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

by Huang, Yunte

  At this point, there was still no Charlie Chan. If the novel was conceived on the cool lanai of Mrs. Gray’s beach cottage in the spring of 1920, Chan would be born four years later in the stuffy, hushed reading room of the New York Public Library—or at least that was Biggers’s claim.

  Having conceived of this new novel, the workaholic Biggers could no longer sit still, despite his doctor’s orders to take a break from writing. He tried to rent an office in downtown Honolulu, but the owners of the few vacant places looked askance at Biggers—renting a business office in order to write a book must have been too exotic an idea for the locals. So Biggers ended up renting a room in a dingy, small hotel. Having put his desk and typewriter there, Biggers would go downtown at about nine every morning, feeling good in the cool breeze. It got hot fairly quickly in Honolulu after sunrise, and before long the harsh sun would sap his energy. The hotel room had a cozy double bed, and the temptation to lie down for just a few minutes was too strong. A nap that started out in midmorning often ended in time for supper, a tropical phenomenon experienced by John Quincy in The House, when he first landed in the lotus land: “Lazy, indeed. John Quincy had a feeling for words. He stopped and stared at an agile little cloud flitting swiftly through the sky—got up from his chair to watch it disappear over Diamond Head. On his way back to the desk he had to pass the bed. What inviting beds they had out here! He lifted the mosquito netting and dropped down for a moment.”5 Thanks to the distracting balmy weather in Hawaii, Biggers did not complete his Waikiki murder mystery there. Instead, he finished it at a lodge in Williamstown, Massachusetts, during the long, cool summer of 1924.

  Upon returning from Hawaii, Biggers continued to mull over the Waikiki novel while selling his short stories. On October 23, 1922, Biggers wrote to his editor, Laurance Chambers, “I am, as I told you on the street, contemplating a novel—a mystery story of Honolulu, which I have promised to the Post as a serial. I have it pretty well worked out, and expect to go to work on it after I do about two more short stories to get money enough to keep me going while engaged with the longer work.”6

  Two months later, Biggers reported to Chambers on the progress of the novel, which he tentatively titled Moonlight at the Crossroads:

  I enclose a couple pages regarding the projected novel…. I have a large list of characters with which to play here—army people, traders, planters. An Americanized Chinese house boy—the star pitcher on the All-China baseball nine—the lawyer for the opium ring—an Admiral of the Fleet who introduced the two-step to Honolulu society in the days of King Kalakaua—an old Yankee from New Bedford who came over sixty years before, married a Hawaiian, and never went back—a champion Hawaiian swimmer—beachcombers—the picturesque keeper of a run-down hotel at the beach who is the younger son of a good English family—his daughter—the president of the Japanese bank.7

  Still there was no Charlie Chan.

  In the winter of 1923, Bigger’s health declined again, leading him to consider selling his house in Pelham Manor and moving to warmer climes for good. As he wrote to Chambers, “I haven’t been quite so well as I hoped, but it may be that the coming of spring will finally drive out the poisons, tonsorial and otherwise…. The doctor says I should never spend another winter in a cold climate, and was particularly anxious for me to get away this winter. But alas, no one has bought the house, and I seem marooned here.”8

  The following summer brought good news. “The house deal was settled yesterday,” he wrote Chambers on June 11. “Hope to have a good manuscript for you soon.” While en route to the Berkshires, his usual summer hideout, Biggers stopped by the cavernous New York Public Library to do some reading and refresh his memories of Hawaii. It was in the Reading Room, while browsing through a big pile of Hawaiian newspapers, that Biggers supposedly came across the name of Chang Apana: “In an obscure corner of an inside page, I found an item to the effect that a certain hapless Chinese, being too fond of opium, had been arrested by Sergeants Chang Apana and Lee Fook, of the Honolulu Police. So Sergeant Charlie Chan entered the story of The House Without a Key.”9

  If Biggers’s claim were true—that the chubby Chinese detective, who would charm millions of readers and viewers, was indeed born in that dim, hushed Reading Room—then Charlie Chan certainly would be in good company. As the Great Depression sent the country into a tailspin, a generation of 1930s writers, including Henry Miller and Henry Roth, would make good use of the Reading Room inside Forty-second Street’s stone-lion–guarded building. Chan would have been born, then, in the same cradle as Miller’s semiautobiographical alter ego and Roth’s Yiddish-speaking David Schearl.

