Yunte Huang, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History (W. W. Norton, 2010)
On a late August afternoon in 2010, I had a brief rendezvous with Charlie Chan’s “evil twin.” Sitting in a quiet bar in the vicinity of Columbia University, I was catching up with a couple of old friends from the Bay Area, one of whom had just relocated to New York City to begin law school. Having just arrived on a four-hour bus ride from Baltimore, I was tired, hot, and for the moment more interested in the $2 Bud in my hand than in the happy hour conversation between my friend’s new chums from Columbia Law. So I carried on a slightly absent-minded dialogue with the other friend I knew, who had also relocated to the Bronx to attend medical school. Yet my mind snapped to attention, when, I heard my friend say “he was wearing a Fu Manchu.”
Since I was in a somewhat hazy state, I have no recollection of exactly whose facial features were being outlined (a “Fu Manchu” in my friend’s parlance being, I assume, something of a goatee that resembles the one worn by the infamous cultural icon), but I do recall pondering the offensive nature of the remark. Or, rather, whether or not anyone at the table should find the descriptor offensive. It was slightly troubling that my friend, born in Southern California to parents who had immigrated from Hong Kong, and who had lived and studied in California – a bastion of Asian American consciousness – for over twenty-some years, would drop “Fu Manchu” in a sentence in such a nonchalant manner. Then again, we were sitting down with a dozen new Asian American (most of whom would self-identify simply as “Asian”) enrollees at Columbia Law School and my friend, who had rowed crew at Berkeley, had just been carrying on a conversation with a former Harvard crew member. Certainly, no glass ceilings hovered over that table. So why should the spectre of a racially sensitive figure like Fu Manchu?
Fu Manchu, of course, plays an important part in the American story that Yunte Huang 黃運特 tells in his acclaimed “biography” of Charlie Chan, which is less a straight-forward narrative of the fictional detective or his real-life counterpart, Chang Apana 鄭平 (ca. 1871 – 1933) than an exploration of the tortuous history of “cultural miscegenation” – in this case, the interplay of cultural, social and political forces and personalities from Hawai’i to Harvard to Hollywood over the past century that led to Charlie Chan becoming first a celebrated and later a demonized Chinese American representation in fictional bestsellers and silver-screen blockbusters.
Yunte Huang and his Charlie Chan book have received much media and critical attention since the book’s summer release, so I need not add here one more piece of summary – and in any case, there is no topping the witty review written for The New Yorker by Jill Lepore, that other connoisseur of all things American. Let it suffice to say that the genius of Huang’s book lies not so much in his basic argument but in the vivid stories that he tells and the colourful style in which he has chosen to tell it.
I appreciated three aspects of Huang’s book the most. First, he is attentive to historical details and the changing cultural contexts of the American/Hawaiian/Asian American story (But I do have quibbles with his carelessness in treating the few instances of Chinese history that intersects his own – see below). Thus we learn of the year in which the first cattle appeared on the islands of Hawai’i and the number of executions performed (as well as the ethnicities of those condemned to the sentence) in Honolulu over a certain span of years. Seemingly “marginal” numbers and facts that have a bearing on Chang Apana’s life. We also learn that Charlie Chan’s anti-Japanese attitudes have less to do with any age-old antagonism between the Chinese and the Japanese (for surely there is no such thing), but with the truly anti-Japanese sentiments of the 1920s (the 1924 Johnson-Reed act had more to do with American fears of Japanese immigration than of Chinese immigration – which played out in an earlier era). All very nice and pleasing for the historian-as-reader.
