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

by Huang, Yunte

  A break in the case came the next day, when a woman phoned McDuffie with information she thought suspicious but “not very important.” She was a roomer at the Elite Hotel and had seen a Filipino man trying to wash some stains off his sweater in a third-floor bathroom of the hotel on the night of the double murder. McDuffie and Apana immediately acted on the tip and located the owner of the sweater, Domingo Rodrigues, a servant in the officers’ mess at Fort Shafter.

  More than a decade later, when Biggers, at the height of his literary career, visited the islands and met with Apana, “the real Charlie Chan” would tell Biggers about the Rodrigues nabbing. When the two officers first approached him, the suspect withstood the questioning well, until Apana drew attention to Rodrigues’s new shoes. “Why you wear new shoes this morning?” became the punch line of the whole case. The suspect balked, turned around suddenly, and tried to escape. Swift as a shadow, Apana beat him to the door and blocked the exit. Rodrigues pulled a knife from his pocket and lunged at Apana. The blade slashed open Apana’s sport coat, close to his stomach, but fortuitously it landed in his broad leather belt. When the knife hit the brass buckle, Apana grabbed Rodrigues’s right wrist and gave it a twist. Once the knife fell to the ground, the “desperado” was arrested. A subsequent search of Rodrigues’s room yielded a pair of blood-soaked shoes, a stained sweater, and a pair of trousers smeared with human blood. Soon the other members of Rodrigues’s gang—Miguel Manigbas, Hildago Bautista, and Celestino Manalo—were also arrested.7

  The four Filipinos confessed to the killing, but each pointed the finger of guilt at others. According to Rodrigues, the four men entered Lim’s store on the night of April 30. Miguel asked Lim for some apples, and when the owner turned to get them, Miguel stabbed him in the back. “The Chinese screamed in pain and attempted to defend himself with a hammer. After a desperate struggle he was overpowered and collapsed.” Rodrigues declared that Miguel had cut Lim’s throat. The storekeeper’s wife was roused by his shouts for help. She went to the door, which led to the main part of the store from the bedroom. “She was attacked and slain by a well-directed blow. Her mutilated body was left lying on the floor.” The store was ransacked, but the killers were unable to locate any loot other than a paltry $4.20 in the cash register, in addition to a revolver.8

  Justice was swift for the four Filipinos. They were arraigned on May 22, sentenced to death by hanging (except for Manalo, who had turned state’s evidence and was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment) on June 14, and sent to the gallows three weeks later.9 In Hawaii, between 1826 and 1913, there were forty-nine documented executions: twenty-six Hawaiians, seven Japanese, five Chinese, four Koreans, four Filipinos, two Puerto Ricans, and one Caucasian. The Caucasian was an illiterate Irish sailor, one John O’Connell. He had jumped ship in 1906 and then kidnapped, murdered, decapitated, dismembered, and disemboweled the son of a prominent haole family.10

  On the morning of July 8, 1913, about a hundred people witnessed the hanging of the three Filipinos at the Oahu prison yard. As the noose was adjusted and a black cap drawn over his head, Domingo Rodrigues shouted to the crowd in broken English that he was being sent out of the territory because he had accidentally killed a man. These were the last words uttered by any of the trio before the traps were sprung one after another on the scaffold.11

  Beginning with this triple hanging, Hawaii would see in subsequent years a sharp increase in the executions of Filipinos. Following in the paths of Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, Filipinos were the latest additions to the plantation workforce, and they were on the lowest rung of the islands’ social and economic ladder. From 1914 to 1957, the year Hawaii outlawed the death penalty, twenty-six civilians were hanged, of whom twenty were Filipino. The others were two Koreans, two Japanese, one Puerto Rican, and one Hawaiian; not a single white man was among them.12 Racism had obviously tipped the scale of justice even in the land of aloha.

  After the hanging, members of Honolulu’s Chinese community paid $2 to $5 for pieces of the hanging rope, mementos that would grace their ancestral halls for generations to come.13 They also presented Chief McDuffie with a diamond-studded gold badge, “as a mark of esteem and appreciation of McDuffie’s efforts in effecting the prompt capture of the quartette of Filipinos.”14 There was no mention of Apana in this recognition, but Apana’s reward would come in a different form—one longer lasting and more glittery than a badge studded with precious stones. For that, we need to look at the character he inspired and the man who created Charlie Chan.

