Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History
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Having condemned his movie father for his troubling genealogy, Chin goes on, in another essay, to compare Chan with the other China man also born out of a white cradle, Fu Manchu. Chin claims that the two Chinese icons are “visions of the same mythic being, brewed up in the subconscious regions of the white Christian’s racial wet dream.” He is particularly critical of the way Asian masculinity is portrayed by Fu and Chan:
Devil and angel, the Chinese is a sexual joke glorifying white power. Dr. Fu, a man wearing a long dress, batting his eyelashes, surrounded by muscular black servants in loin-cloths, and with his bad habit of caressingly touching white men on the leg, wrist, and face with his long fingernails, is not so much a threat as he is a frivolous offense to white manhood. Chan’s gestures are the same, except he doesn’t touch and, instead of being graceful like Fu in flowing robes, he is awkward in a baggy suit and clumsy.5
In Chin’s analysis, what is most insidious about Chan is not so much his annoying, asexualized appearance as his being a symbol of acculturation, which Chin regards as a synonym for Christian conversion of the Chinese. Drawing upon the history of white, proselytizing missionary work in Chinatowns (not to mention Hawaii itself) in previous decades, Chin states that Christian conversion is cultural extinction, a form of behavior modification that foments an identity crisis. He describes it elegantly as a “self-destructive Ping-Pong game,” which prompts a person to question his self-worth as a Chinese and yearn for the Christian, American way of life. Charlie Chan’s cardinal sin, says Chin, is that he suffers from this same identity crisis and decides to pursue the path of the convert.
According to Chin, Chan’s encounter with Ah Sing in the novel Keeper of the Keys is a sure sign that Chan is a straw man in the racial parable of conversion. Ah Sing, a variation of Bret Harte’s “heathen Chinee” Ah Sin, as we saw earlier, represents a pagan Chinese who stubbornly stays pagan and rejects Americanization or Christian acculturation. As Chan admits in Biggers’s novel, “[Ah Sing] is of my own origin, my own race, as you know. But when I look into his eyes I discover that a gulf like the heaving Pacific lies between us. Why? Because he, though among Caucasians many more years than I, still remains Chinese. As Chinese to-day as in the first moon of his existence. While I—I bear the brand—the label—Americanized.” Calling Chan’s confession “a schizoid internal dialogue,” Chin goes on to tear apart the character: “The Charlie Chan movies were parables of racial order. In the cockeyed logic of that order, the greatest insult to Chinese America in these films, the casting of a white man in the role of Charlie Chan, was and still is no insult at all but part of the charm of the films and visual proof of our acceptance and assimilation by whites. They just eat us up.”6
In Chin’s razor-sharp analysis lies the core of Asian American criticism of the Charlie Chan character, a criticism that carries the weight of the Asian experience in contemporary America. Indeed, it would be hard to accept Chan as a likable character if you grew up listening to neighborhood kids chanting, “Ching Chong Chinaman sitting on a fence…” and having them taunt you with a Chanish “Confucius say….” And it is certainly true that there are stereotypical aspects of Charlie Chan that smack of racial parody and mockery. After all, he is a product of his time, born in the nativist era of the 1920s and rising to stardom before the civil rights movement attempted to raise America’s consciousness. But if every time we smelled the odor of racism in arts and literature we went out and rallied in the street, then we probably would have killed off everything from jazz to hip-hop, from George Carlin to Jerry Seinfeld. Out of the crucible we call art, there is rarely if ever what might be described as good, clean fun. Indeed, comedy can sting even more so. The yellowface of Charlie Chan, which Chin considers the most racist aspect of the character, actually finds strong historical parallels with Aunt Jemima, Uncle Tom, and Nigger Jim. Like these blackface figures, Charlie Chan epitomizes the creative genius of American culture and exemplifies what critic Stanley Crouch has called “the catalyst of the American experience”—cultural miscegenation.
