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

by Huang, Yunte

  It turns out that Akron’s Charlie Chan, unlike many Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century, was not a mute witness to history. According to a 2008 report, the Akron Beacon Journal interviewed Chan for an article about China’s Boxer Rebellion, the uprising against foreigners and imperialistic aggression in the summer of 1900. The unnamed reporter, almost as if anticipating Biggers, decided to write in dialect: “Chan was busy, but he came out from the rear of his laundry long enough to be interviewed. He was told that there was a great war raging in China and he was asked to say something about the Boxers. ‘War! War in China! Me no care. Me safe. China bad. Me no go back China.’”9

  While the passage of more than a century prevents us from knowing whether this was Chan’s real sentiment, we do know that his laundry was in a prominent location within walking distance of the train station. If Biggers hopped aboard the Pittsburgh, Akron & Western Railroad, he could get to the big city in two hours, and he would not have missed seeing Charlie Chan’s laundry sign.

  In September 2008, fourteen years after I first saw the road sign for Canton on my northward migration, I flew from California to Indiana to examine Biggers’s papers in the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington. Arriving on a Saturday, aware that the library would not open until Monday, I rented a car at the Indianapolis Airport and drove toward Ohio’s flatlands for a closer look at the state that now is called not only “Mother of Presidents” but also the venerable home of Charlie Chan’s creator.

  As soon as I left the airport, I encountered an almost impenetrable thunderstorm. The skyline disappeared, and all I could see was the blurred glow from the taillights of the car immediately in front of me. Having becoming inured to the seemingly eternal California sun-shine, I had forgotten how nasty a Midwest storm could get, and how quickly it could dissipate, especially at that time of year.

  After a night at a most hospitable Super 8 Motel in Columbus, I resumed my pilgrimage the next morning, the first day of autumn. Driving past the vast cornfields, where remaining patches of green were melting fast into a sea of gold, I could sense that the sun, having already surpassed the Hawaiian Islands, was inching across the equator on its annual journey south.

  My first stop of the day was Canton, that American homage to my homeland. Arriving in the midwestern town on a Sunday morning was like walking into a deserted movie set during a production break: all the props were there, but not a soul was to be seen. Downtown Canton, with its cluster of concrete office buildings, limestone churches, and faded Victorian houses, reminded me of Buffalo, albeit on a smaller scale. I remembered the many Sundays when I had strolled down Main Street to Buffalo’s deserted business district, where the stony façades of the Guaranty (now Prudential) Building, the Central Terminal, and art deco City Hall stood as mute witnesses to the glorious past of that Queen City. Canton’s Saxton House interested me most, for I knew it had a tragic connection to Buffalo. The three-story Victorian, on the corner of Market Avenue and Fourth Street, had been the home of Ida Saxton McKinley and her husband, William McKinley, before his 1896 election to the presidency. In September 1901, while attending the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo, President McKinley was assassinated by anarchist Leon Czolgosz. The grieving First Lady withdrew to her home in Canton, where she died just six years later.

  Biggers had just begun his junior year at Warren High School at the time of McKinley’s assassination. After lying in state at both Buffalo’s City Hall and the White House, the president’s body was returned for burial to Canton, where thousands of Ohioans lined up to pay final tribute to their native son. We do not know whether Biggers, living only forty miles away, was one of the mourning spectators. In the unlikely event that he wasn’t, he most certainly was riveted by the dramatic events unfolding in his corner of the world. Judging from his choice of postgraduate careers in journalism and playwriting, we can be sure that affairs of such magnitude and theatricality as McKinley’s death and the execution of his assassin would leave an indelible impression on his young mind and give him an early taste for the thrill of dramatic news.

  My next stop was Akron. In particular, I was hoping to find the site where Ohio’s Charlie Chan had run his laundry business. Prior to the trip, I had used Google Earth to pinpoint the spot and map out the route, but when I arrived at 40 North Howard Street, all I saw was a deserted lot covered with litter and weeds, adjacent to a barn-like building with boarded-up windows. At a fork just down the road stood a nightclub with a comical façade: the one-story brick structure was painted in spotted yellow, rather like SpongeBob SquarePants. Not too far from the highway, I did see railroad tracks, and I imagined what a curious sight it would have been for a nineteenth-century train passenger to spot Mr. Chan’s laundry sign in the American heartland.

