by Huang, Yunte
ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR
Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History
“Charlie Chan is a unique and fascinating book. Not only is it superbly researched, but it is written with both verve and poignance, interweaving the substantial biographies of both Chang Apana (the real Honolulu detective) and E. D. Biggers together with touches of personal memoir that are revelatory and liberating. The book defines a kind of international postmodernity—urbane, compassionate, questing, and dedicated to the unmasking of the story of genuine travail and accomplishment behind the racist travesty that has been perpetuated in literature and film.”
—Garrett Hongo, author of Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai’i
“Charlie Chan, much like the classic geisha dolls on bookcase shelves, has survived for generations as little more than a paper-thin stereotype. Now, in this impressive and highly original work, Yunte Huang has brought this fictional character out of the dusty shadows into three-dimensional life, offering us not only a picture of a little-known swath of American history but the surprising story of this Chinese detective’s American creator, and the real-life figure who inspired him.”
—Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha
“Witty and erudite, Charlie Chan intrigues and surprises as it unravels the three guises of this American original—a real-life, Hawaiian-born Chinese detective; a literary creation; and a movie character. Racist stereotypes, we come to see in this exemplary work, can convey monstrous fictions as well as complex, multifaceted truths.”
—Gary Y. Okihiro, author of Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones
“Yunte Huang restores our pleasure in Charlie Chan, and deepens it. Reading Huang, American fans of Chan novels and movies will feel relief from the automatic guilt we have learned to identify with the pleasure of enjoying a racially marked character. Huang knows his hybrid hero as well as he knows his own hybrid self, linked by a love of ironies. Chan’s misplaced expressions and the pleasantly unsettling effects of getting English delightfully, and intentionally, wrong sometimes show up standard usage as unremarkable, not to say boring. Chan’s superior intelligence, like Huang’s, plays on the expectations of ‘native’ responses in order to outdo them. So enjoy the chuckles; in Huang’s hands we recognize ourselves to be the butt of the Chinaman’s humor and the beneficiaries of his wisdom.”
—Doris Sommer, author of Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education
CHARLIE CHAN
ALSO BY YUNTE HUANG
Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics (2008)
CRIBS (2005)
Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature (2002)
Shi: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry (1997)
CHARLIE CHAN
THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE HONORABLE DETECTIVE AND HIS RENDEZVOUS WITH AMERICAN HISTORY
Yunte Huang
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
NEW YORK • LONDON
Frontispiece: Warner Oland in Charlie Chan on Broadway, 1937
(Courtesy of Everett Collection)
Copyright © 2010 by Yunte Huang
All rights reserved
Selections from Charlie Chan, © 1931–1942, courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox. All rights reserved. Selections from correspondence between Earl Derr Biggers and David Laurance Chambers reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from Bobbs-Merrill, 1922–1936. All rights reserved.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Huang, Yunte.
Charlie Chan: the untold story of the honorable detective and his rendezvous with American history / Yunte Huang.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-0-393-07916-6
1. Apana, Chang, 1871-1933. 2. Chan, Charlie (Fictitious character) 3. Detectives—Hawaii—Biography. I. Title.
HV7571.H3H83 2010
363.25092—dc22
[B]
2010016653
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT
FOR ISABELLE AND IRA, AS ALWAYS;
AND FOR GLENN MOTT, A FRIEND COMING FROM AFAR,
AS CONFUCIUS SAYS
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Prologue
PART ONE THE “REAL” CHARLIE CHAN
1 Sandalwood Mountains
2 Canton
3 Paniolo, the Hawaiian Cowboy
4 The Wilders of Waikiki
5 “Book ’em, Danno!”
