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

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    Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History
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Shortlisted for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography and the 2011 Edgar Award for Best Critical/Biographical Book: An ingenious and absorbing book. . . . It will permanently change the way we tell this troubled yet gripping story.Jonathan Spence Hailed as irrepressibly spirited and entertaining (Pico Iyer, Time) and a fascinating cultural survey (Paul Devlin, Daily Beast), this provocative first biography of Charlie Chan presents American history in a way that it has never been told before. Yunte Huang ingeniously traces Charlie Chan from his real beginnings as a bullwhip-wielding detective in territorial Hawaii to his reinvention as a literary sleuth and Hollywood film icon. Huang finally resurrects the honorable detective from the graveyard of detested postmodern symbols and reclaims him as the embodiment of Americas rich cultural diversity. The result is one of the most critically acclaimed books of the year and a deeply personal . . . voyage into racial stereotyping and the humanizing force of story telling (Donna Seaman, Los Angeles Times). 35 black-and-white illustrations

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ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR

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

Charlie Chan is a unique and fascinating book. Not only is it superbly researched, but it is written with both verve and poignance, interweaving the substantial biographies of both Chang Apana (the real Honolulu detective) and E. D. Biggers together with touches of personal memoir that are revelatory and liberating. The book defines a kind of international postmodernityurbane, compassionate, questing, and dedicated to the unmasking of the story of genuine travail and accomplishment behind the racist travesty that has been perpetuated in literature and film.

Garrett Hongo, author of Volcano: A Memoir of Hawaii

Charlie Chan, much like the classic geisha dolls on bookcase shelves, has survived for generations as little more than a paper-thin stereotype. Now, in this impressive and highly original work, Yunte Huang has brought this fictional character out of the dusty shadows into three-dimensional life, offering us not only a picture of a little-known swath of American history but the surprising story of this Chinese detectives American creator, and the real-life figure who inspired him.

Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha

Witty and erudite, Charlie Chan intrigues and surprises as it unravels the three guises of this American originala real-life, Hawaiian-born Chinese detective; a literary creation; and a movie character. Racist stereotypes, we come to see in this exemplary work, can convey monstrous fictions as well as complex, multifaceted truths.

Gary Y. Okihiro, author of Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones

Yunte Huang restores our pleasure in Charlie Chan, and deepens it. Reading Huang, American fans of Chan novels and movies will feel relief from the automatic guilt we have learned to identify with the pleasure of enjoying a racially marked character. Huang knows his hybrid hero as well as he knows his own hybrid self, linked by a love of ironies. Chans misplaced expressions and the pleasantly unsettling effects of getting English delightfully, and intentionally, wrong sometimes show up standard usage as unremarkable, not to say boring. Chans superior intelligence, like Huangs, plays on the expectations of native responses in order to outdo them. So enjoy the chuckles; in Huangs hands we recognize ourselves to be the butt of the Chinamans humor and the beneficiaries of his wisdom.

Doris Sommer, author of Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education

CHARLIE CHAN
ALSO BY YUNTE HUANG

Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics (2008)

CRIBS (2005)

Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature (2002)

Shi: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry (1997)


CHARLIE CHAN THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE HONORABLE DETECTIVE AND HIS RENDEZVOUS - photo 1

CHARLIE CHAN

THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE HONORABLE DETECTIVE AND HIS RENDEZVOUS WITH AMERICAN HISTORY

Yunte Huang

Picture 2
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
NEW YORK LONDON

Frontispiece: Warner Oland in Charlie Chan on Broadway , 1937
(Courtesy of Everett Collection)

Copyright 2010 by Yunte Huang

All rights reserved

Selections from Charlie Chan , 19311942, courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox. All rights reserved. Selections from correspondence between Earl Derr Biggers and David Laurance Chambers reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from Bobbs-Merrill, 19221936. All rights reserved.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Huang, Yunte.
Charlie Chan: the untold story of the honorable detective and his rendezvous with American history / Yunte Huang.1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-0-393-07916-6
1. Apana, Chang, 1871-1933. 2. Chan, Charlie (Fictitious character) 3. DetectivesHawaiiBiography. I. Title.
HV7571.H3H83 2010
363.25092dc22
[B]

2010016653

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

FOR ISABELLE AND IRA, AS ALWAYS;

AND FOR GLENN MOTT, A FRIEND COMING FROM AFAR,
AS CONFUCIUS SAYS

Contents
List of Illustrations

M AP OF THE H AWAIIAN I SLANDS Courtesy of Hawaiian State Archives - photo 3

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

Introduction

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?

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