  Biggers’s claim, however, cannot easily be verified.

  My careful examination of the two major Honolulu newspapers being published in 1924, the Honolulu Advertiser and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, failed to locate the item Biggers specified. The only Apana news that came close was an equally obscure item published in the “Brevities” section of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on June 6, 1924, which reads: “Arrested for Assault—Tong Kut Lum, alleged assailant of Lai Tin, was arrested this morning by Detective Chang Apana. He is alleged to have struck Lai yesterday, following an altercation. Both men were members of a Chinese theatrical company. Tong was charged with assault and battery.”10

  While it is quite possible that Biggers was reading newspapers from previous years, further evidence from the Honolulu Police Department seems to suggest that Biggers might have conflated events. In a letter dated February 26, 1979, Earl Thompson, assistant chief of the Administrative Bureau of the HPD, replied to a query from a Mr. J. David Reno of Boston, Massachusetts, obviously a Charlie Chan aficionado: “Regarding your inquiry of Lee Fook, complete checks of our records fail to identify this person as a police officer with our department.”11

  Without Lee Fook, the news item regarding Apana and Lee making opium arrests appears as fishy as the fifth ace on the river.

  Just to be thorough, I also checked with the New York Public Library and was told by their research division that there was no record of the library’s having subscribed to either of the two Hawaii newspapers before 1924.12

  Such a legalistic attachment to historical facts may take just a bit of the romance out of Charlie Chan’s legendary birth. But, regardless of how or where Biggers first encountered Chang Apana, it is certain that Charlie Chan arrived fully formed—like Athena emerging from the head of Zeus—in that distant summer of 1924. And those summer months, as we will see, proved to be a turning point in American culture.

  PART THREE

  CHARLIE CHAN, THE CHINAMAN

  COVER DESIGN FOR E. D. BIGGERS’S BEHIND THE CURTAIN, 1928 (Courtesy of Lilly Library, Indiana University)

  14

  The Heathen Chinee

  BRET HARTE, “THE HEATHEN CHINEE,” 1870 (Courtesy of Poetry and Rare Books Library, University at Buffalo)

  Ching Chong Chinaman sitting on a fence

  Trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents.

  Along came a choo-choo train

  Knocked him in the cuckoo brain,

  And that was the end of the fifteen cents.

  —American children’s jump-rope song from a less-enlightened era

  THE FIRST CHARLIE Chan book, The House Without a Key, was published in March 1925. A quarter of the way through the novel, Charlie Chan makes his inconspicuous entrance as a minor character, literally as “the third man,” the Chinaman:

  As they went out, the third man stepped farther into the room, and Miss Minerva [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 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!”1

&
nbsp; Chan’s idiosyncratic, ungrammatical speech is apparent from the beginning. His first utterance, like a newborn’s first cry, is unmistakably pidgin English: “No knife are present in neighborhood of crime.”2

  Charlie Chan’s unceremonious debut is a prelude to his tortured legacy in American culture, a legacy that at once endears and offends millions. Depending on one’s persuasion, Biggers’s first description of Chan yields very different readings. Chan is “fat,” which means he is either chubby and lovable or oafish and ugly. He walks “with the light dainty step of a woman,” which means he is unobtrusive and agile, or he is effeminate. His close-cropped black hair suggests his neatness or lack of status. “His amber eyes slanting” projects a sense of realism to some, but a degree of repulsion to others, since “slanting” sounds pejorative. His courteous bow indicates politeness to some but docility to others. Chan’s ungrammatical speech, reminiscent of fortune-cookie witticisms, sounds hilariously funny to many but racially parodic to others.

  All things Charlie, it seems, are radically polarizing.

  But we are already ahead of ourselves in the story. Let us backtrack and look more closely at Charlie Chan’s literary debut, at a time in the mid-1920s when the Chinaman grabbed the attention of the reading public and film audiences nationwide, an era when American children chanted, “Ching Chong Chinaman sitting on a fence,” as they jumped rope on the streets, the chant being their first exposure to “Oriental” culture.

