Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History

by Huang, Yunte

  Poverty, as Ai recalls, plagued the shabby villages scattered around the delta south of Canton. Bombed by British battleships during the Opium Wars and scorched in what historians have characterized as “the most destructive civil war in the history of humanity,”1 this area suffered from famines, bandits, and epidemics. Adding to the miseries were the constant fights between the Punti (local people) and the Hakkas (guest people) over land possession. Feuds between clans could turn bloody. A Chinese immigrant recalled the bitter memory of being forced to flee from the violence and turmoil:

  In a bloody feud between the Chang family and the Oo Shak [i.e., Oo Sack] village we lost our two steady workmen. Eighteen villagers were hired by Oo Shak to fight against the huge Chang family, and in the battle two men lost their lives protecting our pine forests. Our village, Wong Jook Long, had a few resident Changs. After the bloodshed, we were called for our men’s lives, and the greedy, impoverished villagers grabbed fields, forest, food and everything, including newborn pigs, for payment. We were left with nothing, and in disillusion we went to Hong Kong to sell ourselves as contract laborers.2

  Cantonese from this area, out of economic necessity, were among the first to sell themselves into the dreaded coolie system. Like Irish peasants after the potato famine, they were the most active in venturing overseas during the second half of the nineteenth century. A government report of the time noted: “Ever since the disturbances caused by the [bandits], dealings with foreigners have increased greatly. The able-bodied go abroad. The fields are clogged with weeds.”3

  In Ai’s plain language, we sense the dearth of materials and supplies in the life of these villagers left behind:

  Ours was such a small village that we had no stores or restaurants. A small local shop supplied such often used items as sauce and bean-curds, but for the other household and kitchen items that we needed we must wait for the market days to come around.4

  On so-called market days, vendors convened at a particular village; the markets rotated among adjacent villages. There was simply not enough commerce to justify maintaining a regular store in one location and keeping it open daily. Market days were the few occasions when children like Ai and Ah Pung could, if allowed by their family budget, purchase a taste of life outside of its impoverished norm.

  Ai, coming from a well-to-do family of country gentry, did manage to experience such temporary relief. Writing his memoir in his eighties, when he had retired comfortably to Hong Kong, the Hawaiian business tycoon remembered with almost boyish delight the bowls of soup he had gulped down with such eagerness in the early years of his life:

  As Yung Mark was but a mile and a half from our village, I would visit Yung Mark on market days and spend money on a bowl of rice-soup of fish, pork, or chicken. The cheapest was fish rice-soup, at sixteen cash a bowl. After I have had my fill of rice-soup, I would return home.5

  Ah Pung, however, had no chance for even as simple a treat as a bowl of fish- or meat-flavored soup. His family was poor, as evidenced by his lack of schooling—any family that could afford it would have been obliged to send their kids to school at that time, or in almost any other period of Chinese history. Ah Pung, in fact, never learned to read in either Chinese or English, even though later in life he taught himself to read Hawaiian. Toys were rare in a family like his.

  It is worth noting that even a full century later, little had changed. When I was growing up, for example, in a small village in the waning days of Mao’s China, my “toys” were mud-pies, tadpoles, ants, fireflies, grasshoppers, and whatever luckless insects fell into my hands. Occasionally I could catch a fledgling sparrow learning to fly if I suddenly clapped my hands and yelled loudly. The frightened young bird would fall to the ground and make a good, hapless pet—but only for a few days, since caged sparrows have a fiery, rebellious temperament and do not survive for long.

  Such were the simple, rustic delights of childhood in rural China, both for Ah Pung and for me.

  There would be endless chores that even a three-year-old such as Ah Pung would have to share: gathering fallen tree leaves and twigs for kitchen fuels, collecting animal droppings for fertilizer, keeping birds and animals away from grain drying on the ground, and so on. The slightly older kids would have to babysit their siblings, wash dishes, do laundry, herd water buffalo, or simply work in the fields like adults.

  In such a harsh environment, a child prone to accidents and disease would be lucky to grow to maturity. Child kidnapping was a common, daily fear in Ah Pung’s day. Occasionally, when a famine broke out, cannibalism might become the last resort for families on the brink of starving to death; they were forced by necessity to make exchanges with other equally desperate families so they could at least avoid eating their own children or siblings.