  PART TWO

  CHARLIE CHAN’S POP

  EARL DERR BIGGERS AT HIS PASADENA, CALIFORNIA, HOUSE, LATE 1920S (Courtesy of Lilly Library, Indiana University)

  10

  The Other Canton

  THE SAXTON HOUSE, CANTON, OHIO (Photo by author)

  This is America—a town of a few thousand, in a region of wheat and corn and dairies and little groves.

  —Sinclair Lewis, Main Street, 1920

  PERMIT ME TO digress just a bit from the story of Chang Apana and Charlie Chan. In the late 1980s, I was a student of English literature at Peking University in China. During my sophomore year, in the spring of 1989, student protests broke out. Calling for democracy and freedom of speech, hundreds of thousands of students paraded through the streets of Beijing and staged demonstrations at Tiananmen Square. A hot-blooded youth despite my academic ambition, I joined the protests and camped out every day at the square, where, only two decades earlier, millions of Red Guards, participating in the Cultural Revolution, had jingoistically waved copies of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book of Sayings, shouted slogans, and pledged their allegiance to the Communist Party’s Great Helmsman. Our own protests and sit-ins, slightly less frenzied, went on for months, but Deng Xiaoping’s Communist regime turned a deaf ear to our political demands.

  Hearing about the turmoil in the capital city and concerned for my safety, my family lured me out of Beijing under a false pretense: they sent me a telegram claiming that my mother was “gravely ill.” When I arrived in my hometown after a three-day journey, I was surprised to see my mother standing in front of our house, looking as healthy as a newlywed and smiling as if she had just won the lottery. On that same night, June 4, troops and tanks rolled into Beijing, killing hundreds of demonstrators—an event remembered today as the Tiananmen Square Massacre. My mother might have felt fortunate that her youngest son had stayed out of harm’s way, but the tragedy in Beijing vanquished my realistic hopes for the future of China. Two years later, I left China and landed in, of all places, Tuscaloosa, an Alabama college town. A comparison is futile here, because nothing like it exists in the People’s Republic of China. Imagine, for example, leaving Manhattan and arriving in Manhattan, Kansas; or leaving Moscow and ending up in Moscow, Idaho. This is not to say that the experience would necessarily be unpleasant, but one’s mind boggles and the senses gasp in the new air of change.

  The Deep South certainly has its charms. Alabama, as Carl Carmer puts it, is “a land with a spell on it—not a good spell, always. Moons, red with the dust of barren hills, thin pine trunks barring horizons, festering swamps, restless yellow rivers, are all parts of a feeling—a strange certainty that above and around them hovers enchantment—an emanation of malevolence that threatens to destroy men through dark ways of its own.”1 Carmer was a Yankee author who taught English at the University of Alabama in the 1920s, at the height of the Ku Klux Klan reign of racial terror and violence. At the time of my arrival in the summer of 1991, Tuscaloosa had already lost the malevolent luster depicted by Carmer, but the Heart of Dixie still was a shock for me. Having grown up in China’s homogeneous society, I felt disoriented (in more ways than one) when I was suddenly thrown into an environment where race, to put it mildly, matters.

  Yellow, as I was to find out, is not a visible color in the land where Uncle Tom’s cabin used to stand. Three decades after the civil rights movement, the historical effect of biracial segregation remained so strong that Asian
s, as the third race, simply fell into a vacuum. “You are either a white man or a nigger here,” a white Baptist minister once infamously said.2 While blacks still bore the brunt of racial discrimination, Asians were regarded more or less as foreigners, offscreen Charlie Chans, so to speak. Out of desperation and economic necessity, I opened SWEN, a Chinese restaurant in Northport, just across the Black Warrior River from Tuscaloosa, and worked for two years as co-owner, manager, chef, delivery boy, waiter, dishwasher, and kitchen hand. Owning a fast-food joint did nothing to enhance my social status; on the contrary, it had the opposite effect. Ever heard of Chinese haute cuisine? It does exist, but Chinese food in great swaths of America is still associated with the image of lowdown chop-suey joints that once populated Western mining towns in the nineteenth century, and it’s tough to shake off that stigma in the Deep South. As a result, during those two years when I made soup and fried rice every morning, delivered boxes of steaming food all over town, and mopped the tiled floors of my restaurant’s kitchen every night after closing, I constantly felt like a bottom-feeding fish, one that cannot see the light of day in the muddy pond of America.