  Charlie Chan, as we know, was not the central character in Biggers’s early conception of the novel. Biggers originally opened the story in San Francisco, and two newspapermen there, both white, were the designated heroes. “Sergeant Charlie Chan entered the story of The House Without a Key,” as Biggers recalled, “supposedly a minor character, a mere bit of local color.”3 As the writing progressed, however, Chan modestly but firmly took the spotlight. And as soon as Biggers’s story ceased running serially in the Saturday Evening Post, “Say—when are we going to have another Charlie Chan story?” became a popular cry, suggesting that Biggers’s magazine excerpts had an electrifying effect on readers, in much the same way that earlier Americans had crowded the New York docks to get the next installment of a Dickens novel more than half a century earlier.

  A flood of letters descended on Biggers following the selections in the Saturday Evening Post, and his readers clamored for Charlie Chan to take center stage. Biggers soon realized that Chan, like a monkey on his back, could never be killed off. Much as Sherlock Holmes dogged Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (in fact, Doyle even tried to kill him), Charlie Chan would remain forever linked to his creator.

  But why? What made Charlie Chan so appealing to the reading public of the 1920s? Why was he so popular on the silver screen in America and beyond? The answer lies, I believe, both in the kind of Chinaman that he is and in the kind of nation that America had become during the “tribal twenties.”

  Just as Biggers’s first descriptive passage portends the troubled legacy of Charlie Chan, Miss Minerva’s exclamatory sentence, “But—he’s a Chinaman!”—led by a conditional “but” and broken by a dash—identifies the peculiar aura of his appeal. Indeed, a Chinaman, a loaded word in the English language, can now be applied to one character who can carry the whole burden of being a Chinaman.

  So, what is a Chinaman?

  Actually, we cannot ask such a timeless question, for the image of the Chinaman changes over time. As an English word, Chinaman was first used as a neutral term for a Chinese male. Occasionally, it even referred to a man from the Far East, including Japanese and Korean men. Unlike Frenchman or Englishman, however, the connotation of Chinaman turned negative in the nineteenth century as anti-Chinese sentiments gained currency in the United States.

  As in Hawaii, Chinese immigration to the United States had been sporadic before the mid-nineteenth century. Sightings of individual Chinese were reported in Pennsylvania as early as 1785, but it was the discovery of gold at John Sutter’s mill in 1848 that suddenly spiked the number of Chinese arriving in North America: 325 in 1849, 450 more in 1850, 2,716 in 1851, and 20,026 in 1852. By 1870, there were about 63,000 Chinese in the United States, and 77 percent of them were in California.4

  At first, Chinese were welcomed in America, especially in California, which had just joined the Union in 1850. The Chinese arrivals were routinely reported in the Daily Alta California as increases to a “worthy integer of population.” In his January 1852 address to the state’s legislature, Governor John McDougall praised the Chinese immigrants as “one of the most worthy class of our newly adopted citizens.” But as the competition in the goldfields became more intense, the tide soon turned against the Chinese, and these affectionate feelings turned sour. Only four months after Governor McDougall’s speech, the California legislature, at the urging of white American miners, passed the foreign miners’ license tax, which required a monthly payment of three dollars from every foreign miner who did not desire to become a citizen. Since a 1790 federal law had already denied “nonwhite persons” their eligibility for citizenship, Chinese miners became the main target of the tax. From 1852 to 1870, California collected $5 million from the Chinese, a sum representing between 25 and 50 percent of the state’s revenue.5

  When Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1854, “The disgust of California has not been able to drive or kick the Chinaman back to his home”—a sentence cited today by the Oxford English Dictionary as the first recorded American use of the word Chinaman—the New England sage seemed well informed about the events in the Wild West. White Californians’ resentment and discrimination toward the Chinese were indeed on the rise. The following stanza from a gold rush song entitled “California As It Was and Is,” published by John A. Stone under the pseudonym “Put” in 1855, precisely captures the anti-Chinaman sentiments of the era:

  I remember, I remember when the Yuba used to pay,

  With nothing but a rocker, five hundred dollars a day.

