Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History
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The end of the transcontinental railroad project also meant unemployment for the thousands of Chinese workers. Many of them went to San Francisco, a city that, in the words of Will Rogers, “was never a town.” After growing exponentially during the heat of the gold rush, San Francisco by 1870 had developed into “a locus of industry,” becoming the ninth-biggest manufacturing city in the United States. The Chinese population of the city had also soared, from 2,719 in 1860 to 12,022 in 1870. Most Chinese immigrants in America crammed into crowded urban neighborhoods and made their living in retail business, service, vice, or entertainment within the confines of Chinatowns. In San Francisco, they also fanned out and sought employment in the city’s booming manufacturing industry. By one account, nearly half of the workers in San Francisco’s factories in 1872 were Chinese.11
For employers, the advantage of hiring Chinese laborers was all too obvious: they were cheaper than white workers. Just as Mark Twain had pointed out in one of his Hawaiian letters, “You will not always go on paying $80 and $100 a month for labor which you can hire for $5.” While Twain’s numbers sound a bit exaggerated, it is a fact that by hiring the Chinese workers, the Central Pacific Railroad was able to reduce its labor costs by one-third. The competition from cheap Chinese workers produced white-labor resentment, as it had done previously in the mines. Racial antagonism was further exacerbated by the business owners’ practice of using Chinese replacements as a wedge for breaking strikes led by white workers. As a result, anti-Chinese riots erupted constantly in the American West, a region already notorious for violence.
While it is impossible to know how many Chinese were murdered or brutalized in isolated areas where the rule of law was a phantom, some of the worst outrages did not go unnoticed. The earliest recorded urban anti-Chinese riot took place in 1871 in Los Angeles, then a sleepy town of 5,728 souls, when twenty-one Chinese were shot, hanged, or burned to death by white mobs. One historian lists thirty-one California urban centers that experienced burnings of Chinese stores and homes and expulsions of Chinese residents in the 1870s. During an 1880 riot in Denver, a mob shouted death threats to the Chinese, overwhelmed the eight police officers on duty, and destroyed most of the buildings in Chinatown. Then they wrapped a rope around the neck of a Chinese laundryman, dragged him through the streets, and kicked and beat him to death. In another incident in 1885 in Rock Springs, Wyoming, a mob of 150 disgruntled white miners, armed with Winchester rifles, stormed into the Chinese quarter. They killed twenty-eight Chinese, wounded fifteen, and burned much of the district to the ground. According to one eyewitness, “the Chinamen were fleeing like a herd of hunted antelopes, making no resistance. Volley upon volley was fired after the fugitives. In a few minutes the hill east of the town was literally blue with hunted Chinamen.” Some linguists believe that the word hoodlum comes from the anti-Chinese cry of “huddle ’em,” a signal for mobs to surround and harass the Celestials.12
Vigilante violence was coupled with a series of anti-Chinese ordinances and legislation enacted by cities, states, and Congress. In the 1870s, San Francisco passed a number of ordinances with the stated intent to “drive [the Chinese] to other states to be their own educators against” further Chinese immigration. The Cubic Air Ordinance called for each tenement to have at least 500 cubic feet of air for each inhabitant. The city officials enforced the ordinance only in Chinatown and arrested not the predominantly white landlords but the Chinese tenants. The Laundry Ordinance set licensing fees punishingly high for Chinese laundries, charging them $15 every three months but only $2 or $4 for laundries run by whites.13
In the state of California, following the 1852 foreign miners’ license tax bill, the legislature passed an 1855 law entitled “An Act to Discourage the Immigration to this State of Persons Who Cannot Become Citizens Thereof.” In 1862, newly elected Republican governor Leland Stanford, whose railroad company would soon become the largest employer and exploiter of Chinese labor, used his inaugural address to decry “the presence among us of a degraded and distinct people,” and to call for “any constitutional action, having for its object the repression of the immigration of Asiatic races.” In the same year, the legislature passed “An Act to Protect Free White Labor against Competition with Chinese Coolie Labor, and Discourage the Immigration of Chinese into the State of California.” While an 1849 state statute had already provided that “No Black or Mulatto person, or Indian, shall be allowed to give evidence for or against a white man,” an 1854 ruling by the California Supreme Court added Chinese to the list and barred them from testifying.14 Most states had in the nineteenth century adopted the 1661 Maryland law against miscegenation, but the California version was designed to include the Chinese in the prohibition. As a white politician warned in 1878, “Were the Chinese to amalgamate at all with our people, it would be the lowest, most vile and degraded of our race, and the result of that amalgamation would be a hybrid of the most despicable, a mongrel of the most detestable that has ever afflicted the earth.” Two years later, the California legislature passed a bill to ban the marriage of any white person with a “negro, mulatto, or Mongolian.”15
