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

by Huang, Yunte

  Even though Apana was now at a remove from the sprawl of the street, he remained an inspiration and a role model for the department. In 1925, according to newspaper accounts, a new wave of hooliganism and violence hit Honolulu. Young gangsters were hanging around street corners and attacking unescorted women and servicemen on shore leave, so the HPD organized a “whipping squad” to clean up the streets. Under the leadership of Sergeant Antone Louis, five detectives (Jardine, John R. Troche, Oliver Barboza, George Nakea, and Joe Munson) were equipped with blacksnake whips that coiled around their waists, Apana-style. For a while, the squad was quite effective in breaking up the gangs. As Jardine recalled, “Young thugs who felt like heroes fighting clubs and fists with clubs and fists squealed like naughty children when they were on the receiving end of blacksnake whips. And we were pretty good. We got so good we could flick small specks off the seats of hoodlums’ pants.” Unfortunately, two detectives one day accidentally flicked the wrong youngster while pursuing a bunch of hoods and were charged with assault and battery. They were convicted in court and fined $100 each, and that was the end of the “whipping squad.” Undeterred, Jardine still considered Apana-style crime fighting more humane and effective than other methods, especially in dealing with youngsters. “It’s better,” he said, “to whip a young man than to have to shoot an older one.”9 Apana would agree with that.

  Like Charlie Chan, who has multiple offspring, Apana had a large family. After the death of his second wife, with whom he had three children, he had married her younger sister, Annie Lee Kwai, in 1914. Among Apana’s three marriages, this was the only one recorded, with the marriage certificate revealing that the Catholic wedding was held on April 12 at Our Lady of Peace Cathedral in downtown Honolulu. Father Reginald Yzendoorn, a Sacred Hearts priest, officiated, and witnesses were Alfred F. Ocampo and Anna Kepano.10 With Annie, Apana would have six more children. All told, he had ten children by the time of his death, while his fictional double sired a baker’s dozen.

  Born in 1895, Annie was about twenty-five years younger than Apana. An extant photo of Annie, taken in 1932 with Apana and three of their children (Annie, Alexander, and Rose), shows a beautiful young woman wearing a flowery dress and a broad-brimmed hat, looking confident, strong, full of pep. Since Apana never learned to drive, preferring instead the less mechanical, paniolo modes of transportation (a horse or a horse-drawn buggy), Annie was the family chauffeur. When in his wife’s car, Apana always sat in the right front passenger seat, his right hand holding onto the canvas top of the car, “as if expecting it to blow off at any minute.”11

  Chang Apana was a very strict man, both with himself and with the people around him. He kept a regular daily schedule and would cook and serve family meals at the same time every day. Anyone who was tardy would be out of luck. Friends and relatives trying to curry favor with him in police matters, such as traffic tickets or car licenses, were often disappointed. “He don’t like us violate the law,” recalled his nephew, Walter Chang. “He arrests his own brother even, you know. He’s a very strict man. That’s what, you know. You can’t beat the man, very strict.” When suitors of his daughter Cecelia came to call at the house, Apana sometimes would give them the third degree.12

  Apana especially disliked gambling, a social disease prevalent among the Chinese. According to Gilbert Martines, the Apana family moved in 1922 from downtown Honolulu to the outskirts for reasons related to gambling. Living in town might have made it easier for Apana to go to work, but it also gave Annie the convenience of socializing with her friends, who appeared addicted to mah-jongg. Like stud poker and fast-drawing cowboys, mah-jongg and Chinese ladies are inseparably linked. Even though Annie and her friends played for pennies, Apana came down hard on gambling of any kind, and he became furious with his wife. To get Annie “away from the undesirable influences” of her friends, he moved the family from downtown Morris Lane to Waialae Avenue in Kaimuki, which was considered to be “the country” at that time.13

  IN JUNE 2008, during a research trip to Honolulu, I went to visit Apana’s house at 3737 Waialae Avenue. As soon as the sun rose from behind craggy Diamond Head and transformed Waikiki Beach from its predawn monochrome to a colorful postcard, I left my hotel on Kalakaua Avenue and walked windward along Kapahulu Avenue. A plumeria-scented ocean breeze blew gently at my back. Large monkey-pods stood by the roadside under majestic canopies, their blossoms flaming like sunrise clouds.

