by Huang, Yunte
But the core strength of Chan’s character lies in his pseudo-Confucian, aphoristic wisdom. Unlike the Kung Fu movies, which showcase a Chinese penchant for ass-kicking and sword-brandishing, Chan reveals the Chinaman as a sage: a wise, calm, responsible, and commonsensical man who also happens to be a hilarious wisecracker. These depictions prepared television audiences of the 1970s for Kung Fu, featuring David Carradine as a Shaolin master wandering the American West and fighting for justice in a constant sea of flashbacks. There is even a good deal of Charlie Chan’s wit in the torqued physicality of Jackie Chan’s slapstick.
For me, a real Chinaman, who didn’t grow up in this country but hasn’t been shielded from the arrows of American racism, it is fascinating that Charlie Chan is an American original, “made in the U.S.A.” Make no mistake: Charlie Chan is an American stereotype of the Chinaman. Anyone who believes that Chan is Chinese would probably also believe that the fortune cookie is a Chinese invention. Charlie Chan is as American as Jack Kerouac, that stalwart of the American hipster who was born French Canadian and spoke the dialect of joual as his first language. Call it the melting pot or the pu pu platter, but Brahmin Boston is where the chop suey of Charlie Chan was first stir-fried by the Harvard-educated Biggers, only to be recast later by wisecracking screenwriters and directors in bronzed and lacquered Hollywood. What Stanley Crouch calls cultural miscegenation as the catalyst of the American experience has found another exemplar in Charlie Chan. Simply put, Charlie Chan’s Chinatown beat, like jazz, is a distinctly American brand, not a Chinese import.
My goal in writing this book, then, is to demonstrate that Charlie Chan, America’s most identifiable Chinaman, epitomizes both the racist heritage and the creative genius of this nation’s culture. To my chagrin, because I am a big fan of the genre, this book is no high-speed detective fiction with gun molls and badinage. The mystery of Charlie Chan is as deep as any “Confucius say.” I have had to unravel it by tracing several dry streams to the source of long dormant wells. It wasn’t hard to get them roiling again, like an old and faithful geyser in the American psyche that dependably gives insult. The clues I found in these backwaters would not always converge, but I have come to see this as the true nature of American legends: they need something foreign to make them live again. Hollywood has always known this, with such directors as Billy Wilder and Ang Lee producing scalding interpretations of the most American of stories. But I must confess that I am not in the packaging business. The legends that Hollywood perpetuates can never be entirely circumscribed, wrapped up with string. Instead, in my far-flung research and peripatetic travels, I found not one but four unique stories of Charlie Chan.
The first story, of course, is the man himself, beginning with Chang Apana, the bullwhip-toting Cantonese detective in Honolulu. Then there is Earl Biggers’s story, unwinding from the cornfields of small-town Ohio to the old-boy parlors of Harvard Yard, followed by Chan’s reinvention on the silver screen, a legend annealed in Hollywood and America’s racial tensions. And, finally, there is Chan’s haunting presence during the era of postmodern politics and ethnic pride in contemporary America. Each of these streams is a story in itself, a slice of bona fide Americana. Together, they form the biography of Charlie Chan, the honorable detective whose labyrinthine matrix we have only now begun to fathom.
Prologue
CHANG APANA’S BULLWHIP, ON DISPLAY AT THE HONOLULU POLICE DEPARTMENT MUSEUM (Photo by author)
ON A BALMY July night in 1904, a wiry wraith of a man sauntered alone through the dim alleys of Honolulu’s Chinatown. A mere five feet tall, with intense shoulders and a ramrod-straight back, the man was wearing a Canton-crêpe blouse, threadbare trousers, and a Panama hat. A pair of dark glasses obscured the scar above his eye. His upper lip, blackened by burnt cork, gave the impression that he needed a shave. From a distance, he was unmistakably Chinese, barely distinguishable as he walked among the shuffling throng of his countrymen.
The hot, southerly Kona weather, which had piled the breakers high along the coast and sapped the spirit out of every living being, had departed the island by sundown. A gentle trade wind blowing in from the northeast had brought renewed energy to the city. A local boy was plucking soft tunes on his ukulele, perhaps down on the moonlit beach not far below the street, fringed with coconut palms and licked by the lazy surf. When the serenade paused, a cock mynah gave out a clear-throated cry, ruffling its plumage beneath the canopy of a perfumed night.