Unfortunately, Charlie Chan has remained a thorn in the side of many Asian Americans today. Judging by their response whenever the iconic Chinaman pops up, it seems likely that some of the younger anti-Chan clan have not had the opportunity to take another look at the films for themselves—they have inherited their critical views from the older generation. In 2003, when the Fox Movie Channel announced that it was undertaking a Charlie Chan festival of restored prints (of the series produced from 1931 to 1942), the decision touched off a storm of protest. Three prominent organizations—NAPALC (National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium), NAATA (National Asian American Telecommunications Association), and OCA (Organization of Chinese Americans)—coordinated a successful letter-writing campaign to have the films banned from the cable channel. Fox caved in to pressure and issued a statement explaining the cancellation of the series: “Fox Movie Channel has been made aware that the Charlie Chan films may contain situations and depictions that are sensitive to some viewers. Fox Movie Channel realizes that these historic films were produced at a time when racial sensitivities were not as they are today. As a result of the public response to the airing of these films, Fox Movie Channel will remove them from the schedule.”7
In its campaign letters, NAATA called Chan “one of the most offensive Asian caricatures of America’s cinematic past.” OCA’s verdict on Chan was equally devastating:
Charlie Chan is a painful reminder of Hollywood’s racist refusal to hire minorities to play roles that were designed for them and a further reminder of the miscegenation laws that prevented interracial interaction even on screen. Asian Pacific Americans and many other minorities were not able to portray themselves on screen. Instead, they were inaccurately depicted by Caucasian actors, who wore face paint to act out stereotypical images of Asians as slanted eye, buck toothed, subservient, and non-English speaking.
Opposing such dismissive views are Charlie Chan fans, whose sheer number obviously convinced Fox to reconsider its earlier cancellation decision. Die-hard fans were outraged by the ban. Jerry Della Femina, the advertising guru, wrote, “Charlie always got his man. But then one day, Charlie Chan was murdered in cold blood. Killed by a whole generation that decided Charlie Chan movies were not politically correct.”8 Fox eventually decided not to do a whole festival but to broadcast three select films, followed by panel discussions led by Asian American representatives. Indeed, the debate continues.
In her op-ed piece published in the New York Times a few years before the Fox firestorm broke out, Long Island–born Chinese American writer Gish Jen also cited Charlie Chan as an example of what she called the “Asian Illusion” in America. She criticized the mainstream media for superimposing fanciful ideas onto real human beings and transforming everyday Asians into mysterious Orientals. “The aphorism-spouting Charlie Chan (played by Warner Oland, a white actor in yellowface) is godlike in his intelligence, the original Asian whiz kid,” writes Jen. “You would not be surprised to hear he had won a Westinghouse prize in his youth. More message than human being, he recalls the ever-smiling black mammy that proliferated during Reconstruction: Don’t worry, he seems to say, no one’s going to go making any trouble.”9 Charlie Chan, in other words, is a “Yellow Uncle Tom” with brains. Jen’s article provoked responses from Chan devotees whose letters continued to appear in the paper in subsequent months. “As a Caucasian who has seen just about every Charlie Chan movie there is,” wrote one reader, “I must respond to the article by Gish Jen about stereotypes that perpetuate Charlie Chan as the Stepin Fetchit of Orientals…. Chan belongs in film history with Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, not the land of coolies and Uncle Toms.” Another letter pointed out that those films reflected “a far more pernicious bias against blacks,” and that, in contrast, “at least Charlie Chan was a highly respected, wise and capable detective, dominating each of the films.” Another Chan enthusiast concluded emphatically, “Long live Charlie Chan—detective, cr
ime-fighter and man.”
That last statement speaks to the true longevity of Charlie Chan in American culture. Case in point: Just when Asian Americans began their criticism of Charlie Chan during the civil rights movement, there was a sudden outpouring of Charlie Chan–themed products on the mass market. First there was a handsome 1968 paperback, Quotations from Charlie Chan, edited by Harvey Chertok and Martha Torge, a collection of Chan’s bon mots compiled in the manner of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book of Sayings, which was making the rounds among left-leaning peaceniks at the time. Another book of Chan’s aphorisms soon followed. Entitled The Wit and Wisdom of Charlie Chan, it ironically quoted Frank Chin’s stinging critique in its introduction: “In the tradition of two thousand films and stage productions…no Chinaman’s ever played the role of Charlie Chan.”10 In November 1973, the Charlie Chan Mystery Magazine was born, with each of its four issues featuring a new Chan novelette by Robert Hart Davis. A year later, noted mystery writer Dennis Lynds came out with The Return of Charlie Chan, published by Bantam Books along with the paperback reprints of six Chan novels. And then there was the 1981 cinematic spoof, Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen, starring Peter Ustinov as an almost outlandishly stylized Charlie Chan. That same year, the film’s novelization, authored by Michael Avallone, was published by Pinnacle Books.