Although some of these racist laws, such as the foreign miners’ license tax, were voided by the federal Civil Rights Act (the Enforcement Act) of 1870, the anti-Chinese movement gained momentum in post–Civil War America. As economic depression hit the country and led to job losses and labor strikes, Chinese immigration became a national issue. In 1879, President Rutherford B. Hayes—who had won the highly disputed 1876 election by one electoral vote but lost the popular vote to his opponent—placed what he called “the Chinese Problem” within the broad context of racial relations in America. He argued that the “Chinese invasion” was pernicious and should be discouraged. “Our experience in dealing with the weaker race—the Negroes and Indians,” he said, was not encouraging. The Chinese appeared to be a bigger threat because they were seen as intelligent and competitive, and their population was increasing. “I would,” Hayes concluded, “consider with favor any suitable measures to discourage the Chinese from coming to our shores.”16 Although Hayes ultimately would veto the so-called Fifteen Passenger Bill, which only allowed fifteen Chinese per ship to enter the United States, a landmark immigration bill was passed by Congress in May 1882, during the term of President Chester A. Arthur. Known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, the bill suspended the immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years and reconfirmed the inadmissibility of Chinese for citizenship. Renewed in 1892 and then extended in 1902 until its repeal in 1943, the exclusion led to a sharp decline in the Chinese population: from 105,465 in 1880 to 89,863 in 1900 to 61,639 in 1920.17 The bill was the first significant restriction on free immigration in U.S. history and the first immigration law to target a specific ethnic group. In the words of Senator George Frisbie Hoar, a Massachusetts Republican who was one of a handful of the bill’s opponents, “Chinese exclusion represented nothing less than the legalization of racial discrimination.” Hoar’s stance made him a target for scorn, especially in the western states. He was burned in effigy in Nevada, and California newspapers labeled him a “dwarf” and a “chicken-hearted Puritan of the east.”18
Recently, historians have pointed out that the exclusionist policy had as much to do with class tensions as with race. Ronald Takaki, in his monumental study of Asian American history, writes:
In fact, there was very little objective basis for the Congress to be worried about Chinese immigrants as a threat to white labor. The Chinese constituted a mere. 002 percent of the U.S. population in 1880. Behind the exclusion act were fears and forces that had little or no relationship to the Chinese…. The Chinese Exclusion Act was in actuality symptomatic of a larger conflict between white labor and white capital: removal of the Chinese was designed not only to defuse an issue agitating white workers but also to alleviate class tensions within white society.19
Whether class tension, economic necessity, or outright racism was the real cause for the passage of the bill—
most likely it was a combination of all three factors—the Chinese served as highly visible scapegoats for the social ills in the decades following the Civil War. Not surprisingly, the white working class resented “cheap Chinese labor” way out of proportion to the actual number of Chinese laborers. Nowhere was this racist sentiment captured more colorfully and cogently than in the poem “The Heathen Chinee,” by F. Bret Harte. Like his close friend Mark Twain, Harte was otherwise sympathetic to the plight of Chinese workers in the Western states, but he was also responsible for a work that would greatly enrich American racist vocabulary, particularly pertaining to the Chinese. Also known as “Plain Language from Truthful James,” the narrative poem, first published in September 1870 in Overland Monthly, was originally meant to be a parody of racial animosity toward the Chinese. It began with a plain-speaking “Truthful James” as the narrator:
Which I wish to remark—
And my language is plain—
That for ways that are dark
And for tricks that are vain,
The heathen Chinee is peculiar,
Which the same I would rise to explain
The second stanza introduces a prototype of a Chinaman whose name will become a “John Doe” for all Chinese in racist literature:
Ah Sin was his name;
And I shall not deny
In regard to the same
What that name might imply,
But his smile it was pensive and child-like
As I frequent remarked to Bill Nye.
