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

by Huang, Yunte

  Greed quickly took hold of the king and local chiefs, who would command thousands of commoners to trudge up the steep slopes of valleys to harvest and transport the prized logs. The work was dangerous and gruesome. Historians have given sobering accounts of the misery that the wood trade inflicted on the native people:

  Slavery replaced freedom to the people. Natives were treated like cattle. Up and down the treacherous mountain trails they toiled, logs and sandalwood strapped to their sweating shoulders. Men and women actually became deformed due to the tremendous weight of the logs on their backs. The forced laborers in the sandalwood forests had no time to farm—food grew scarce and famine came.14

  By 1819, intensive harvesting had stripped almost all of the Hawaiian sandalwood forests. It also caused market oversaturation and led to a precipitous price decline from the highest average of $13 per picul (133 1/3 pounds) to merely $1.50 per picul.15

  Within just three decades, the dramatic rise and fall of the sandalwood trade left the Hawaiian economy in shambles. For years, the island kings and chiefs “had been buying all sorts of luxury goods and contracting to pay in sandalwood.” Now, the wood was disappearing but the debts remained. In 1826, when the first two American warships, USS Dolphin and USS Peacock, arrived in Honolulu, the king and the chiefs were forced to acknowledge debts to American traders in an amount close to $160,000.16

  But fortune smiled on the islands once again. Following the demise of the sandalwood trade, sugar miraculously emerged as the one product that would restore the economy. From the Hawaiian perspective, however, new contacts with the outside world brought new hazards, be they germs, viruses, or vices—the so-called gifts of civilization.

  A type of giant perennial grass, sugarcane had originated in India but was brought to Hawaii by the Polynesians as they migrated outward from the South Pacific sometime during the first millennium. The plant was growing plentifully in the islands at the time of European discovery. In his travelogue, Captain Cook noted the abundance of sugarcane in the islands. On his third and last voyage, Cook wrote, “Having procured a quantity of sugarcane and finding a strong decoction of it produced a very palatable beer, I ordered some more to be brewed for our general use.”17 The natives, however, had made no use of it beyond that of food until its commercial value was recognized in the nineteenth century. It was again a Chinese who was credited with the first attempt to manufacture sugar from the native Hawaiian canes in 1802.

  Chinese had begun to settle in Hawaii soon after Cook arrived. Most of them were skilled workers hired as carpenters and cooks on European and American vessels. In 1788, some forty-five Chinese carpenters, under the direction of Captain John Meares of the Felice, were taken to Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island to build a forty-ton schooner, the North West America. Upon the completion of the project, and on the Chinese team’s homebound journey via Hawaii the next year, Kamehameha I asked for some of the workmen to stay and build him a ship just like North West America. But the request was denied by Captain Meares, though one Chinese carpenter did build “a small platform for a swivel gun on one of Kamehameha’s canoes.” There has been speculation that some of these Chinese might have “jumped ship and remained in Hawaii.”18 But the more probable first Chinese settlement was in 1789, when an American trader, Captain Simon Metcalf, sailed from Macao for the northwestern United States on the Eleanora and made a stop in Hawaii—the first of the American vessels in the China trade to stop over in the islands—to give the crew of forty-five Chinese and ten Americans some rest. It is likely that one or more Chinese remained in the islands, as the Chinese community celebrated the 150th anniversary of the first Chinese arrival in Hawaii in 1939.

  The first recorded sighting of a Chinese living in Hawaii was documented by Edward Bell, who in 1794 wrote that the foreigners seen standing with Kamehameha I at Kealakekua Bay when the ships arrived were “John Young, Isaac Davis, Mr. Boid, 1 Chinaman, and 7 other whites.”19 In the absence of reliable historical documents, it is impossible for us to ascertain who that “1 Chinaman” was, and what business he had standing there with the most powerful king in Hawaii’s history. It is said that Kamehameha relished, perhaps more than anything else, haggling with ships’ captains over supplies and cargoes. “Wherever he was,” writes historian Gavan Daws,