  My final stop of the day was Biggers’s birthplace. To get to Warren, I had to turn east on Interstate 76 and then take a local westbound highway a few miles past Youngstown, where in 1878 a twenty-one-year-old young man named Clarence Darrow had just begun his law practice. Darrow would one day become the nation’s first celebrity attorney, but his spectacular career would end after losing the infamous Massie Case in Hawaii in 1932, a trial so sensational and so rife with racial tension that it might be called a harbinger of the O. J. Simpson trial more than sixty years later.

  Driving on rural Route 82 after Youngstown, I was reminded of the landscape in a realist novel. Sleepy hamlets broke the monotony of expansive corn-and wheatfields. In and out of view came huddled wooden houses framed by their parched lawns and broken wooden fences, and occasionally, trailers scattered behind clumps of oaks and birches. Barns and silos, standing back from the road in the shrouds of thin mist, looked like giant toys in a fairyland dreamed up by some kids but then abandoned after play.

  Warren, I must confess, was not quite as grand as I had imagined. The proverbial “diamond in the rough” label would not apply to the hometown of the famous author. As a midwestern town on the fringe of the Rust Belt, Warren showed evidence of decline. Traces of old mills and factories, formerly the lifeblood of the city, were still visible here and there, including a rusty railroad track that seemed to have been unused for years. Pothole covers protruded in the middle of the streets as if someone had started to pull them up for scrap metal but was interrupted.

  After driving around aimlessly, I turned to the Warren–Trumbull County Public Library. Perched at the corner of a main thoroughfare and shaded by large elm trees, the library was a two-story brick building with a huge parking lot. At the entrance were racks of used paperbacks and dusty VHS tapes for sale, all donated or withdrawn from circulation. Approaching the information desk, I asked the bespectacled, white-haired librarian about their E. D. Biggers holdings.

  “Who?” she responded.

  I repeated the name and emphasized that Biggers was a hometown author and the creator of Charlie Chan. This, however, elicited little enthusiasm, though my mention of Chan made her look at me as if I were a Chinese orphan looking for my long-lost father. She typed in the name on a computer terminal to search the database. There was only one item, a Chan novel, in the library’s collection, and it was a 1970s paperback reprint. Sensing my disappointment, she kindly told me that I might be able to find something in their History and Genealogy section upstairs. She pointed her finger toward the stairwell in the middle of the room, “That lady up there knows a lot and might be able to help you. But her office is closed on Sunday.”

  This information put an abrupt end to my pilgrimage of the day. Feeling let down, I decided to reward my efforts with a Chinese buffet before returning to Bloomington. When I got to the Golden Dragon (I’m always amazed by the names given to Chinese restaurants in America), situated in the corner of a nondescript shopping plaza with a red Chinese paper lantern hanging outside its door, it was already past the lunch rush. Only a few diners still lingered in this forty-seat dive. A big man, with a sizable beer belly, a ponytail, and wearing a black Jesus and Mary Chain band T-shi
rt, was brooding over his dessert—chunks of cantaloupe and almond tofu. When he lifted his face and stared at the stacks of empty plates and crumpled napkins that mounted before him, he smiled like a hunter pleased with game birds bagged on a good day. Two teenage girls, one wearing braces, were giggling over their fortune cookies. The food trays on the buffet island had run low at this hour. I filled my plate with the few remaining options and sat down near the window.