The most phenomenally successful media product to resurrect Charlie Chan’s image was the Saturday-morning cartoon series from William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, whose production studio dominated American television animation during the second half of the twentieth century. The Hanna-Barbera team had produced such classics as The Flintstones, Scooby-Doo, and The Jetsons. From 1972 to 1973, they created a sixteen-episode animation series, The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan, aired by CBS on Saturday mornings. While the baby boomers had grown up on Charlie Chan’s “Confucius say,” Americans of this new generation, the Xers, had their breakfast milk and cereal accompanied by the adventurous Chan Clan, Chu Chu the dog, and Stanley Chan’s “Wham bam, we’re in a jam!” At an impressionable age, some of these tykes might even have learned to rhyme from the series: Chan, clan, van, plan; wham, bam, jam. Like the acoustic memory created by the radio dramas of their grandparents’ generation, the voice of Keye Luke as Mr. Chan or the young Jodie Foster as Anne left a residual, if not indelible, mark on the minds of not a few Xers. As much as many well-meaning Asian Americans try to banish the character, Charlie Chan the Chinaman is here to stay. He is an American folk hero in the same tradition of Paul Bunyan (that scourge of environmentalism), or more complicated, nuanced characters such as Nigger Jim and Huck Finn, without whom American literature would be penurious.
Sometimes late at night, I turn on the TV and a Chinaman falls out. He is hilarious. They call him “Mr. Chan.” Having grown up in China, where I have met thousands of Chans, I find him to be the strangest and most impressive Chan ever. He has amazing linguistic acrobatic skills on a par with anyone from Tin Pan Alley, dishing out colorful aphorisms at ease in his singsong pidgin:
Tongue often hang man quicker than rope.
Mind, like parachute, only function when open.
Man who flirt with dynamite sometime fly with angels.
Action speak louder than French.
He reminds me of Monkey King. In Chinese folk myth, Monkey King is an invincible trickster who hides his weapon in his ear. When necessary, he pulls out his weapon, a hair, and blows a puff of air. The hair instantly turns into a golden pole! Charlie Chan is that Monkey King, concealing his aphoristic barbs inside his tummy. But he is also the African American Signifying Monkey, or the Native American Coyote. He is a master of signifying, woofing, battling, or doing the dozens. His sayings may not be as nasty as the likes of “Yo mama is so stupid that she sold her car for gas money,” but at times his sharp-tongued “Confucius say” imparts as much insult as wisdom.
When some people complain about Charlie Chan’s deferential docility, especially in the presence of white men, they have simply underestimated the real strength of his character. Chan is a peculiar American brand of trickster prevalent in ethnic literature and incarnated by Mark Twain’s Huck Finn and Herman Melville’s Confidence Man (curiously named China Aster). It is a brand that also includes Jim Crow, the Bunker brothers, Al Jolson’s Jazz Singer, and Stepin Fetchit and his numerous step-chillun. All these characters are indeed rooted in the toxic soil of racism, but racism has made their tongues only sharper, their art more lethally potent. Whether it’s a jazzy tune coming from the lips of a blackface Jew or a yellow lie told by a ventriloquist Swede, the resilient artistic flower has blossomed in spite of as well as because of racism. This undeniable fact, insulting and sobering, has uniquely defined America.
As a man from China, I want to ask, “Will the real Charlie Chan please stand up?” So far, I have only seen his ghost most vividly appear in Wayne Wang’s offbeat sleeper hit, Chan Is Missing (1982). In this low-budget movie, an elderly Chinese American named Jo and his nephew Steve engage in a fruitless search through the streets of Chinatown for a Mr. Chan Hung. Chan has taken $2,000 from Jo and Steve to finalize a taxi-license deal, but he mysteriously disappears. A spoof on the Charlie Chan genre, the film shows a Chinatown mystery that has no solution. Unlike Charlie Chan and his sidekick, Jo and Steve sink deeper and deeper into the whereabouts of Chan and the puzzle of his real identity.