  After struggling for three years in Alabama, I decided to go to graduate school rather than return to China.

  In August 1994, having imbibed these new American vapors for a few years, I felt emboldened enough to make my first cross-country drive from Tuscaloosa, a town of tall pines and red clay now adjacent to the newly chosen American headquarters of Mercedes-Benz, to Buffalo, a faded remnant of a bygone age of Rust Belt glory, where I would study for my Ph.D. in English. Behind the wheel of my beat-up blue Toyota hatchback, I came upon a sign that said, “Canton,” about an hour after I passed Columbus, Ohio, on Interstate 71. For a second, I thought I was dreaming, but then my senses got hold of me. Still, I was intrigued by the Chinese-sounding name and hit by the distinct feeling of nostalgia, a yearning for a homeland I had once sworn I would never return to. Chinese names, I knew, were popular among those who were planning American towns in the early nineteenth century. The China trade, which had brought silk, porcelain, and tea from Canton to America, would inspire, as it turned out, the adoption of “Canton” as the name for more than thirty American municipalities. Another thirty, if not more, were dubbed China, China Grove, China Hill, or Pekin. Was this because nineteenth-century settlers wished to create an ersatz feeling that they were in some exotic, faraway land?3 This was the case for Ohio’s Canton, which was founded in 1805. When surveyor Bezaleel Wells divided the town’s land, he named it after the Chinese city as a memorial to John O’Donnell, a China trader he had admired. O’Donnell, who owned a Maryland plantation also named Canton, had been the first person to transport goods from China to Baltimore.

  At the time of my first cross-country drive, I did not know much about Charlie Chan, let alone Earl Biggers. Nor was I aware of the uncanny coincidence that, while the original Charlie Chan had grown up in a rural village near Canton, China, the man who created the fictional Chinese detective hailed from the woods near a city that bears the same name—though the two Cantons are, both geographically and symbolically, at opposite ends of the earth. Only later would I learn that Biggers had spent his childhood near Canton, Ohio, tumbling in the weeds and haystacks among the oak groves and cornfields that were whizzing by my Toyota on that summer day in 1994.

  In order to make ends meet as a graduate student in Buffalo, I had to work busy shifts as a deliveryman at a Chinese restaurant and as a security guard at a Korean-owned wig store in a rundown neighborhood. To relieve the tension, I went book-hunting at estate and moving sales on weekends. Once the so-called Queen City of the Great Lakes but then a virtual ghost town whose population had diminished either through aging or migration to warmer climes, Buffalo had much to offer in antique furniture and used books. At an estate sale inside an old Victorian house, I found something curious—a twin set of Charlie Chan books: crimson, hardboard-covered reprints with five novels bound into two volumes, handsomely titled Charlie Chan’s Caravan and Charlie Chan Omnibus. There was even a handwritten dedication in red wax pencil in one of the volumes: “Hurry and get well, Irving, we miss you—Eddie and Jean.” A get-well gift from many years back—the Grosset & Dunlap reprints dated to the 1940s. I took the “caravan” and “omnibus” home for a dollar each. I never figured out who Irving was and whether Charlie Chan had facilitated the desired recuperation, but I became an avid fan of Charlie Chan, renting all the movies I could find at video stores, reading all the novels, and constantly looking out for those cheap paperbacks as well as rare editions.