Under the sickle moon, the Chinaman reached the corner of Smith Street in the heart of Chinatown. He slowed his pace on the darkened street, where shops and restaurants displayed clapboard signs scrawled in his native language. They had shut their doors much earlier, except for one nondescript building where he saw a glint of light escaping through an upstairs window. A faint smile flickered at the corners of his mouth. He drew a deep breath; the night air was a strange mélange of odors that lingered from the oil of woks and the salty tang of the Pacific wind.
Through the unlit front gate he stepped cautiously inside the building and passed by the doorman undetected. He did the same at the next three doors, each guarded by someone, each leading him deeper into what seemed like a maze of Chinese boxes.
Climbing up the rickety stairs to the second floor, he turned and faced a room packed with gamblers, all Chinese, huddling over games of fan-tan, pai gau, craps, and mah-jongg. The air was a mix of smut and smoke, the den ringing with curses, jeers, and the sound of clicking dice and mah-jongg tiles.
He observed the ballyhoo through his dark lenses. Someone at the mah-jongg table looked up and immediately recognized the face of the infamous cop, whose name elicited shudders from the spines of Honolulu criminals.
“Chailow!”
Before the Cantonese cry for “cop” dropped to the ground, a five-foot bullwhip had uncoiled like a hissing rattlesnake from the detective’s waist. One crisp snap of the whip and the entire room froze like a gambling-hall diorama under glass. Only clouds of cigarette smoke still wavered, the afterthoughts of exploded firecrackers, not sure where to settle in the deafening silence.
Many there had already heard of, and some had even tasted, the might of this unusual weapon wielded by the former rough-riding paniolo (cowboy). Resisting arrest would be futile, even though they knew he had, as usual, brought no backup. His whip had spoken, louder than any law or gun.
Telling them the jig was up, the Chinaman, known to the locals as “Kana Pung,” lined up the gamblers, forty in all, and marched them out of the room and down to the police station on Bethel Street. Not a single shot was fired.1
Kana Pung’s real name was Chang Apana. An officer of the Honolulu Police Department, he would later acquire a more fascinating moniker: Charlie Chan. His colorful exploits, like the bravado on this July night, would one day draw the attention of mainland novelist Earl Derr Biggers. From 1925 onward, a total of six novels and forty-seven films, in addition to radio programs, newspaper comics, and countless faux-fortune-cookie witticisms, would make Charlie Chan, Apana’s fictional double, one of the most enduring cultural icons of twentieth-century America.
PART ONE
THE “REAL” CHARLIE CHAN
CHANG APANA, CIRCA 1917 (Photo by On Char, courtesy of Bishop Museum)
1
Sandalwood Mountains
DIAMOND HEAD, 1870S (Courtesy of Hawaii State Archives)
The loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean.
—Mark Twain
A BOY NAMED Ah Pung was born sometime around 1871 in a thatched hut by a muddy creek in Waipio, a tiny village tucked away in the rolling sugarcane fields to the east of Honolulu. His father, Chang Jong Tong, was a Chinese coolie laborer from southern China, and his mother, Chun Shee, had been born in Hawaii of Chinese parents.1 Ah Pung was their second son. The proud father took the day off from fieldwork and started dyeing eggs, according to Chinese custom. Later he would go around the small, tight-knit plantation community carrying not only a bas
ket of boiled red eggs but also the good tidings of his newborn. An illiterate man from a humble peasant family, Chang had no idea that the baby snuggling comfortably next to his mother inside their shabby hut would one day turn out to be a legend.
As with other Hawaiian coolie families of the nineteenth century, crucial records of Ah Pung’s birth are murky and unreliable. The Delayed Birth Records issued in 1909 by the Department of Health lists December 26, 1871, as his birth date, as does his official employment record at the Honolulu Police Department. But the 1930 census lists his age as sixty-one, which means he must have been born around 1869, a date confirmed by the obituaries published upon his death in 1933, as well as by his death certificate. Gilbert Martines, who did pioneering research on Apana for his thesis at the University of Hawaii in the late 1980s, believes that Apana was in fact born December 26, 1864.2 But Apana’s gravestone, which still stands in the verdant Upper Manoa Valley, states “1870,” in Chinese characters, as his year of birth.