  Kamehameha immersed himself in trading, and with great gusto. A visiting ship would anchor and wait for clearance from the king’s harbor masters. For merchant vessels and naval ships alike the royal guards fired their cannon in salute, and then Kamehameha came out on his platformed canoe, sometimes wearing only a loin cloth and alone except for an interpreter and a few attendants, sometimes dressed in European magnificence, seated on a gun chest with his hand on a silver sword, and surrounded by feather-cloaked chiefs and courtiers, but always with his tooth-edged calabash spittoon beside him.20

  In either setting, whether in a team of white compradors such as John Young and Isaac Davis or among the Hawaiian chiefs and courtiers, a long-queued Chinese would certainly stand out to an observant Western explorer. Most likely the Chinese seen by Bell was a merchant participating in the king’s haggling on the dock.

  The man credited with the first attempt at making sugar out of Hawaiian canes was Wong Tze-chun. Not much is known about this Chinese man except that he arrived in Hawaii on a sandalwood trading ship in 1802. He was obviously a tong see (sugar master) in South China, where for centuries sugarcane had been cultivated and manufactured into sugar. In rural areas in southern China, as Bob Dye describes in his book Merchant Prince of the Sandalwood Mountains,

  itinerant tong see went by boat to the creek villages with their pots, rollers, and drying mats. Villagers brought them freshly cut cane that they fed between two huge stones, kept in motion by men or beasts, which ground and crushed the cane to express the crude juice. This liquid was boiled in kettles and then boiled again while being furiously whisked. The hot syrup was then spread in thin layers on mats to cool. Later the brittle sheets were cut into small squares, which were stored in jars.21

  We do not know if this was Master Wong’s first overseas adventure, but he had at least come into contact with other Chinese who had visited Hawaii and recognized the sugar plant. Like thousands of Chinese who jumped aboard the minute they heard about gold in America, Master Wong must have had a “sweet” dream when he heard of the abundance of cane lying wasted in the Sandalwood Mountains. On this trip, Wong carried with him a vertical stone mill, boilers, and other tools of his trade. Upon arrival, he set up his apparatus on the small island of Lanai, ground off a small crop, and started making sugar. But Lanai was the least hospitable island for growing sugarcane, and Master Wong, true to the spirit of itinerancy, folded his mat and returned to China the next year.22

  In 1811, other Chinese began making small quantities of sugar and molasses at a mill owned by the king. Next came John Wilkinson, an Englishman who, having had experience with sugarcane in the West Indies, established a plantation in Manoa Valley. But Wilkinson’s establishment was abandoned after his death in 1827, and the South China sugar manufacturers soon filled the gap with the founding of the Hungtai Sugar Works at Wailuku, Maui, in 1828. Induced by the decline of the sandalwood trade, William French, an American China trader, undertook sugar cultivation and production in Waimea, Kauai, in 1835. French hired Chinese workmen and recruited four tong see from China. The latter brought with them “a mill, a simple apparatus—granite cylinders turned by wooden cogs and operated by human muscle power.” Later that year, French advertised that he had ten tons of sugar and a thousand gallons of “Sandwich Island Molasses” for sale.23 Clearly, the great era of the Hawaiian sugar industry was underway. It was an industry that fundamentally changed the course of Hawaiian history and reshaped the destiny of millions in the Pacific Rim, including little Ah Pung, born in the cane fields of Waipio.

  Though no record has been found to verify the date of arrival of Ah Pung’s father, Chang Jong Tong, we know that he was among the early waves of
Chinese coolies brought to Hawaii to work in the sugarcane plantations, so we can speculate on the basis of the few facts we do have about him.

  Unlike on the U.S. mainland, where the clamor of “The Chinese must go!” was a clarion call for almost all parties in the mid-nineteenth century (more on this point later), the general sentiment in Hawaii was “The Chinese must come!” Economy, as they say, is the king, and several economic factors joined forces to create increasing demands for labor in Hawaii; among them were whaling, the nascent sugar industry, and the ripple effects of the California gold rush.