“This mystery is appropriately Chinese,” Jo finally realizes. “What’s not there seems to have just as much meaning as what is there. The murder article is not there. The photograph’s not there. The other woman’s not there. Chan Hung’s not there. Nothing is what it seems to be. I guess I’m not Chinese enough. I can’t accept a mystery without a solution.”11 Jo’s admission to not being Chinese enough sounds to me like an echo of Charlie Chan’s confession to his Americanization: “I bear the brand—the label—Americanized.” Yet, unlike Frank Chin’s unalloyed condemnation of acculturation, Wang’s film offers a parable on the true identity of “Mr. Chan,” or what it means to be a Chinese in America. As Presco, a young Filipino staff worker at Manilatown Senior Citizens Center, deadpans, “You guys are looking for Mr. Chan—why don’t you look in the puddle?”12
In a puddle, after a storm, the mud settles to the bottom. And when you look into the puddle, you will see on the surface not just reflections of the blue sky and white clouds but also your own face. In our search for the truth about Charlie Chan, then, we don’t need to look in faraway places such as China, where so many of the American brands we buy are manufactured. Instead, we need to look in that reflecting pool called America, where, as long as our eyes remain open, the images of ourselves will never cease.
As a man from China, a Chinese man come to America, I say: Chan is dead! Long live Charlie Chan!
Epilogue
CHANG APANA’S GRAVE AT THE CHINESE CEMETERY, MANOA, HAWAII (Photo by Susan M. Schultz)
Story are now completely extracted like aching tooth.
—Charlie Chan
SURPRISINGLY, MY FIRST trip to Hawaii only came in January 2007. I had been invited by the English Department at the University of Hawaii–Manoa to attend a conference on translation, but my secret personal mission was to find the grave of Chang Apana, the real Charlie Chan.
Earlier that day, after delivering a presentation called “Chinese Whispers,” I went to the Honolulu Police Department Museum to hear, so to speak, the whispers from the past, Chinese or otherwise. My conference host, Susan Schultz, drove me through downtown Honolulu in the midst of what is known locally as “liquid sunshine”—a brisk shower of silky threads that shine in the sun. The police headquarters is a four-story concrete stronghold, looking like a big chunk of New York’s United Nations Secretariat building lopped off, shipped around the globe, and placed in the middle of the Pacific. It is located at Beretania Street—Beretania being a Hawaiian rendering of the word Britain and named after British Consul Richard Charlton, who owned a plot of land in the area in the 1820s.
The man who greeted us, when we eventually were led through the maze of hallways to the one-room museum, was a friendly, middle-aged African American police officer. He introduced himself as Eddie Croom, curator of the museum. From the film world of the 1930s when black sidekicks were invariably portrayed as inarticulate, superstitious, and easily frightened Negroes to the present moment when a distinguished black curator stood there to provide me with a glimpse of the history of my own race, America has progressed significantly, though even at the time of Chang Apana and Charlie Chan, Honolulu had already acquired the epithet of “the melting pot of the Pacific.” It was always a city that brought all races together at the crossroads of the globe. Samuel King, Hawaii’s legendary governor, once said, “The secret of Hawaii’s racial harmony is that we’re all in the minority.” Even though King’s remark sounds a bit too rosy, it does indeed contain a seed of truth that could not be denied as I searched for the story of Charlie Chan, real and fictional.
The room we entered looked like a brightly lit curio shop. In the middle were large, glass-fronted wall-to-wall cabinets with long display cases. Photographs, uniforms, helmets, badges, weapons, certificates, motorcycles, and other kinds of memorabilia seemed to choke the room. From images of the pre-Cook kapu system to posters for Hawaii Five-O, from the rifle that once had belonged to the infamous Koolau the Leper to the mug shots and arrest file of Grace Fortescue, this museum is a Hawaiian encyclopedia of crime and punishment brought to life.