  Wistfully chewing my beef broccoli and kung pao chicken, I looked out at the deserted parking lot and the red lantern swinging gently in the breeze. The lantern had the Chinese character “Fortune” printed upside down on its sides and a bunch of golden threads tied together as the tail. The Chinese word for “upside down” is dao, a homonym of the word for “arrival.” “Fortune” written upside down means “fortune arrives.” This lantern reminded me of a curious object in Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street that appears only once in the book and remains unelaborated by the narrator. Early on in the novel, Carol Milford, a footloose, free-spirited student at Blodgett College, is invited to dinner at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Marbury, a couple who epitomize small-town America’s cultural narrowmindedness and smug complacency. The Marburys, writes Lewis, “regarded Carol as their literary and artistic representative. She was the one who could be depended upon to appreciate the Caruso phonograph record, and the Chinese lantern which Mr. Marbury had brought back as his present from San Francisco.”10 Like a recording of Enrico Caruso’s voice, the Chinese lantern is a perfect souvenir from cultural excursions that nice folks take outside God’s Country. Mr. Marbury is an insurance salesman; he must have bought the lantern in San Francisco’s Chinatown on a business trip. A gilded bust of a half-naked laughing Buddha would be too pagan for a Bible-worshipping home like the Marburys’. A lantern is just about right.

  Looking at the lantern, I had an epiphany. Until then, I had tried to track the story of Charlie Chan from one Canton to another, from colonial Hawaii to postbellum Ohio. I had always wondered how Biggers, a boy from a milquetoast midwestern town, could have created a Chinaman so alive, so distinct from almost everything in the environment that had nourished his creator. I realized, sitting in that aromatic dining room of the Golden Dragon, that Charlie Chan to Biggers’s Ohio was the Chinese lantern to Lewis’s Main Street America. He was a whiff of Oriental mystique blown into the insular flatland.

  On my way back to Indiana, I turned on the radio. A previous driver, or maybe the rental-car company, had preset the radio to local Christian music and gospel stations. In between evangelical rock and Bible readings, there was also some news, which that day was dominated by America’s economic meltdown. The national unemployment rate had just breached the 6 percent mark. Even though that percentage remained a far cry from Great Depression levels, the economists interviewed on the news broadcast all predicted that the worst was yet to come. It seemed inevitable that the rural area through which I was driving, hit hard by the Great Depression, would again bear the brunt of the impending recession. That 1929 stock-market crash, as we will see, caused no small havoc in the life of Earl Biggers.

  It was sunset when I crossed the state line separating Ohio from Indiana. Shadows grew longer on the ground. The last rays of the sun burned the edges of the clouds as hot as prairie fire. Over the western horizon, atop rolling hills, the sun hung like a Chinese lantern, about to be extinguished.

  11

  Lampoon

  THE SIGNET HOUSE, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS (Photo by Ian Graham, courtesy of the Signet Society)

  I park my car in Harvard Yard.

  —Anonymous

  AT THE DAWN of the twentieth century, Harvard University was in the waning days of what George Santayana termed “The Genteel Tradition.” The unprecedented forty-year reign of President Charles W. Eliot would come to an end in 1909, six years after Earl Biggers graduated from Warren High School and matriculated at Harvard. In 1910, William James, father of American psychology and pragmatism, would die. Santayana himself, who had arrived on a horse and buggy as an immigrant from Spain, would resign from his professorial post at Harvard in 1912 and leave the country for good.

  Popular culture, eroding the gap between the high-brow and the low-brow, also made inroads into the ivory tower alongside the Charles River. Biggers, a youngster from the cornfields of Ohio—short, round, dark, bright-eyed, with a friendly manner—was perhaps the best representative of such a change of tide in American culture. The freshman Biggers showed little passion for the classics. In a few years, the fifty-volume Harvard Classics, edited by Charles Eliot, would grace the living rooms of American households aspiring to the upper class. Eschewing the likes of Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf, Biggers preferred Rudyard Kipling and Richard Harding Davis, and he considered Franklin P. Adams a better storyteller than Oliver Goldsmith. A professor who heard his announced preferences in class bemoaned, “Oh, Biggers, Biggers, why will you be so contemporary?!”1