The truly captivating details of Huang’s narrative comes through, however, in his command of the overlapping and mutually resonating cultural productions that seem to play a part in the becoming of Charlie Chan. For instance, Huang makes an intriguing comparison between Earl Biggers’ Chan and Agatha Christie’s Poirot (the fictional Belgian detective who was also fond of spouting proverbs). He also perceptively points out that Warner Oland, the most famous of a line of non-Asian Chans, had shuttled back and forth between Paramount and Fox to take on both the Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan roles – a schizophrenic division of labor between the bad and good Chinamen embodied by a single actor. We also learn that after the original Charlie Chan films were successfully shown in 1930s China, local imitations popped up, in which, ironically, “a real Chinaman imitates a Swede’s imitation of a Chinaman.” (pp. 258)
Then there is the personal dimension of Huang’s book. As Lepore and other reviewers have all picked up, Yunte Huang, who is a scholar known for “transpacific studies,” does not shy away from putting his own history and style on the page. We learn much about the author’s post-1989 transition to the United States (having been traumatized by the quelling of the student movement, he had vowed, at one point, never to return to China) and his first experiences as an immigrant. Surely the one-time owner/chef of a Chinese restaurant in Alabama knows a thing or two about the complexities of being Chinese American!
As for personal style, Huang seems to have developed specifically for this book a penchant for pop cultural references (just compare the prose of Charlie Chan to that of his Transpacific Displacement or Transpacific Imaginations). Perhaps he does so knowing that he is writing for Norton and thus a public audience who would be turned off by the academic jargon, but perhaps it is also the author’s way of paying tribute to his pop culture subject. Thus we learn that Chang Apana had once climbed walls in Honolulu like a “pre-Spider Man sleuth,” that a certain building in Canton, Ohio is painted like “Spongebob Squarepants,” and that “blaming him [Charlie Chan] for acting ‘inscrutable’ is like accusing Jerry Seinfeld of being too funny or whining too much.” Fair enough, since Charlie Chan himself is an icon of American popular culture. However, sometimes Huang’s witticisms do backfire, especially as he seems to pull “Chinese” metaphors out of nowhere: “As the American warships…sunk a Spanish fleet in the harbor of Manila, America’s Manifest Destiny in the Pacific became as clear as the broth of wonton soup.” (pp. 50) This is first time I’ve encountered foreign policy described in gastronomic terms and I’m not entirely convinced.
On the whole, it is impossible not to admire the honest, clever, and thoughtful manner in which Yunte Huang has researched and crafted this fascinating story. Nor can one disagree with his basic argument, which amounts to, in his words: “Like all racialized figures – including Uncle Tom, Aunt Jemina, John Chinaman, Ah Sin, Nigger Jim, and Fu Manchu – Chan [Charlie] bears the stamp of his time, a birthmark that encapsulates both the racial tensions and the creative energies of a multicultural America.” (pp. 147-148) In other words, if not appreciated, Charlie Chan, his real life counterpart, and his various creators must be understood within their proper historical contexts. Simply falling in line with the Asian American criticism (and identity politics) that have become something of a trend since the 1960s-70s is to fall into a most unfortunate trap – in which the strong distinctions between such a despicable character as Fu Manchu and much more endearing character as Charlie Chan become indistinguishable from one another. This, of course, is a problematic predicament, because “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 hiphop, from George Carlin to Jerry Seinfeld.” (pp. 282-283)
Very wise and sensible. For the most part.
My “beef” with Huang’s book lies not so much in his treatment of the American story, but in his throwaway lines on Chinese history and culture. These might be minor quibbles were it not for great media attention and critical acclaim given to this book. Listed as one of The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2010, reviewed by many prominent magazines and newspapers, and with such headlines in the Chinese media as “Wenzhounese Professor Huang Yunte’s Work Nominated for the Most Prestigious Literary Award in the United States,” (“温籍教授黄运特作品被提名美国高规格文学奖”), I fear for the inattentive reader picking up on a few of the troubling depictions of Chinese history and culture found in the early pages of the book. I have in mind three especially egregious instances:
1. While telling us about Chang Apana’s stint with the Hawaiian Humane Society, Huang writes:
“As a Chinese, he came from a culture that even today believes in the reincarnation of souls. Under the influence of Buddhism, many Chinese believe that a soul after the death of a person will inhabit another body, but there is – and this is the tricky part – no guarantee that the latter will be a human body. If you have done something evil in this life, then in the next life your soul will inhabit the body of a dog, pig, horse, or any animal that belongs to a lower rung on the ladder of the species. So, to a Chinese eye, the unenviable life of a working mule is punishment for the bad deeds committed in the last life by the soul currently occupying the body of the mule.” (pp. 46)
When describing the gambling problem in Honolulu’s Chinatown at the turn of the 20th-century, Huang shifts into the present:
“It is not an exaggeration to say that even today we Chinese will place a bet on anything. From lottery tickets to card games, anything that involves probability and luck ties into the deep-seated connection with the Chinese psyche and numeracy.” (pp. 63)
With these asides, Yunte Huang has turned beliefs and practices shared by a significant group of Chinese residents in Honolulu’s Chinatown of the 1900s and by, certainly, many people in both rural and urban China that Huang has encountered in his own life into timeless and universal aspects of Chinese culture. For if reincarnation is seen through “the Chinese eye,” and gambling/an obsession with numbers is attached to “the Chinese psyche,” then surely, for the less knowing reader, these must be applicable to all Chinese across time and space! This is, of course, not so. And Yunte Huang could have chosen more appropriate phrasing or, better yet, left out these unnecessary asides altogether.