  Densely populated today, Kaimuki is no longer the prim countryside to which the Apana family moved in the 1920s, but it has remained one of the most multiracial residential areas in Hawaii. My barber in Santa Barbara, a man named Dean who grew up in Honolulu, has repeatedly told me while swooshing his sharp scissors close to my ears, about the Chinese chow fun and Vietnamese pho he used to have at places in Kaimuki.

  That June morning, I was not looking for a homey dive for chow fun or pho. I had Apana’s last address memorized, but I had miscalculated the distance when perusing the map. What I had figured to be a mere thirty-minute walk lasted for more than an hour. I soon realized that Waialae Avenue, Kaimuki’s main thoroughfare, runs all the way from Waikiki toward the coral reefs on the east, and Apana’s house is at the farther end of the avenue, near the ocean.

  Typical of Honolulu weather, the temperature rose quickly as the sun edged higher in the sky. Walking block after block in the direction of the sun and the sea, I passed by modest-looking shops, fruit stands, markets, fast-food restaurants, bus stops, and telephone booths. The word Kaimuki in the Hawaiian language means “the ti oven.” It is believed that in the old days, the Menehune (Hawaii’s legendary little people) chose this area of rocky hills as a stronghold where they could safely make their famous ti ovens and not be molested by the Kamapuaa (pig gods) during the night. After the haoles arrived, they set up a semaphore signal station on Kaimuki Hill. In 1887, a rich German from Kauai, Daniel Paul Isenberg, bought a plot of land at Waialae and developed an extensive ranch for cattle, alfalfa, and racehorses. In 1898, during the real-estate boom following Hawaii’s annexation to the United States, Kaimuki became the first major subdivision in Hawaii. The 1900 Chinatown fire, described in chapter 6, sent some residents to this area to build their new homesteads and businesses. By the time the Apana family moved here in 1922, Kaimuki had become a quiet suburb with affordable, small bungalows scattered throughout the formerly barren, red-dirt land.14

  Close to the Apana house was the Sacred Hearts Academy, an impressive white building with a stone terrace leading up to an arched façade. Founded in 1909, this was where Apana’s three daughters had once gone to school. On days when Annie’s car was not available, a police paddy wagon would arrive at the house to pick up Apana for work and also drop off the girls at the academy, where their school-mates would wonder what the girls were doing in a police wagon.15

  A few blocks down the street, where one could begin to glimpse the turquoise ocean shining under the tropical sun, stood a humble, two-story wood-frame house at the corner of Waialae Avenue and the uphill Fourteenth Avenue. Built in a plain plantation style, the house was nestled among brick-red vines of bougainvillea and the green shade of a mai-say-lan tree about to bloom. A metal mailbox sitting atop a low brownstone wall read: “3737,” Apana’s last address before he died. Right next to it was another mailbox, somewhat older, with the number “3737A,” indicating an apartment attached to the rear of the house. There used to be a cottage behind the house, and when girls from the detention home sometimes came to help the Apanas with domestic chores, they would bunk in the cottage.16

  The mai-say-lan tree—if it was indeed the same tree that had once stood in the Apana’s garden—has an interesting history. Mai-say-lan is the Cantonese name for what is called mi lan in Mandarin Chinese. Also known as Aglaia odorata, mock lemon, or Chinese perfume plant, mi lan is a popular tree in southern China. When it blooms, the flowery bulbs look like little grains of yellow rice (hence the name mi, meaning “rice”) and emit a distinct sweet ar
oma. The chain-smoking Apana invented a unique way of enhancing his favorite Chesterfield brand. He would put the cigarettes in a can containing a mixture of tea leaves and mai-say-lan flowers. Over time, the mingled fragrance would seep into the Chesterfields and float in the air when he smoked the cigarettes.17

  Behind the mai-say-lan was a narrow front lanai, built of beams painted in coffee brown and partly shaded by two barren white trellises. As an illiterate man, Apana used to have his daughter Rose read to him on the lanai after dinner.18 (Incidentally, Charlie Chan’s eldest daughter, who is said to be an avid reader of movie magazines, also happens to be named Rose.) One can easily imagine a scene of domestic bliss: an aging father, a former rough-and-tumble paniolo and now a grizzled detective, who had endured multiple stab wounds and gunshots, listening to his teenage daughter reading stories to him in a language he did not completely understand. The parental pleasure obviously would not be found solely in the stories themselves, but more in the satisfaction of knowing that his daughter was growing and learning.