The trio—James, Bill Nye, and Ah Sin—taking a break from their backbreaking toil in the minefield, are playing a card game, euchre, in which Ah Sin claims to be a beginner:
It was August the third
And quite soft was the skies,
Which it might be inferred
That Ah Sin was likewise;
Yet he played it that day upon William
And me in a way I despise.
Which we had a small game,
And Ah Sin took a hand;
It was Euchre. The same
He did not understand;
But he smiled as he sat by the table,
With the smile that was child-like and bland.
Bill, it turns out, is cheating, hiding cards inside his sleeve:
Yet the cards they were stocked
In a way that I grieve,
And my feelings were shocked
At the state of Nye’s sleeve;
Which was stuffed full of aces and bowers,
And the same with intent to deceive.
But for some reason, Ah Sin seems to have beginner’s luck, soundly beating them both:
But the hands that were played
By that heathen Chinee,
And the points that he made,
Were quite frightful to see—
Till at last he put down a right bower,
Which the same Nye had dealt unto me.
And here comes the moment of enlightenment: a question that would later be quoted over and over in the annals of American foreign-labor policy, a refrain that can still be heard today:
Then I looked up at Nye,
And he gazed upon me;
And he rose with a sigh,
And said, “Can this be?
We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor?”…
At this point, a mob, led by indignant Bill Nye, beat up Ah Sin, that heathen Chinee, who is actually a better cheater but has played dumb. According to Truthful James, Ah Sin has stacked twenty-four packs of cards up his sleeve. “I state but the facts,” James claims.
Which is why I remark,
And my language is plain,
That for ways that are dark,
And for tricks that are vain,
The heathen Chinee is peculiar—
Which the same I am free to maintain.20
Truth be told, Harte, who had reported sympathetically about the Chinese for newspapers in the region (Mark Twain lost his job because he did the same), intended the poem to be a satire about racial prejudice held by the likes of Truthful James and Bill Nye rather than an outright caricature of Ah Sin. The Irish working class, targets of ethnic slurs themselves, were often portrayed in literature of the period as the main instigators of racial discrimination against the Chinese, their chief competitors for menial jobs in minefields and railroads.
The poetic irony, however, was completely lost on mostly white readers who embraced Harte’s poem not as a satire but as an accurate depiction of the Chinese. Soon reprinted in the New York Evening Post, Prairie Farmer, New York Tribune, Boston Evening Transcript, Providence Journal, Hartford Courant, and Saturday Evening Post, Harte’s poem became a defining piece that shaped the American conception of the Chinese, making Harte one of the most popular American writers in 1870.
Harte himself would in later years call the poem “trash,” “the worst poem I ever wrote, possibly the worst poem anyone ever wrote.”21 But the damage was done, the image was sealed for American posterity, and key phrases from the poem have become commonplace sayings in American life since then. As a heathen Chinee, Ah Sin wears a queue, waxing tapers on his fingernails, with a soft, childlike expression; he cheats in “ways that are dark” at a card table and ruins American prospects with “Chinese cheap labor” in the workplace.