  Nearly three decades before the discovery of gold at John Sutter’s mill, whaling ships were docking at Hawaiian ports. More than a hundred whaling ships stopped at these ports in 1824, and more than 170 in 1829. During the next twenty years, Pacific whaling expanded rapidly, with the fleet doubling in size and then nearly doubling again. As the industry moved northward from the equatorial hunting grounds to the Sea of Japan—a geographical shift noted in Melville’s Moby-Dick—and finally to the Arctic, the Hawaiian Islands became a vital entrepôt of a booming trade. For eight years—before the 1859 discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania sounded the death knell for the whaling industry—the annual ship arrivals at Hawaiian ports totaled more than five hundred. In the record year of 1846, almost six hundred ships crowded the islands. These vessels spent much time in island waters and took on vast supplies of fresh provisions. As Daws puts it, sailors on shore leave meant business for everyone—not just for Hawaiian women.24

  The California gold rush, started in 1848, also created a new market for Hawaiian produce. The whaling season of 1847–48 was particularly dismal, and many stores on the islands were badly overstocked. But with gold fever hitting thousands of men, including hundreds of natives, the stores were soon “stripped of everything that might be useful in the goldfields, from pickaxes, shovels, and lamps to Bibles and playing cards.” In San Francisco, prices of food and durables skyrocketed: a 500 percent rise in the price of beef and a fourfold increase in the price of flour; a single droplet of laudanum (an opium tincture used as an analgesic) would go for as much as $40.25 All this created an unparalleled opportunity for Hawaii, where potatoes, corn, wheat, coffee, squash, turnips, and other vegetables could grow plentifully because of the islands’ superior climate and fertile soil. Potato patches on Maui even acquired an epithet, “Nu Kaleponi” (New California), because potatoes, “snapped up by the shipload and sent to San Francisco,” were as good as the gold being dug out of the ground.26 Once again, plantation owners were crying out for workers as the native population dwindled precipitously, as a result of either epidemics or emigration to California’s goldfields.27

  The gold rush and the subsequent trade opportunities for Hawaii did not, however, last long. By the end of 1851, as Daws tells us, “surface gold in California was mined out. The West Coast market collapsed…and Hawaii found itself in the midst of depression.”28 The quick boom-and-bust of whaling and the gold rush taught local businessmen a lesson: they needed to rely on the soil and not the sea. Sugar emerged as the obvious choice to be the staple of the islands’ economy. With the subsequent rising export of sugar and molasses, the white plantation owners yearned for cheap and reliable labor. They looked and found the Chinese.

  On January 3, 1852, 175 Chinese field laborers and twenty-three houseboys arrived in Honolulu Harbor after a rough fifty-five-day voyage, with a loss of five men, on Captain John Cass’s Thetis. The laborers had agreed to work for five years, at $3 per month as field hands or $2 per month as houseboys, in addition to receiving passage money, clothing, room and board.29 Thus began the Chinese contract-labor migration, the infamous “pig trade.” Visiting the islands in 1866, a fledgling American writer—who had adopted the pseudonym “Mark Twain” shortly before the trip—provided colorful descriptions of the labor-recruitment system, for which he would become an avid advocate:

  The sugar product is rapidly augmenting every year, and day by day the Kanaka race is passing away. Cheap labor had to be procured by some means or other, and so the Government [of Hawaii] sends to China for coolies and farms them out to the planters at $5 a month each for five years, the planter to feed them and furnish them with clothing. The Hawaiian agent fell into the hands of Chinese sharpers, who showed him some superb coolie samples and then loaded his ships with the scurviest lot of pirates that ever went unhung. Some of them were cripples, some were lunatics, some afflicted with incurable diseases, and nearly all were intractable, full of fight, and animated by the spirit of the very devil. However, the planters managed to tone them down and now they like them very well. Their former trade of cutting throats on the China seas has made them uncommonly handy at cutting cane. They are steady, industrious workers when properly watched.30

  Mark Twain was commissioned that year by the Sacramento Union, a leading newspaper in the West that was often called “the Miners’ Bible,” to spend a month in the islands as a traveling correspondent. With the newly inaugurated steamer Ajax running between San Francisco and Hawaii, the paper saw an opportunity to serve readers who might soon visit the islands. The publisher hired Twain, who had only recently lost his newspaper job in Nevada due to his sympathy for Chinese miners, to assess the lay of the land in Hawaii.