“Tombstones,” says Charlie Chan, “often engraved with words of wisdom.” But in this case, words at Apana’s resting place are not at all reliable, as his tombstone also records 1934 as the year of his death—in this case, a factual error.
At the time of Ah Pung’s birth, Honolulu was a bustling seaport town of about 15,000 souls. Isabella Lucy Bird, a British traveler who spent six months in the islands in 1873, described Honolulu as a place that “looks like a large village, or rather like an aggregate of villages.”3 With shadowy huts and houses made of straw, wood, adobe, or coral that perched on streets as straight as a line or as crooked as a corkscrew, the town was a distant cry from what it is today.4 Waikiki, nowadays a jungle of high-rises inundated with two million tourists each year, was then only a stretch of white sand running from Diamond Head to the harbor. Here and there, a few grass shacks straggled along swamps and ponds. A stream ran from Manoa Valley down to the sea.5 Under the ten-year reign (1863–72) of King Kamehameha V—a benevolent monarch who dressed plainly and enjoyed poking around town on his old horse—tourism as an industry had just begun to grow. The first hotel in town, reincarnated in 1927 as the palatial pink Royal Hawaiian, did not even have its cornerstone laid until 1871, just around the time of Ah Pung’s birth.
To better know this man’s true story, we need to take a detour and look at some snapshots of early Hawaiian history, at the events that would impact directly—or at times more obliquely—the life of our future Charlie Chan. As the honorable detective says, compared to the grandeur of history a man is merely “one minute grain of sand on seashore of eternity.”
The Hawaiian Islands, also known as the Sandwich Islands, only emerged as an economic center a hundred years after Captain James Cook’s arrival in 1778. After Cook’s death at Kealakekua Bay, where his body was butchered and devoured by the natives on the beach, the missionaries soon came in waves—British, American, French—bringing the Word of God and trying to convert the “cannibals” who had barely finished digesting the roasted flesh of the man once regarded as their god Lono. And after the missionaries inevitably came the businessmen, fortune-seekers, and scavengers of the Pacific, bringing, in the parlance of the Kanakas (natives), the word of Rum.
Koolau the Leper, a colorful character in one of Jack London’s infamous leprosy stories, summarizes the early colonial history of Hawaii in a few poetic sentences full of pain and resentment:
They came like lambs, speaking softly. Well might they speak softly, for we were many and strong, and all the islands were ours. As I say, they spoke softly. They were of two kinds. The one kind asked our permission, our gracious permission, to preach to us the word of God. The other kind asked our permission, our gracious permission, to trade with us. That was the beginning. Today all the islands are theirs, all the land, all the cattle—everything is theirs.6
For the United States, the islands possessed a lure far beyond their natural beauty or their strategic location for maritime travel. In some ways, the islands, indeed the whole Pacific basin, perpetuated the notion of Manifest Destiny, holding the key to the future of the young republic as it grappled for international respect.
On February 22, 1784, shortly after the Revolutionary War, the merchant ship Empress of China, used as a privateer during the war and still fitted with guns, sailed from New York for China with a super-cargo of ginseng, furs, raw cotton, and lead. The transpacific trade was in large measure an attempt to rescue the battered economy of a nation suffocating under a war debt of more than $50 million. To make matters worse, markets accustomed to American raw products were now limited or closed. Refusing to open its home ports on an equal basis to American shipping, Great Britain also closed its West Indies colonies to Yankee suppliers. France also restricted American trade with its West Indies colonies, and Spain continued its exclusionary mercantilist policies toward the United States. As a result, Americans had to turn to the Pacific in order to overcome their nation’s economic setback, and in Hawaii they were in luck.
The Empress, the first American ship to dock at a Far East port, returned from Canton in 1785, making a 20 percent profit on invested capital. In the following years, China trade expanded rapidly. By 1800, the number of American ships that cleared Canton in one year had swelled to one hundred. In trade volume, America now ranked second only to Great Britain.