6 Chinatown
7 The See Yup Man
8 Desperadoes
9 Double Murder
PART TWO CHARLIE CHAN’S POP
10 The Other Canton
11 Lampoon
12 The Raconteur
13 The House Without a Key
PART THREE CHARLIE CHAN, THE CHINAMAN
14 The Heathen Chinee
15 Fu Manchu
16 Charlie Chan, the Chinaman
17 Kaimuki
18 Pasadena
19 A Meeting of East and West
PART FOUR CHARLIE CHAN AT THE MOVIES
20 Hollywood’s Chinoiserie
21 Yellowface
22 Between the Real and the Reel
23 Rape in Paradise
24 The Black Camel
25 Racial Parables
PART FIVE CHARLIE CHAN CARRIES ON
26 Charlie Chan in China
27 Charlie Chan Soldiers On
28 The Fu Manchurian Candidate
29 Will the Real Charlie Chan Please Stand Up?
Epilogue
Appendix I: A List of Charlie Chanisms
Appendix II: A List of Charlie Chan Films
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Introduction Map of the Hawaiian Islands
Prologue Chang Apana’s bullwhip
Part I Chang Apana, circa 1917
Chapter 1 Diamond Head, 1870s
Chapter 2 Canton, China, late 1890s
Chapter 3 Chinatown, Honolulu, late 1890s
Chapter 4 A Chinese store in Chinatown, Honolulu, late 1890s
Chapter 5 Hawaiian Humane Society Seal
Chapter 6 Map of Chinatown, Honolulu, circa 1900
Chapter 6 Chinatown after the 1900 fire
Chapter 7 A See Yup Man
Chapter 8 During the 1900 Chinatown fire, residents were evacuated under police direction
Chapter 9 Honolulu Police Detective Division, on the steps of the old downtown station, August 6, 1911
Part II Earl Derr Biggers at his Pasadena, California, house, late 1920s
Chapter 10 The Saxton House, Canton, Ohio
Chapter 11 The Signet House, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Chapter 12 Earl Derr Biggers, circa 1907
Chapter 13 J. A. Gilman residence, Honolulu, 1908
Part III Cover design for E. D. Bigger’s Behind the Curtain, 1928
&n
bsp; Chapter 14 Bret Harte, “The Heathen Chinee,” 1870
Chapter 15 Boris Karloff in The Mask of Fu Manchu, 1932
Chapter 16 Cover design for E. D. Biggers’s The House Without a Key, 1925
Chapter 17 Chang Apana’s house, Kaimuki, Hawaii
Chapter 18 Earl Derr Biggers’s house, Pasadena, California
Chapter 19 Earl Derr Biggers with a stand-in Charlie Chan, July 1928
Chapter 19 Earl Derr Biggers and Chang Apana, July 5, 1928
Part IV Kamiyama Sojin as Charlie Chan in The Chinese Parrot, 1927
Chapter 20 Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Hollywood
Chapter 21 Warner Oland and Anna May Wong on the set of Old San Francisco, 1927
Chapter 22 Chang Apana and Warner Oland, Honolulu, 1931
Chapter 22 Wo Fat Restaurant, Chinatown, Honolulu
Chapter 23 Chang Apana, circa 1932
Chapter 24 Chang Apana and Chief Charles Weeber, 1932
Chapter 25 Warner Oland and Stepin Fetchit in Charlie Chan in Egypt, 1935
Part V Charlie Chan’s Bar, Sydney, Australia
Chapter 26 Chinese movie poster for Charlie Chan in Shanghai, 1936
Chapter 26 Movie poster for Charlie Chan Smashes an Evil Plot, 1941
Chapter 27 Sidney Toler, circa 1910
Chapter 28 Warner Oland in The Mysterious Dr. Fu-Manchu, 1929
Chapter 29 Warner Oland and his stand-in on the set, early 1930s
Epilogue Chang Apana’s grave at the Chinese Cemetery, Manoa, Hawaii
Epilogue The gravestone of Chang Apana
MAP OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS (Courtesy of Hawaiian State Archives)
Introduction
IN THE SPRING of 2002, I was scheduled to give a talk on my new book, Transpacific Displacement, followed by that rite of passage most authors come both to anticipate and to dread, the book signing. Without my knowledge, an amiable secretary in the English Department at Harvard, where I was then teaching, made a flyer for the event at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. Her concoction was—how shall we say it—an intriguing collage. 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 the Swedish actor Warner Oland, playing Charlie Chan, stood atop the sprawling, vast Asian continent and peered menacingly in the direction of North America. The secretary told me that she, a Caucasian woman in her late fifties, had grown up watching Charlie Chan movies. My inveterate wisecracking—which I was not shy to dispense around the department—had reminded her of her favorite, aphorism-spouting Chinese detective. Given my affection for her and my own sense of civility, I did not dare question her creative enterprise, informing her that this image of a bellicose Chan would be offensive to most Asian Americans. I did not initiate that conversation because I knew it would take a book’s worth of pages to explain the tortured legacy of Charlie Chan in America, even to myself. Instead, I thanked her in my polite Chinese manner for her sprightly design. And now I have written this book about Charlie Chan, in part to carry on my imaginary dialogue with this well-meaning lady.
So, who is Charlie Chan?
To most Caucasian Americans, he is a funny, beloved, albeit somewhat inscrutable—that last adjective already a bit loaded—character who talks wisely and acts even more wisely. But to many Asian Americans, he remains a pernicious example of a racist stereotype, a Yellow Uncle Tom, if you will; the type of Chinaman, passive and unsavory, who conveys himself in broken English. In this book, however, I would like to propose a more complicated view. As a ubiquitous cultural icon, whose influence on the twentieth century remains virtually unexamined, Charlie Chan does not yield easily to ideological reduction. “Truth,” to quote our honorable detective, “like football—receive many kicks before reaching goal.”
To write about Charlie Chan is to write about the undulations of the American cultural experience. Like a blackface minstrel, Charlie Chan carries both the stigma of racial parody and the stimulus of creative imitation. It is no coincidence that Stepin Fetchit, the most celebrated black comic actor in the 1930s, and one of the most reviled since the civil rights movement, had also starred in Charlie Chan movies. Fetchit played a lazy, inarticulate, and easily frightened Negro. And so did Mantan Moreland, another popular black comedian, who brought to the Chan movies his extraordinary vaudeville talent. Charlie Chan’s racial ventriloquism in the hands of such white actors as Warner Oland, Sidney Toler, and Roland Winters finds strong historical parallels with Aunt Jemima, Uncle Tom, and Nigger Jim. Before jumping to any ideologically reductive conclusion, we should pause and think: What would American culture be without minstrelsy, jazz, haiku, Zen, karate, the blues, or anime—without, in other words, the incessant transfusion (and co-opting) of diverse cultural traditions and creative energies?
