Apana Chang - Charlie Chan: the untold story of the honorable detective and his rendezvous with American history

M AP OF THE H AWAIIAN I SLANDS (Courtesy of Hawaiian State Archives)

I N THE SPRING of 2002, I was scheduled to give a talk on my new book, Transpacific Displacement , followed by that rite of passage most authors come both to anticipate and to dread, the book signing. Without my knowledge, an amiable secretary in the English Department at Harvard, where I was then teaching, made a flyer for the event at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. Her concoction washow shall we say itan intriguing collage. My name and the book title were highlighted in bold, with a map of the Pacific Rim fading out in the background. A silhouette of the Swedish actor Warner Oland, playing Charlie Chan, stood atop the sprawling, vast Asian continent and peered menacingly in the direction of North America. The secretary told me that she, a Caucasian woman in her late fifties, had grown up watching Charlie Chan movies. My inveterate wisecrackingwhich I was not shy to dispense around the departmenthad reminded her of her favorite, aphorism-spouting Chinese detective. Given my affection for her and my own sense of civility, I did not dare question her creative enterprise, informing her that this image of a bellicose Chan would be offensive to most Asian Americans. I did not initiate that conversation because I knew it would take a books worth of pages to explain the tortured legacy of Charlie Chan in America, even to myself. Instead, I thanked her in my polite Chinese manner for her sprightly design. And now I have written this book about Charlie Chan, in part to carry on my imaginary dialogue with this well-meaning lady.

So, who is Charlie Chan?

To most Caucasian Americans, he is a funny, beloved, albeit somewhat inscrutablethat last adjective already a bit loadedcharacter who talks wisely and acts even more wisely. But to many Asian Americans, he remains a pernicious example of a racist stereotype, a Yellow Uncle Tom, if you will; the type of Chinaman, passive and unsavory, who conveys himself in broken English. In this book, however, I would like to propose a more complicated view. As a ubiquitous cultural icon, whose influence on the twentieth century remains virtually unexamined, Charlie Chan does not yield easily to ideological reduction. Truth, to quote our honorable detective, like footballreceive many kicks before reaching goal.

To write about Charlie Chan is to write about the undulations of the American cultural experience. Like a blackface minstrel, Charlie Chan carries both the stigma of racial parody and the stimulus of creative imitation. It is no coincidence that Stepin Fetchit, the most celebrated black comic actor in the 1930s, and one of the most reviled since the civil rights movement, had also starred in Charlie Chan movies. Fetchit played a lazy, inarticulate, and easily frightened Negro. And so did Mantan Moreland, another popular black comedian, who brought to the Chan movies his extraordinary vaudeville talent. Charlie Chans racial ventriloquism in the hands of such white actors as Warner Oland, Sidney Toler, and Roland Winters finds strong historical parallels with Aunt Jemima, Uncle Tom, and Nigger Jim. Before jumping to any ideologically reductive conclusion, we should pause and think: What would American culture be without minstrelsy, jazz, haiku, Zen, karate, the blues, or animewithout, in other words, the incessant transfusion (and co-opting) of diverse cultural traditions and creative energies?