Charlie Chan

June 28, 2010
The fictional Chinese-American detective and his real-life model anchor this enjoyable if unfocused meditation on the cultural construction of race. English prof Huang (Transpacific Imaginations) recounts the life of Chang Apana, a Chinese immigrant police detective in Honolulu who inspired mystery writer Earl Derr Biggers to create the Confucian sleuth Chan, who appeared in six novels and more than 40 movies (usually played by white actors). Apana is a colorful figure, complete with cowboy hat and bullwhip, but both he and his connection to the Chan character, whom he little resembled, are marginal to the story Huang wants to tell about racial attitudes and tensions in early 20th-century America. (Apana is a passive observer, for example, in the account of an explosive Hawaiian interracial rape case.) More convincing is Huang's nuanced analysis of Chan and his mincing gait, ingratiating smile, pidgin English, and fortune cookie aphorisms. Disputing writers who consider him a demeaning stereotype, Huang discerns behind Chan's exoticism a positive and formidable figure who embodies the "creative genius" of American "cultural miscegenation." Beyond the extraneous biography and historicizing, Huang presents an absorbing study of art taking on a life of its own. Photos.

July 1, 2010
Huang (English, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; "Transpacific Imaginations" here gives us a fascinating examination of Charlie Chan that is many books in one. He begins with a study of Chang Apana (1871–1933), the real detective on whom Charlie Chan was based. Apana, who was born in Hawaii and lived in China from age three to ten, policed Honolulu's Chinatown after previous posts as a cowboy and as an officer for the Humane Society. Huang then turns to Earl Derr Biggers, a Harvard graduate and writer who created the fictitious Chinese American detective Chan. Biggers himself proves to be equally intriguing. Huang also examines the cultural phenomenon of Charlie Chan in films and other media, exploring the detective's place in America's cultural memory. Huang believes there are many layers to the meaning of Biggers's creation: Chan cannot be easily dismissed simply as a product of American racism. Huang's personal reflections are welcome interludes in this most compelling work. VERDICTThis book has broad appeal to readers interested in film history, ethnic and cultural studies, literary biography, and pop culture. Recommended for public and academic libraries.—Stacy Russo, Chapman Univ. Libs., Orange, CA

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 1, 2010
The Charlie Chan we know from the movies (played by Swedish actor Warner Oland) had two strands to his DNA: E. D. Biggers immensely popular Charlie Chan novels and the actual man on whom Biggers based his tales. The model for Biggers canny Honolulu detective was Chang Apana, who rose from Hawaiian paniolo (cowboy) in the 1890s to Humane Society officer to Honolulu cop and detective in the early twentieth century. Changs beat concentrated on the notorious gambling dens, scenes and seeds of drugs and violence in the labyrinth of Honolulus Chinatown. Huang, who was born in China and is a professor of English at the University of California, brings a wealth of perspective on the treatment of Chinese, both historically and in fiction, to this work. Readers will learn a great deal about how the Chinese fared as plantation workers in Hawaii, about Hawaiian history, about Chang, about Biggers, and about the meaning of the Chan oeuvre, both books and movies. Huang also works in his own story of immigrating to the U.S., which is both stirring and illuminating. This is a beautifully written analysis of racism and an appreciation of Charlie Chan and Chang Apana, made credible by Huangs background. As Huang says, As a man from China, a Chinese man come to America, I say: Chan is dead! Long live Charlie Chan!(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)

Starred review from June 1, 2010

China-born poet and critic Huang (English/Univ. of California, Santa Barbara/Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics, 2008, etc.) recounts the making of an American folk hero.

Debuting as a minor character in novelist Earl Derr Biggers' The House Without a Key (1925), Charlie Chan attained enormous popularity through six novels and nearly 50 films, as well as radio dramas and a comic strip, creating what the author calls a "tortured legacy in American culture, a legacy that at once endears and offends millions." By the late '40s, the genial, aphorism-spouting detective was firmly established as a funny, beloved figure, or as a Yellow Uncle Tom, depending on one's point of view. In this original, deeply personal account, Huang illuminates every conceivable aspect of Chan and his place in American culture. His vibrant narrative tells the stories of Biggers, a newspaperman turned novelist, who created Chan as an alternative to Sax Rohmer's villainous character Fu Manchu; Chang Apana, a legendary, crime-busting Chinese cop in Honolulu who wore a Panama hat, carried a bullwhip and became the real-life basis for Chan; and the fictional Chan, who entered American popular culture just as nativists succeeded in pushing through anti-Chinese immigrant legislation. Chan was played in hit movies by Swedish actor Warner Oland and others and has been vehemently dismissed in recent years as nothing more than a racial stereotype by author and playwright Frank Chin and other prominent Asian Americans. Huang takes a balanced view. Chan is a racist stereotype, he writes, but he is also a folk hero, exemplifying the "cultural miscegenation" that critic Stanley Crouch calls "the catalyst of the American experience." The author makes a convincing case for Chan's place in film history not as an Uncle Tom but rather as one in a line of wise detectives with eccentricities, including Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. An appendix offers more than 50 "Charlie Chanisms."

Multilayered, provocative and highly accessible, this will appeal to Chan fans, scholars and general readers.

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