The boom in trading, however, was buttressed more by the natural products that merchants collected from the Pacific, especially in the Hawaiian isles, than by the native products of the American continent. Although the Empress voyage was a success, the Chinese soon discovered that the ginseng they bought from the Americans was not the same as the Korean herb that had been used for centuries in traditional Chinese medicine. Consequently, it became increasingly difficult for American traders to sell products brought from their native land. They had to look for alternatives, soon finding that the Pacific abounded with natural products that would cater to the demands of East Asian as well as American markets. Fortune-seekers moved into the Pacific to scavenge for furs, whales, bêche-de-mer (sea cucumbers), tortoiseshell, pearls, shark fins, birds’ nests, grain, fish, salt, coal, sandalwood, lumber, copra, cowhide, tallow, arrow-root, vanilla, spices, guano, human heads, and even human beings. These commodities gave currency to the nineteenth-century term curio, famously adopted by Herman Melville in Moby-Dick (1851): The New England innkeeper, Peter Coffin, told Ishmael that the Pacific savage Queequeg had “a lot of ’balmed New Zealand heads (great curios, you know).” The Oxford English Dictionary, in fact, cites Melville’s sentence as the earliest recorded use of the word.7
Among the Pacific curios, two were uniquely abundant in Hawaii: sandalwood and sugar. Called ’iliahi in Hawaiian, sandalwood is a parasite that attaches itself to the root of another tree. As it grows, it becomes a hard, fragrant wood. Hawaiians used sandalwood sticks to make bows for their traditional musical instrument, the ukeke. They also ground the wood into a powder and sprinkled it on kappa (bark cloth) garments as a perfume.8 For centuries, China, Japan, and other Asian countries had also been using sandalwood for “incense, fuel for funeral rites, temple carvings, handmade boxes, medicine, and as a basic ingredient in perfume.”9 Ornate cabinets and chests made of sandalwood were considered rarities, gracing houses much as antique vases and authentic artworks do today.
The beginning of the Hawaiian sandalwood trade, as historian Michael Dougherty tells us, can be traced to John Kendrick, the captain of the American clipper Lady Washington. Born about 1740 in Harwich, Massachusetts, Kendrick came from a long line of seamen. A true patriot, he participated in the Boston Tea Party and fought bravely in the Revolutionary War, where he was captured by the British navy and later released on a prisoner swap. After the war, he became commander of the first American ships of discovery, setting out to explore the Pacific Northwest.10
Sponsored by a Boston merchant, Kendrick’s expedition set sail on October 1, 1787. After clearing the Falkland Islands and Cape Horn, Kendrick sailed up the coast of
Vancouver Island in June of 1788. He traded for furs with the Haida and other tribes and then sailed for Macao to unload the cargo. His ship stopped by the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands to restock food, water, and firewood. While stir-frying his popular chop suey for the Western sailors, the Chinese cook on board realized to his amazement that the logs and sticks burning under his sizzling wok gave out a distinctive fragrance.11
Up to this point, China had been importing white sandalwood from India and the East Indies, but the supply had become insufficient to meet market demand. The cook’s discovery of red sandalwood, though of a quality inferior to the white species, made Kendrick recognize a potential new trade item for the Canton market. He immediately sent men ashore with instructions to collect the wood. Kendrick, however, did not live long enough to reap the full benefits of their fragrant discovery, for he was accidentally killed by a cannon shot from a British warship saluting his return to Honolulu Harbor in December 1794.12 Still, the era of the sandalwood trade had begun. The islands emerged as a major source for the wood supply to China, and the archipelago soon became known in China as Tan Heung Shan, Sandalwood Mountains.
The transpacific trade had profound and tragic effects on the natural environment of the islands. Kamehameha I (also known as Kamehameha the Great), perhaps the most powerful monarch in the history of Hawaii, who by 1810 had unified all the main islands, maintained a monopoly over the export of sandalwood. In 1812, three shrewd Bostonians, Jonathan and Nathan Winship and William Davis, persuaded Kamehameha to sign a ten-year agreement for the sale of sandalwood. According to the agreement, the king would “have the sandalwood gathered and waiting” for the American merchants; the latter would “sail it to Chinese ports, sell it, and, upon return, give Kamehameha one quarter of the net profits.”13