  The scene reminded me of my own daughter, Isabelle, and the times we had spent together. When Isabelle was still living with me in Santa Barbara, I used to get up every morning to make her breakfast—pan-fried mini-pancakes, scrambled eggs, and a glass of warm soy milk—and then drive her to school. The fifteen-minute drive along the foot of the Santa Ynez Mountains was my favorite. As we passed the orange groves and rolling hills, Isabelle would sit to my right, telling me about her dreams of the previous nights and things she had learned at school. And she would ask me millions of questions. Since she had learned to speak Chinese first, she was still struggling with English then. Every day, I was delighted to notice new English words she had picked up; every new word was an instant enlargement of her world, like tree rings or Emerson’s circles that grow wider and wider.

  Thinking of Isabelle, I envied Apana his domestic bliss, his precious time with his daughter.

  In between Rose’s stories, promptly at nine o’clock, Apana would go inside and bake goodies—cornbread, pudding, or jelly rolls. While waiting for the pastry to be done, the father and daughter would resume their ritual of reading or holding long chats in the midst of the sweet smell drifting out from the kitchen. According to Rose, her father would “tell her of his hopes that she would go to college some day.” (Charlie Chan’s daughter Rose, like many of her siblings, does go to college, in California.)19

  From where they were sitting, they could see the dark profiles of the ridges to the north of Kaimuki. Today those ridges are covered with houses. And to the east, where Waialae disappeared into the night, the ocean glistened with silvery fish-scale waves. The yellow lanterns of Japanese sampans twinkled like fireflies under the moon. In Apana’s day, motorcars were still too rare to disturb the underdeveloped, rustic Kaimuki at such late hours. Only the tick-tock hoof-beats and squeaking wheels of a buggy would now and then interrupt the calm of the night.

  The nights at Apana’s house, however, were not always so peaceful. Opium dealers would stop by and try to bribe the detective into revealing the locations and times of pending busts. There had been many graft scandals at the HPD in the early decades of the century, resulting in the arrest and firing of several of Apana’s associates and superiors. Chief of Detectives Arthur McDuffie resigned in 1923 after being implicated in a scandal. His successor, Captain John Kellett, was indicted for graft in 1927, while a few years later, Kam Kwai, Apana’s close associate, was accused but cleared of corruption. As the longest-serving officer at the HPD at the time of his retirement, Apana had maintained a remarkably pristine record. When those offering bribes showed up at his door, Apana would scream at them and send them away.20

  Walking around the house that morning, I thought about knocking on the door and trying to speak to whoever was living there. But I realized that eight o’clock on a Sunday morning might be too early to barge into a strange house and ask questions, especially questions about residents who had lived there about eight decades earlier. I had been circling the residence for more than twenty minutes, and no one seemed to be up and about; the only movement was a white satin curtain behind a slightly opened upstairs window that bowed waywardly as the morning breeze came and went.

  At one point, an old Asian woman emerged from a bungalow next door, dragging behind her a fallen bougainvillea twig. As she put the dry twig into a trash can by the street, I approached her. She was startled, and when I tried to speak to her in English, she shook her head and said something that sounded like Vietnamese. Then she quickly went back inside.

  Across the street was a bus stop, so I went there and waited, trying to decide what to do next. Suddenly, my cellphone buzzed; it was my daughter, Isabelle, calling from her home in Austin, Texas. “Daddy, aloha!” she yelled cheerfully. Before my trip, I had sent her a book from her favorite Juni B. Jones series, called Juni B. Jones, First Grader: Aloha-ha-ha! We started chatting about what she had read in the book, and I told her I would send her a postcard from Hawaii. We had made a pact that every time I went on a trip, I would send her a postcard from each city I visited. Within a year, she had received about half a dozen cards from all the places I had visited for lectures and readings: snowy Boston (her birthplace), the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, the Sooner Hotel in Norman, Oklahoma, the Statue of Liberty, the Golden Gate Bridge, and so on.