  The twenty-five picturesque letters Twain would write from the islands in the next six months served the paper’s purpose quite well. He documented in great detail the islands’ scenery and climate, politics, social conditions, history, and legends, but he conveniently forgot to mention the prevalence of leprosy, for fear that it might frighten off the businessmen who would be reading his letters with an eye toward possible trade opportunities.

  What particularly impressed Twain, besides the flamboyant tales of Captain Cook’s demise and the indigenous cannibalism, was the sugar-industry boom supported by shrewd local planters’ use of Chinese coolie labor. The master ironist did a little math: with more than 250 sugar plantations in Louisiana and Mississippi, the aggregate yield was only twenty-five million pounds in 1866. By contrast, Hawaii’s mere twenty-nine small plantations yielded a total of twenty-seven million pounds that year. The secret, Twain concluded, lay not just in the fertile soil or advantageous weather but also “in their cheap Chinese labor.” When one company paid only $5 a month for labor that another company had to hire for $80 and $100, there was no question which business would fare better.31

  Twain’s testimony to its benefits partly explains the continuation of the Chinese coolie trade until 1898, when Hawaii was annexed by the United States, which by then had effectively stopped Chinese immigration with 1882’s Chinese Exclusion Act. What Twain considered to be the secret to Hawaii’s success, “cheap Chinese labor,” was regarded as a disaster for the white labor force on the mainland. Only four years after Twain penned these letters, his close friend and collaborator, Bret Harte, would publish “The Heathen Chinee,” one of the most popular poems about Chinese to rear its racist head in the nineteenth century. In the poem, white miners lamented, “We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor.” But for decades, before becoming a U.S. territory, Hawaii hugely benefited from the steady supply of cheap Chinese labor. From 1852 to 1898, an estimated 46,500 Chinese laborers flowed into the islands.32

  Many of these indentured laborers, realizing that a coolie’s life was certainly not what they had bargained for, chose to return to China upon the expiration of their five-year contract. Others moved to expanding towns such as Honolulu and looked for other forms of livelihood. Ah Pung’s parents, with two children and a third on the way, homesick for their native land, decided to move the growing family back to China. Thus, at the age of three, Ah Pung took his first and only journey to his ancestral hometown in southern China. His stay would form an indelible impression on the young boy, but it would not prove permanent.

  2

  Canton

  CANTON, CHINA, LATE 1890S (Courtesy of the Second Historical Archives of China)

  China, like the purse of a gener
ous man, has endured much.

  —Charlie Chan

  IT IS HARD to imagine how shocking the scene of rural Canton might have appeared to Ah Pung’s parents when they arrived back in their hometown. The two punishing Opium Wars (1839–42 and 1856–60), combined with the brutal Taiping Rebellion (1851–64), had ravaged the countryside in the Pearl River Delta, which sprawled out to the South China Sea. With endemic poverty that was decimating the population, hardscrabble peasants were living lives that were, to use a Chinese expression, niuma buru—worse than those of cattle and horses.

  Little Ah Pung’s ancestral hometown, Oo Sack, a small village in Hsiangshan District, south of Canton on the western bank of the Pearl River, was no stranger to this devastation. Later, the district would change its name to Chungshan, in honor of its best-known native son, the founding father of the Republic of China, Sun Yat-sen, who, like Ah Pung, would come of age in Honolulu.

  There is, sadly, no record of Ah Pung’s life in Oo Sack. But one of his contemporaries, Chung Kun Ai, provides in his memoir, My Seventy Nine Years in Hawaii, a description of this pattern of dreary subsistence in rural Canton in the 1870s. Chung, better known as C. K. Ai, was born in 1865, a few years before Ah Pung, in Sai-San, a short distance northwest of Oo Sack. Despite the difference in spelling (thanks mostly to the crude imagination of U.S. customs officers, who baptized millions of immigrants by assigning last names they had acoustically approximated from Chinese, Yiddish, and Polish alike), “Chang” and “Chung” are transliterations of the same Chinese character. Chang Apana and Chung Kun Ai, in other words, share a family name, even though there is no record to indicate they are immediately related. Later, orbiting in the same microcosm of Honolulu’s Chinatown, with Apana as famous cop and Ai as leading businessman, it is possible that their paths might have crossed again.