chinaman in Western

               fantasy. Like all racialized figures—including Uncle Tom, Aunt Jemima, John

               Chinaman, Ah Sin, Nigger Jim, and Fu Manchu—Chan bears the stamp of his

               time, a birthmark that encapsulates both the racial tensions and the creative

               energies of a multicultural nation.

 

And in that sense, Chan is in a long tradition of figures who survive and prevail through their linguistic abilities, despite any difficulties they may have with the language. “Endeavoring to make English language my slave,” Chan says at one point in The House without a Key, “I pursue poetry.”

    

Los Angeles, July 14, 2010

Reprinted, in different form, from Bookforum.com (August 12, 2010).