Poems and songs such as “The Heathen Chinee” appeared at a time when popular music was attracting a mass audience and songsters were crafting new tunes to satisfy demand. These ditties were recited and sung around campfires, in parlors and saloons, and at political rallies. Harte’s poem, in particular, was recited in public among opponents of Chinese immigration. Eugene Casserly, a senator from California who was “vehemently opposed to the admission of Chinese labor,” wrote Harte to thank him for supporting his legislative agenda.22 The profound ways in which a poem like “The Heathen Chinee” had molded American minds and attitudes would only be matched by the influences of Charlie Chan novels and films, which struggled against the legacy of earlier songs and poems.
In 1931, when Earl Biggers was contemplating the title for his sixth Charlie Chan novel, he had actually considered adopting Harte’s “Heathen Chinee” catchphrase, “Ways That Are Dark.” The idea had originally come from a press agent at the Fox Film Corporation (predecessor of Twentieth Century-Fox). In February 1931, Fox was producing a movie version of Biggers’s fifth Chan novel, Charlie Chan Carries On, with the Swedish actor Warner Oland debuting in the leading role. In his communication with Biggers, Willoughby Speyers of Fox’s press department wrote, “Incidentally, could you use the Bret Harte—heathen Chinee phrase of ‘Ways that are dark’ as a possible title for some forthcoming exploits? It doesn’t seem to have ever been used as a film title, though of course it may have been used for a book.”
Two days later, Biggers wrote to Laurence Chambers at Bobbs-Merrill: “The enclosed letter from the Fox press department is in answer to some data about Charlie I sent them at their request…. ‘Ways That Are Dark’ is not a bad title for a mystery, but I feel sure it must have been used before. Besides, it might be dangerous to accept a title from a press agent.”
Sensing an opportunity, Chambers immediately looked into the matter and within days sent Biggers a reply: “‘Ways That Are Dark’ is a pretty slick title, and the Publishers Weekly office says it has not been used before on a book.”23
The idea stuck with Biggers for quite a while when he was working on what eventually would be published in 1932 as Keeper of the Keys, in which a main character is a Chinese houseboy named Ah Sing. Biggers explained to Chambers why he had opted not to adopt Harte’s phrase, even though he had named a character after the poem’s protagonist: “I think KEEPER OF THE KEYS the best title. For a while I feared it might tip off the ending. But I guess we can chance that. I’ll hold WAYS THAT ARE DARK up my sleeve. I fear that, used on this one, it would shove Ah Sing into too much prominence. I don’t want him to overshadow Chan.”24
Charlie Chan might have narrowly escaped
a damning title for his last story and avoided the humiliation of being outshone by Ah Sing, but the American cultural landscape offered few hiding places where he could avoid racial humiliation and negative stereotypes. Museum exhibitions and minstrel shows, for example, provided prominent, pre-cinema venues for the display of visual caricatures of exotic Chinese. In 1784, the same year the Empress of China docked in Canton, Peale’s Museum in Philadelphia displayed Chinese curiosities among its collections of objects from Africa and India. Among the items were everyday utensils, weapons, and bric-a-brac. Best of all was a collection of wrappings used to bind Chinese women’s feet and accompanying tiny shoes and slippers.25 The success of Peale’s soon inspired similar exhibit openings elsewhere, including Salem, Massachusetts, and New York City. But what astounded the museum world half a century later was the appearance of Chang and Eng, the “Siamese twins.”
Born in Siam (now Thailand) of Chinese ancestry in 1811, the Bunker brothers were joined at the sternum by a piece of cartilage with a fused liver. They were discovered by British merchant Robert Hunter and taken, like zoo specimens, on a world tour. The twins, combining the exotic with a rare physical anomaly, were first displayed in 1829 at Peale’s, where they caused a stir, especially in a century when the study of phrenology was very popular. After successfully touring the United States and England for a decade, the twins “retired” to Wilkesboro, a county seat in western North Carolina, where they established themselves as landed Southern gentry. They purchased two farms, built two separate residences, and became slaveholders. In 1843, Chang and Eng married the Yates sisters, Sarah and Adelaide, and between them fathered twenty-two children. The twins died on the same day in 1874, Chang first and Eng a few hours later.