  While we were talking, a bus showed up on the far horizon, like a ship rising from the sea. By the time I said good-bye to Isabelle and to Apana’s old home, the bus had arrived and I hopped aboard. As the bus cruised along bustling Waialae Avenue, it was suddenly clear to me, perhaps because of having visited the detective’s final homestead, how much of a patriarch Apana had become—not only to the Honolulu police force and his family but now to me as well.

  18

  Pasadena

  EARL DERR BIGGERS’S HOUSE, PASADENA, CALIFORNIA (Photo by author)

  I selected Pasadena as the winter home of my family because I consider it a veritable paradise, it has no equal in the world, regarding healthful climate, scenery, vegetation, flowers, shrubberies, fruit and general comfort of living…. Pasadena is undoubtedly destined to become a most popular American winter residence.

  —Adolphus Busch, 1911

  PASADENA, 1924. Bounded by the bold-faced San Gabriel Mountains on the north and a broad valley to the east, the city was reveling in a postwar glamour and opulence that lived up to its name in the Chippewa dialect: “Crown of the Valley.”

  Spanish missionaries settled here in 1771, first building the San Gabriel Mission. In the early nineteenth century, a steady flow of hard-hit midwestern farmers and ranchers, driven out by harsh winters, arrived in the area to rebuild their lives in more temperate climes. With the coming of the railroad in the mid-1880s, Pasadena changed almost overnight from a loose cluster of ranches and haciendas into a busy resort town, replete with luxurious hotels, palatial mansions, and trolley lines.1 Attracted by Southern California’s climate and scenery, the nation’s rich and famous—including Henry Huntington, Walter Raymond, Thaddeus Lowe, and Adolphus Busch—built homes in Pasadena. Orange Grove Avenue, crowded with mansions designed by famous architects, would soon be known as “Millionaires’ Row.” Made up of what one resident called “the cream of culture, education and refinement of the Eastern cities,” Pasadena by 1920 had become the wealthiest city per capita in the United States.

  During the 1920s, Pasadena roared in a style that helped give the decade its glow. What is known today as the Rose Bowl Parade had expanded by 1922 from a few flower-bedecked carriages to a tide of motor-driven floats and marching bands. The first national radio broadcast, which described the spectacle, went out over KPSN from the Pasadena Star-News building in 1926.2 The majestic City Hall, designed by Bakewell & Brown of San Francisco, was completed in 1927, the same year the Huntington Library and Art Gallery opened its doors to the public. Living to the full, the city was a center for art deco, jazz, painting, literature, and science.

&
nbsp; In late 1924, Earl Biggers, whose chronic health problems forced him to abandon his Brahmin friends in the Northeast, decided to relocate and seek warmth and sunshine in Southern California. The move was made financially possible by the handsome advances he had received from both the Saturday Evening Post and Bobbs-Merrill for The House Without a Key. Along with his wife, Eleanor, and son Bobby, Biggers arrived in Pasadena in November. “We are settled in Pasadena and it looks good to us,” Biggers wrote in a letter dated November 21. “Bobby is in a good school, and I think we will look for a bungalow next year.”3

  The Biggers trio first stayed at the resplendent Maryland Hotel. Founded in 1903 and then rebuilt after a fire in 1914, the Maryland was the first luxury hotel in Pasadena to remain open throughout the year. Located on Colorado Boulevard between Euclid and Los Robles, it was well known for the separate bungalows that it leased to the most affluent, who wanted both hotel services and private accommodations.4 After spending Christmas and New Year’s at the Maryland, the Biggers family moved into a lovely little bungalow at 609 South Hudson Avenue, right off California Boulevard. Nestled among roses and with two orange trees on the front lawn, it was a comfortable enough house, but Biggers had developed the habit of working in an office rather than at home. Every morning at nine, he walked through Pasadena’s sunny streets to a rented office, a small room in a building next to the Pasadena Star-News. He kept office furnishings to a bare minimum: one desk, one chair, and one steel filing cabinet. No telephone, no rugs, and no place for a visitor to sit. Pounding away all day at his Remington typewriter in his shirtsleeves, he could hear the clatter of the Star-News’s press outside his windows. “I try to imagine,” Biggers told a friend, “that I am out to make the next edition.”5