A glance at Charlie Chan’s fictional biography reveals just how far his nimble steps have taken him into the American psyche. Most Americans don’t realize that he is based on a real person: Chang Apana, a legendary Honolulu police officer, whose biography will make up a large part of this book. Like Apana, Charlie Chan came of age in colonial Hawaii, riven by endemic racial tension. As a young man, he worked as a houseboy for a rich white family in Honolulu. As a detective, he traveled extensively in the islands, the American West, Asia, and Europe. He stood witness to the plights and sufferings of his fellow Chinese as indentured laborers on sugarcane plantations, as gold miners bullied by their white competitors, as railroad builders taking on the most dangerous jobs, and as laundrymen toiling away with steam and starch, supposedly muttering, “No tickee, no washee.” Some of these ethnic experiences and stereotypes are so deeply ingrained in American culture that even as late as the 1990s, a Republican senator would use the infamous phrase, “Not a Chinaman’s chance,” when addressing the loss of manufacturing jobs to China at a congressional hearing. Abercrombie & Fitch would sell T-shirts that read, “Wong Brothers Laundry Service. Two Wongs Can Make It White.” In many ways, Charlie Chan is a distillation of the collective experience of Asian Americans, his résumé a history of the Chinese in America.
Although Charlie Chan embodies some stereotypical traits, his fictional creator, the early twentieth-century novelist Earl Derr Biggers, succeeded in minting a unique and appealing image. As a Chinaman, Charlie Chan is like a multilayered Chinese box or a Russian doll. He may have slanted eyes, a chubby and inscrutable face, and a dark goatee, but he prefers Western suits to his native garments and wears a Panama hat in the tropical sun. He is no fan of tea; he prefers to drink sarsaparilla. Moreover, unlike a timid, inarticulate Chinaman, Chan is voluble and enjoys spouting fortune-cookie witticisms that are alternately befuddling and enlightening. This is the strength of his character: his beguiling Oriental charm, his Confucian analects turned into singsong Chinatown blues.
When Chan debuted on the silver screen in 1926, anti-Chinese hysteria had already quieted down on the West Coast and in Hawaii. A series of anti-Chinese laws in place since 1882 had effectively limited immigration from China. America was ready for an image of a Chinaman more benign than the chimera of a decade earlier, Dr. Fu Manchu, a Mongol Satan who plotted to take over the West. Chan’s Hollywood career took off. The film series had a grand run of more than two decades, and Chan became one of America’s most beloved movie characters.
Being the country’s first beloved Chinaman is not, however, the only legacy of Charlie Chan. In the decades after World War II, his influence reached into the hard-boiled world of film noir, where characters with Chinese names and Charlie Chan mustaches loom ominously in the dark background. Terms such as Shanghai, Manchurian, and opium den ricochet around like eerie echoes from a stylized underworld. Chinatown becomes synonymous with all that is rotten in the sordid urban space of midcentury America, standing in abject contrast to the clean, white, suburban sprawls of Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best. In the hackneyed symbolism of Chinatown and the clichéd notion of Chinese inscrutability, Charlie Chan has maintained a haunting pre
sence.
Given the perpetuation of this insidious brand of Orientalism, it was hardly surprising that Asian American activists and writers, pioneers such as Frank Chin and Jessica Hagedorn, began a campaign in the 1980s to heighten the public’s awareness of these negative racial tropes and deeply trenched stereotypes. Given this climate of silence that had stilled debate or scrutiny for decades, one can hardly blame Hagedorn for pronouncing, “Charlie Chan is dead.” Carrying the historical weight of the Asian American experience, Hagedorn’s shocking rhetoric was necessary to create a new consciousness, to make all Americans aware of how Charlie Chan had been used in the past to reinforce negative cultural symbols. But, contrary to Hagedorn’s dramatic pronouncement, rumors of Chan’s death may have been exaggerated. Newly restored versions of the old movies are being released on DVD every year to enthusiastic response, Web sites extol his mystique, and spoofs and sequels are produced constantly. We can no longer explain Chan’s longevity by referring simply to the persistence of racism. There is a deeper American story we need to retrieve and properly frame.
As a detective, Charlie Chan should take his place in film history alongside sagacious gentlemen like Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Hercule Poirot, and Lieutenant Columbo, yet his ethnic identity marks him as different. Charlie Chan is far from the emasculated Chinaman his critics have claimed he is. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the movies and novels would know that Chan can be as mentally brazen and combative as Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan. His courage matches that of his real-life original, Chang Apana, who, despite his diminutive height, walked dangerous beats carrying a coiled bullwhip and caught dozens of criminals singlehandedly without firing a shot.
