Charlie Chan

Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History by Yunte Huang
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Yunte Huang was teaching in the English department at Harvard University when his new book was released and he was scheduled to do a book signing at the Harvard book store. With a title like Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature (yawn), it was a challenge to get a crowd to attend so the English department secretary made up a poster for the event and in an attempt to make it more appealing she included a photo of Charlie Chan.

Now some Chinese-Americans are a bit sensitive about Charlie Chan, seeing him as an Asian Uncle Tom figure, a stereotypical racist image of a Chinaman. So the author was a little disturbed about the poster.

Being polite (the Chinese, he tells us, are very polite, kind of like Charlie Chan), he thanked the woman for the poster and asked her why she had included Charlie Chan. “Oh,” she replied, “I grew up watching Charlie Chan movies. He was so smart and wise and they called him in to solve the most difficult murders and he was always able to figure them out and he was witty and polite . . . He was my hero!” This set Yunte Huang to thinking and eventually to investigating the Charlie Chan books and movies and this book is the result. The story is fascinating.

There really was a Charlie Chan, called Chan Apana, a detective with the Honolulu Police Department in the late 19th and early 20th century. Born in China, near Canton, he was illiterate and spoke broken English. He spent a decade in his youth as a cowboy (the second largest cattle ranch in the US is in Hawaii.) As a police officer he was delegated to keep Honolulu’s Chinatown under some semblance of control (closing gambling dens, brothels, opium dens, etc.) Although he was only 5 ft tall and weighed 130 pounds at his heaviest, he carried only a bull whip and he routinely rounded up 40 bad guys single-handedly.

Enter Earl Derr Biggers (from a town very near Canton, Ohio, interestingly), needed to make some money when he graduated from Harvard. He decided to write a book and the first Charlie Chan mystery, The House Without a Key, was the very popular result. Published in 1925 it was set in Hawaii and the exotic tropical setting, combined with the clever and witty Chinese detective as a central character, made it a best-seller. Biggers went on to write five more Charlie Chan books before his early death in 1933.

Yunte Huang’s book takes off from the mystery, its author, and the man who was its inspiration to talk about the history of Hawaii and the story of Chinese in America, the figure of Charlie Chan in the movies and the various actors who played him, the two most famous being Scandinavians, Werner Oland and Sidney Toler. He describes the years when Chinese laborers were encouraged to come to the US to do the dangerous work on the trans-continental railroad, and the years when they were forbidden to immigrate to this country or to become citizens. Things were always a little better for various racial groups in Hawaii but when the islands became a US territory in 1898, the Chinese Exclusion Act applied there. (Hawaii became our 50th state in 1959.)

2011 No 92 Coming soon: Son, by Jack Olsen

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