  The decade of the 1870s, as Ah Pung’s parents would come to realize, was a particularly dire time for China. Teetering in the wake of the crushing wars, the Manchu regime could no longer maintain the imperial façade of the Middle Kingdom. Still four decades from its collapse but already in decline, the Ching dynasty understood that more troubles loomed on the horizon. Among them were fears that the repeated military and economic invasions by the Western powers would make the empire, increasingly carved up through territorial concessions, resemble nothing more than a juicy melon. Regional and nationwide rebellions accompanied this imperial plunder as well. The entire situation was exacerbated by the scourge of opium, which the British had imposed on the Chinese, resulting in an addiction problem for millions.6 Not surprisingly, the Chinese carried this addiction to Hawaii, where Chang Apana, as a cop, would be charged with eradicating this vice.

  Hoping for a better future for their offspring, Ah Pung’s parents decided to send him out of the country. Even though they themselves had not had any luck in Hawaii, the islands were an unquestionable improvement over rural Canton in a country on the verge of political and moral collapse. Ah Pung’s uncle, later known in Hawaii as C. K. Aiona, had signed aboard a ship to try his luck in the Sandalwood Mountains. So, at the age of about ten, in 1881, Ah Pung accompanied his uncle and sailed for his birthplace.

  The young boy had little clue about what lay ahead. Having left Hawaii at three, he might possibly have had faint memories of the soaring cliffs, verdant valleys, and kaleidoscopic flora and fauna. But more than that? Not likely. As the ship departed from Whampoa Harbor and drifted down the Pearl River, Ah Pung watched the wretched countryside float by. Straw huts—not unlike the one in which he had been born ten years earlier in Hawaii—dotted rural Canton’s bleak landscape, like bird nests perched on barren trees in the dead of winter. Here and there, a skinny water buffalo would be toiling in rice paddies at a languid pace. Rent from his parents at this impressionable age, Ah Pung would never see China again.

  3

  Paniolo, the Hawaiian Cowboy

  CHINATOWN, HONOLULU, LATE 1890S (Courtesy of Hawaii State Archives)

  You gaze at this cattle ranch from high on the misty heights of Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, and from the volcano’s sloping shoulder you see 227,000 acres, a breathtaking vista spread out on the highlands of this great mountain. A soothing wind drifts from the mountain and cools the lava wastes. Seemingly limitless, the area includes forests, valleys, seashores, plateaus, meadows, hills, streams, and canyons. This is the sprawling, mysterious, majestic Parker Ranch, with the largest Hereford herd in the world.

  —Joseph Brennan, The Parker Ranch of Hawaii, 1974

  THE GLIMPSE OF the island of Oahu at the end of a forty-day sea voyage provided a stark contrast to Ah Pung’s last view of China. As the boat neared the harbor, epic peaks soared into towering clouds and expansive azure. In deep clefts of lush green, waterfalls streaked down like the long, silvery hairs of a mermaid. Under the tropical sun, the Diamond Head promontory humped like the gnarled back of a giant whale, softened only by the wavy line of palms stretched out along the white beaches of Waikiki. The amphitheater of Punchbowl, the future, fictional home of Detective Charlie Chan, sto
od majestically at the center of the butterfly-shaped island, beckoning the new arrivals.

  Almost all travel writers worth their salt have spoken of the romance of arriving in Hawaii. They often evoke a timeless scene. Bands play aloha music, native girls in grass skirts dance hula, and matronly women in colorful holokus hang leis around the necks of visitors. But for the Chinese coolie laborers who had been packed in the crowded steerage with no privacy or comfort for weeks, this moment of landing was one of utter confusion, anxiety, and humiliation.

  Trudging down the gangplank in a stream of blue cotton, they were greeted not by sirens chanting but by immigration officials shouting incomprehensible commands and questions at them. In frustration, the laborers, coached by their booking agents, shouted back the names of their intended plantations. These were the only two or three English/Hawaiian words they knew or would ever need to know: “Puunene Maui!” “Waialua Sugar Company!” “Naalehu Hawaii!”