2. In describing Honululu’s Chinatown at the turn of the twentieth-century, Huang is right in pointing out that not only was it a locus of gambling and crime, but also a gathering place for revolutionaries. He notes that Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), a contemporary of Chang Apana’s, had been active in Hawai’i during that period, and had set up the Revive China Society (興中會) there in 1894. However, Huang then succumbs into the same type of hyperbole that Sun himself was prone to use:
“If, as Sun said, ‘Hua Qiao [overseas Chinese] are the mother of revolution,’ Honolulu’s Chinatown certainly deserves to be called the cradle of modern China.” (pp. 59)
In one paragraph, Huang has resolved the issue of China’s first Republican revolution and credited no other participants or historical forces than those present in Hawai’i in the 1890s. Interestingly enough, it is Marie-Claire Bergère’s revisionist biography of Sun Yat-sen that Huang consulted for this section. Did he miss Bergère’s argument that Sun was much less an original revolutionary thinker than an opportunistic communicator who was able to make use of political alliances and social networks from not only Honolulu, but Hong Kong, Japan, London, and Indochina in his numerous anti-Qing activities? And is Yunte Huang truly ignorant of the large historiography on the 1911 revolution and subsequent social and political developments within China? Honolulu might be the cradle of Charlie Chan/Chang Apana and one of Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary alliances, but it most definitely cannot be the cradle of modern China!
3. Finally, in describing the impoverished and isolated rural Guangdong (Canton) village in which Chang had spent several years of his childhood, Huang cannot but resist throwing in an autobiographical aside:
“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…Such were the simple, rustic delights of childhood in rural China, both for Ah Pung and for me.” (pp. 25)
Again, the reader comes away with an image of a timeless China, even if Huang tries to pinpoint a specific geographic location, he has painted a picture of a southern Guangdong being just as underdeveloped in the 1970s-80s as it were in the 1870s. Since the playthings were the same for “Ah Pung and me,” no social or cultural changes need have occurred in the hundred years or so that separated the childhood of the author and his subject. This timelessness has been picked up by Jill Lepore in her review. But does she, and other readers, realize that some 270 pages later, Yunte Huang fully contradicts himself? While searching for Chang Apana’s grave, he tells his local guide that
“…at the age of eleven, I had secretly learned English by adjusting the dial of my grandfather’s battered transistor radio just so, and then memorizing the exotic language of the Voice of America.” (pp. 292)
Surely in his childhood, “Ah Pung” did not have access to such “simple, rustic delights” as radios and “Voice of America”!
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“So, what is a Chinaman?” Huang’s answer to his own rhetorical question is that “Actually we cannot ask such a timeless question for the image of the Chinaman changes over time.” (p. 120)
It is unfortunate that such a carefully researched and historically attentive book (when it comes to its main subjects – Chang, Chan, Biggers, Oland, Hawai’i, America) cannot give China the same attention to changes over time.
One hopes, with some degree of optimism, that such inaccurate and irresponsible images of Chinese history and culture that I’ve pointed out above do not unconsciously sneak into the attentive reader’s mind. As Charlie Chan would remind all of us, “Biggest mistakes in history made by people who didn’t think.”