  Through increasingly obsessive research, I found out more about the man who had created Charlie. Earl Derr Biggers was born on August 26, 1884, in Warren, Ohio, “a town of a few thousand,” as Sinclair Lewis would put it. After the Revolutionary War, the fledgling state of Connecticut was bizarrely extended to include a 120-mile-long strip of land in northeastern Ohio, which would become known as the Connecticut Western Reserve. In 1798, a wealthy man named Ephraim Quinby bought 441 acres of land in the area and built the town of Warren. Nestled close to the pencil-sharp state line dividing Ohio from Pennsylvania, Warren was called “the Capital of the Western Reserve” in the early nineteenth century. But the epithet rang hollow; two nearby cities, Cleveland and Pittsburgh, with their proximity to lake and canal shipping, stole the limelight and emerged as the Ohio Valley’s crown jewels. Warren was left with the false grandeur of its nickname and the emptiness of the promise. At the time of Biggers’s birth, Warren had become a prosaic midwestern town of mills, factories, and foundries. With elm-lined streets and a Romanesque courthouse facing a public square of war memorials and patriotic bunting each Fourth of July, it could have been plucked from a Sinclair Lewis Main Street tableau. Earl’s father, Robert J. Biggers, was a hardworking factory engineer who was able to provide handsomely for his wife, Emma, and their only child.4

  Like so many children who are born into provincial insularity but grow up to become writers or artists, young Biggers was inspired by his avid reading. Newspaper comic strips were his favorite. According to his recollection, “As soon as I could write connected sentences, I appropriated the characters from Palmer Cox’s Brownie series, and wove about them many startling romances.” He would read these aloud to his grandmother.5 Aspiring to be a writer, he founded at Warren High School a monthly magazine titled The Cauldron. “The first issue led off with a grandiose editorial in which I split three infinitives,” he later reminisced, “and used the verb lay where I should have used lie. I was an author!”6

  Despite his imaginative powers, young Biggers was stubbornly wedded to the truth. A case in point: There was a haberdashery on the street where the Biggers family lived. Business was dropping off, and the owner hired some New York City slickers—in recollection, Biggers called them “Potashes and Perlmutters,” after two Jewish shopkeepers featured in comic novels by Montague Glass—to help boost the sales. The haberdasher also knocked on Biggers’s door and asked if the young boy would like to work as a clerk on Saturdays. Biggers agreed and began work on a Saturday. By noontime, the gentlemen from the big city took the haberdasher aside and demanded that Biggers be let go, for he had been, like the boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” telling the truth about the goods to the customers and ruining the tall tales of these New York shysters. He was summarily fired.

  Years later, when Biggers was working as a columnist for a Boston newspaper, he again got sacked, in his own words, “for telling the truth in my dramatic criticisms.” Such unfortunate run-ins with truth-telling made Biggers wiser, and he decided to stick to storytelling from then on. Reflecting about them at a dinner party that celebrated the successful production of his first play in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1912, he said, “It was about that time I decided to let Truth remain crushed to earth—and become a liar on a large scale. And from that time on I have lied ambitiously with what success—the future alone will prove.”7

  Young Biggers seems to have
explored his local area and was well acquainted with the two nearby cities, Canton and Akron, as his later writings would show. In Charlie Chan Carries On (published in 1930), Ohio, a state that has produced a passel of U.S. presidents, figures prominently in a murder mystery on a global scale. The plot involves a killer stalking a U.S. tour group on a globe-trotting vacation. The first victim—a Detroit automobile executive—is found strangled in a ritzy London hotel, his hand clutching a key marked “Dietrich Safe and Lock Company, Canton, Ohio,” obviously inspired by Diebold Safe and Lock Company. Two prominent characters, Akron rubber baron Elmer Benbow and his socialite wife, Nettie, seem to be an amalgamation of Seiberlings and Firestones—founding families of the Goodyear and Firestone tire companies, respectively. Other connections to Canton and Akron include characters named Spicer and Everhard, both recognizable names of pioneering clans in the early days of the Buckeye State.8

  The most interesting connection is perhaps the name of Charlie Chan. It is a common assumption that Biggers based his character on Chang Apana. But during the time Biggers was growing up, there actually was a Chinese man named Charlie Chan living in Akron. Listed as thirty-six years old in the 1900 census, Chan was, coincidentally, also born around 1864 in Canton, China. He immigrated to the United States as a teen and opened a laundry in Akron in the late 1890s. Located downtown at 40 North Howard Street, the laundry doubled as Chan’s home. He ran the business for about fifteen years.