  After they had been identified by the plantation representatives, a bango—a numbered metal tag on a chain, hardly a welcome lei—was placed around each of their necks. Then, like cattle heading to market, they were piled into the waiting wagons and taken to their ultimate destinations.1

  Ah Pung, along with his uncle and other laborers, was sent to a plantation in Waipio, his birthplace. The already-sketchy paper trail that follows Ah Pung’s early life unfortunately stops here, at his return around 1881. When he emerges again in our story with any certainty—in 1891, to be exact—Ah Pung, having adopted his official name of Chang Apana, would already be a young man. Despite the absence of reliable information, there exist personal recollections and circumstantial accounts that enable us to piece together a plausible picture of Apana’s life during this time.

  In these ten or so formative years, we are certain that Apana did at least two things: first, he learned to handle horses, and second, he became a stableman for the wealthy Wilder family in Honolulu. There are accounts of Apana winning the title of the best horseman among the Chinese in Hawaii.2 Later, as a policeman, he would always wear a cowboy hat and carry a bullwhip, reminders of those tough riding days. In his funeral procession in 1933, thronged by hundreds in Honolulu, a handler led a white horse without a rider. This was said to be the mount used by Apana while on active duty in the Honolulu Police Department.3

  Horses, then, apparently played an integral role in Apana’s illustrious career, so, to know the true color of our future “supersleuth,” one needs some familiarity with the hardscrabble life of those dashing, devil-may-care paniolos, the Hawaiian cowboys.

  NOT UNTIL 1803 did the first horse arrive in Hawaii, aboard the China trader Lelia Bird. Captain Richard J. Cleveland brought a stallion and two mares from Baja California as gifts for Kamehameha the Great. They caused quite a stir among the natives, who crowded the ship’s decks to see these bizarre equine creatures. Noticing their quizzical looks, a sailor jumped on the back of one of the horses and did a demonstration of galloping. The king, however, failed to show any interest. He took a careless look at the horses and made a remark that greatly disappointed Cleveland. He could not, the king said, perceive that the ability to transport a person from one place to another, in less time than he could run, would be adequate compensation for the food the animal would consume and the care it would require.4

  The king, however, was alone in his nonchalance. Other groups, like the Native Americans a few centuries earlier, had quickly adopted these continental imports as their daily companions. In the words of a catalogue distributed by the Hawaiian Humane Society, “From the day the first mare awed Kona residents in 1803, native Hawaiians were hooked on horses.” Half a century later, as the Pacific Commercial Advertiser reported in 1864, “The passion of the Kanaka, male or female, for horses is the most marked trait in their character.”5

  The horse, however, is only one of the two animals essential to the life of a cowboy, the cow of course being its plodding companion. Cattle had first arrived in Hawaii a decade earlier than horses. In 1793, Captain George Vancouver, the famous English circumnavigator, brought five cows as gifts to Kamehameha the Great at Kealakekua Bay on the Big Island. Vancouver had originally loaded nine cattle—two bulls and seven cows—aboard the Discovery in Monterey, but the animals fared poorly on the long voyage from California. A bull and a cow died en route, and the remaining bull expired soon after landing. It was a glancing blow to Vancouver’s hope to establish a breed of cattle in the islands.

  Learning from his blunder, Vancouver brought three bulls and two more cows the following year, this time in good condition. He convinced the king to declare a kapu (taboo) upon all the cattle for ten years and to punish by death anyone who might injure or kill any of his animals. Thus, protected by royal decree, the bovines grazed freely on the grassy upland range of Waimea. With the aid of natural feed and friendly climes, the animals multiplied, perhaps even more rapidly than the king had anticipated. By 1813, only twenty years after their introduction, thousands of maverick cattle were roaming the plains, valleys, and forests of northern Hawaii.6

  The wild beasts became a nuisance to the natives, munching crops of potatoes, ravishing taro patches, and trampling forest growth. The natives were forced to build stone fences to ward off the invading hordes. In some regions, branches of koa trees were cut and twisted into crude fences. The cattle were also a menace to local residents, who had to avoid thicketed areas where wild bulls reigned supreme and were prone to attack human intruders.7

  The problem with these roving herds created a golden opportunity in 1815 for a keen-eyed young New Englander, John Palmer Parker, who, as Hawaii’s first cowboy, would build the largest cattle dynasty west of Texas. Born on May 1, 1790, near the Charles River in Newton, Massachusetts, Parker seemed destined to sail the high seas—his father had inherited the family whaling-ship business, while his mother was a descendant of shipyard owners and operators.8 Arriving in Hawaii aboard a sandalwood trader in 1809, Parker was smitten by the beauty of the tropical isles and decided, like Herman Melville in the Marquesas twenty years later, to jump ship.