  We used to think ’t’would always last, and would, with perfect ease,

  If only Uncle Sam had stopped the coming of Chinese.

  Here the blame of an idealized California’s passing was laid on the newly arrived, the Chinese FOBs (“fresh off boats”), whose presence in the foothills along the Yuba River was a common sight in the heyday of the gold rush.6

  Other songs of the period caricatured the Chinaman directly, mimicking his pidgin speech, such as this one entitled “Hong Kong”:

  My name is Sin Sin, come from China

  In a bigee large shipee, commee long here;

  Wind blow welly muchee, Kick upee blubelly

  Ship makee Chinaman feelee wellee queer.

  Me fetchee longee a lillee gal nicee

  She com longee to be my wife

  Makee bigee swear to it all her life.7

  This kind of pidgin imitation of Chinese, while enriching the English language with such neologisms as “ching chong,” “ka-ching,” and “chop chop,” would grow into a time-honored tradition in American popular literature. Eventually, it would become fodder for Earl Biggers as he crafted the idiosyncratic speech for Detective Charlie Chan.

  As Emerson keenly observed, however, white resentment and ridicule did not stop the Chinese from coming, in part because there was such great demand for cheap labor, especially in the West. In February 1865, the Central Pacific Railroad hired fifty Chinese workers to lay the tracks for the transcontinental line going east from Sacramento. The company had made the hire on a trial basis, because construction boss James Harvey Strobridge, “a tough Vermonter of Irish ancestry,” considered the Chinese men too small—most of them weighed scarcely a hundred pounds. Started in early 1863, the work on the western end of the transcontinental line had become too hard and dangerous as the tracks reached the Sierra Nevada, and many of the Irish workers had quit. Desperate to find replacements, the company’s superintendent, Charles Crocker, decided to try the Chinese, who had been driven out of the minefields. A former gold miner, Crocker was a hu
ge man who had a reputation for roaring “up and down the track like a mad bull.” He reminded Strobridge that although they might not look as sturdy as the young lads from Ireland, the Chinese “had built the longest stretch of masonry in the world”: the Great Wall.8

  Reluctantly, Strobridge gave the fifty men their so-called Chinaman’s chance but soon found them to be, as Crocker put it in a report, “nearly as equal to white men in the amount of labor they perform.” Leland Stanford, owner of the company, also praised the Chinese workers as “quiet, peaceable, industrious, economical—ready and apt to learn all the different kinds of work.” By the fall of 1865, the company had hired 3,000 Chinese, and more were on their way from Canton. Within two years, 12,000 Chinese were employed by the Central Pacific, representing 90 percent of the entire workforce. These thousands of men contributed physical labor, technical skills, and even their lives to a railroad project that eventually would transform America. One observer of the construction site described the Chinese workers as “a great army laying siege to Nature in her strongest citadel. The rugged mountains looked like stupendous ant-hills. They swarmed with Celestials, shoveling, wheeling, carting, drilling, and blasting rocks and earth.” The winter of 1865–66 was particularly brutal, with a record forty-four snowstorms that piled snowdrifts more than sixty feet high. Avalanches, a constant threat on the job, buried camps and crews. Not until the following spring would the thawing corpses be found, standing upright, “their cold hands gripping shovels and picks and their mouths twisted in frozen terror.”9

  In the spring of 1869, the railhead crossed into the salt flats of Utah and pushed toward Promontory Point, where the Central Pacific Railroad would meet the Union Pacific Railroad coming from the east with its Irish crews. As the two grading gangs—“Irish workers heading west and Chinese workers heading east”—drew close, competition turned ugly. Resenting the Chinese for taking their fellow countrymen’s jobs, the Irish, themselves often targets of ethnic bias, “secretly placed a charge of blasting powder so that it blew up Chinese workers.” On May 10, 1869, the last rail was laid down, the last spike—a golden spike—was rammed home, and engines of the two companies moved forward until they touched. To commemorate the completion of the first railroad to span the North American continent, the cheering crowd gathered for an official photo. In this picture, however, there is not a single Chinese face.10