  On evenings when refined Harvard classmen were reciting Keats and Shelley to one another over shots of brandy and sherry, they would jokingly urge Biggers to leave the room.2 When T. S. Eliot, who entered Harvard during Biggers’s senior year, was contemplating the composition of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in which the speaker is too nervous to approach women at a party, Biggers had an entirely different literary treatment of the same topic. In Eliot’s poem, now a classic of high modernism, the “I,” balding and thin-limbed, lingers forever over a series of self-doubting questions. Drafts of Eliot’s poem were subtitled “Prufrock among the Women.” Like Biggers, who might have taken the name “Charlie Chan” from a Chinese-laundry sign seen in his younger years, Eliot was said to have borrowed “Prufrock” from the name of a furniture company called Prufrock-Littau, near his birthplace in St. Louis. But Eliot added a mysterious initial “J” to the fictional name “Alfred Prufrock,” just to make it sound more aristocratic. By contrast, Biggers’s winning entry in the Harvard Advocate’s contest for the best “pick-up” story was sold to a popular magazine for $25.3 The future creator of Charlie Chan and the future Nobel laureate were obviously traveling on different express trains with not the slightest chance for a collision.

  Even though his unabashed populist taste clashed with the literary pretensions of his classmates, Biggers joined several Harvard societies, including the prestigious Signet Club and the Lampoon. The Signet, founded in 1870, is perhaps the most elitist literary society on campus. Dedicated to the production of literary work (and later expanded to include music), the Signet boasts members who have defined twentieth-century American literature: T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, James Agee, Wallace Stevens, Norman Mailer, John Updike, and John Ashbery, to name just a few. The Lampoon is decidedly a more mixed bag—its notable alumni include William Randolph Hearst, George Santayana, Robert Benchley, John Reed, Conan O’Brien, and numerous writers and producers of television comedies and feature films that have defined American humor: The Simpsons, Saturday Night Live, Seinfeld, Futurama, and The Office. The odd mixture in these clubs of future movers and shakers—high and low, elitist and populist—speaks volumes to the reach of the rising popular culture, and to the fact that what Thorstein Veblen called the “leisure” class was losing its monopoly over American culture.

  I will never forget my first and only visit to the Signet Club. It was in the spring of 2000, my first year as an assistant professor at Harvard. One of my students, a Signet member, had invited me to lunch at the clubhouse on Dunster Street. Entering this charming yellow house tucked away on the fringe of Harvard Square, I noticed an ornate coat of arms, the signet ring, hanging above the front door, where I was greeted by my student and her fellow club members—all undergrads except for one elderly gentleman, who was standing in the far corner of the reception room. When I inquired about the many dried roses hanging on the walls, my student explained that it is the tradition of the society that, upon induction, each new member receives a red rose. It is to be kept, dried, and returned to the socie
ty upon publication of the member’s first substantial literary work. Particularly noteworthy to me was T. S. Eliot’s rose, enshrined with his original acceptance letter.

  My student, a six-foot blonde whose elegant manners recalled, say, a charming heroine from a Henry James novel, continued to give me the inside scoop about Signet treasures, such as the famous pipe once owned by William Faulkner that allegedly had been used by some adventurous undergrads to smoke pot; and the handwritten poem by Santayana in the ladies’ room, to which I would, regrettably, have no access.

  It was right at this point that the elderly, gray-haired gentleman approached me and introduced himself: “How do you do? S—P—, ’57.” The diplomat part of me quickly shook his extended hand, and I was able to reply, “Hi, I’m Yunte Huang. Nice to meet you.” But part of me was rendered speechless. Other than the formulaic, “Nice to meet you,” applicable almost anywhere, I had no answer to his self-introduction, “S—P—, ’57.” For me to say, “Yunte Huang, Peking University, ’87,” would have seemed to challenge the niceties of the exchange. His “’57” meant that he was a member of the class of 1957, of no other university than Harvard. What’s absent in the information should be taken for granted—an implied context of parlor talk, hidden as a secret badge but obvious as daylight. Making this succinct self-introduction, either he assumed I was a member of that community who would be able to reply without ambiguity—“Yunte Huang, ’87”—or he was putting me on the spot by asserting his insider status.

  Between our introductions, a gulf had opened, a chasm so wide that neither of us seemed able to reach over and compare notes from our life experiences. He was, as I learned from our brief chat in the room decorated with dried roses, a retired English professor from a Boston-area college. He had been educated at Harvard, both as an undergrad and as a graduate student, and had been a member of the Signet since his junior year. By contrast, I suspect I must have seemed to him like a social upstart, getting to where I was not by entitlement but by luck—or, even worse, by the magic wand of equal opportunity.