  With the help of friendly natives, Parker built a small hale (house) and tilled an area around the hut to plant seeds. He learned the Polynesian language and acquainted himself with the king. Kamehameha gave the young haole (white man) a job tending the royal fishponds.9 Soon the seafaring itch set in again, and in 1811, when a New England merchant ship passed through Hawaii, Parker signed on for a voyage to China. Unfortunately, the ship, sidelined by a British blockade, was stuck in Canton during the War of 1812.

  Finally returning to Hawaii in 1815, Parker realized that even though wandering the high seas was his calling by birth, he would prefer a more secure life. With the longhorns running wild on the island, Parker recognized an opportunity where others only saw nuisance and hazard. He made a business proposal to Kamehameha, asking the king to allow him to shoot cattle. Deep in debt due to his ill-managed sandalwood trade, Kamehameha was willing to give a second chance to the haole who had played hooky from the fishpond job. He hired Parker as his konohiki (agent) for the supplies of “garden vegetables, taro, meats, and hides for local and foreign consumption,” making him the only person for whom the twenty-two-year-old kapu on cattle was lifted.10 Armed with a musket, the tall, rawboned Parker became, if you will, a pre-Hollywood John Wayne. He spent long days riding into forests and valleys and shooting the king’s cattle. It was hard and dangerous work, for the animals were wild and vicious and would often, like Ahab’s Moby Dick, hunt the hunter.

  In this gruesome slaughter business, Parker was fortunate to have a partner, Jack Purdy, who was easily Parker’s match in sturdiness and courage. Purdy had come to Hawaii aboard a whaling vessel and had, like Parker himself, jumped ship at Kawaihae, on the Big Island. He had also married a Hawaiian woman and had children who all became paniolos. Mary Low, one of Parker’s great-granddaughters who grew up at the ranch, later recalled stories she had heard about tough Jack Purdy. One tale concerned
an Englishman named Brenchley, a man of fortune and a great traveler of Herculean strength. When in Hawaii, Brenchley took Purdy as his guide and claimed that he could do anything or go anywhere that the guide could. One day Purdy proposed that they go out with only their guns and blankets. They rode toward Mauna Loa and subsisted only on geese, ducks, and plovers. Finally they ran out of gunpowder, which worried Brenchley. Purdy took him to a swamp and told him to get in; Brenchley sank to his knees. Telling him to stay there, Purdy disappeared into thick brush near the swamp. Soon, from the brush came a wild bull with an eye of fire and a tail erect. The animal charged toward Brenchley, plunged into the swamp, and stuck fast. “There’s our dinner!” yelled Purdy. He gathered some twigs and tied them into two bundles. He put one bundle on the mud and stepped on it. “Then he cast the other bundle ahead and stepped on that, picking up the first bundle and casting it before him. In this way, he reached the bull and, drawing his knife, cut the animal’s throat and soon sliced off some pieces of beef. Returning to firm ground in the same manner as he had gone to the bull, he kindled a fire and in a short time invited Brenchley to dinner.”11 After this, Brenchley had to concede that he had finally met a man who surpassed him in daring.

  As a team, Parker and Purdy would trek into the ruggedest regions to obtain beef. Each time they shot a bull or cow, they would “cut away the meat from the carcass and haul it to where [they] could salt it and pack it in barrels.” Faced with the generous bounty of nature, many would have succumbed to greed and engaged in mindless killing and reaping of bonanzas, as has occurred with the near-extinction of the whales in the Pacific, buffalo on the American plains, and elephants in Africa. But Parker was no Captain Ahab, no Mr. Kurtz. He was a wise man with a shrewd business sense. As the king’s agent, he took his salary in the form of selected live cattle, which enabled him to choose the best breed for domestication. Very soon he had tamed and fenced in enough herds to start a ranch of his own.12