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

by Huang, Yunte

  The most famous incarnation of Fu Manchu was the 1932 MGM film The Mask of Fu Manchu, featuring Boris Karloff. The story involves Fu Manchu’s attempt to recover the legendary sword and armor of Genghis Khan, whose conquest of the West in the Middle Ages was an inspiration for the evil doctor. Karloff, fresh from his breakout role in the 1931 Frankenstein movie, played Fu Manchu as an Asian Frankensteinian monster so skillfully that he propelled both the character and the film into cult status. With its campy humor, Grand-Guignol sets, and torture sequences, The Mask featured Myrna Loy as Fu Manchu’s daughter, Fah Lo See, with whom he appears to have an incestuous relationship.

  In later decades, Asian American critics would note the references to incest and other sexual transgressions ascribed to Fu Manchu and often commented on the demeaning depictions of Asian men. “Unlike the white stereotype of the evil black stud, Indian rapist, Mexican macho,” Frank Chin writes, “the evil of the evil Dr. Fu Manchu was not sexual but homosexual…. Dr. Fu, a man wearing a long dress, batting his eyelashes, surrounded by muscular black servants in loin-cloths, and with his bad habit of caressingly touching white men on the leg, wrist, and face with his long fingernails, is not so much a threat as he is a frivolous offense to white manhood.”12

  Sadly, fictional representation, no matter how false or tortured, has a strange way of making a claim on reality. By 1932, Fu Manchu had become a household name, and many even believed in his physical existence, in the same way that the British Post Office was for years saddled with letters addressed to Mr. Sherlock Holmes at 221B Baker Street. At the peak of Fu Manchu’s notoriety, a threatening letter once was sent to an employee of the U.S. State Department and signed “President of the Si-Fan.” The FBI conducted an investigation but could find no information about this secret organization.13 As recently as 2008, during the Summer Olympics in Beijing, the fourteen-time gold-medalist swimmer, Michael Phelps, was reported to have shaved off his “Fu Manchu beard” prior to the games to ensure top speed in the water. Yet the same menacing beard had returned a few months later, when a British tabloid showed him smoking a bong. Perhaps it was this satanic growth of facial hair that caused the hapless Phelps to try weed? What is more certain is that the Chinaman image of Fu Manchu, like that of Charlie Chan, is firmly ingrained in popular cultural memory.

  In his lifetime, Rohmer, the Saxon knight on a mission, wrote thirteen Fu Manchu books, making him one of the most widely read and highly paid writers of popular fiction in the world. As an author who made a career out of fictionalizing the “inscrutable” and “insidious” East, Rohmer died in 1959 in an ironic way: While traveling in the United States, Rohmer caught what the alarmed news media called the “Asiatic flu.” The illness would begin as a feverish cold and pass quickly, “leaving the victim in an odd state of weakness during which the slightest overstrain produced complete and fatal collapse. Nothing quite like it had appeared before; no one seemed to know anything about it.”14 Coming out of Asia, this incurable, mysterious flu claimed the lives of many victims, including Rohmer, the man who specialized in making the Orient demonic.

  “I made my name on Fu Manchu because I know nothing about the Chinese,” Rohmer once famously said. “I know something about Chinatown. But that is a different matter. Nowadays, I like to think that a Chinese and a Chinaman are not the same thing.”15 Despite the author’s disclaimer, Fu Manchu the Chinaman, inspired by that most reliable of prognostications, the Ouija board, has lived on as a Chinese archetype in popular culture. And Rohmer insisted that the conflation of image and reality, stereotype and type, was not the work of him or his fellow travelers: “When I began writing, ‘Chinaman’ was no more than the accepted term for a native of China. The fact that it has taken on a derogative meaning is due mostly to the behavior of those Chinamen who lived in such places as Limehouse.”16 Such a double demonization—portraying London’s Chinese citizens as bad and blaming the negative image on their bad behavior—was typical of the Chinatown literature of the twentieth century’s early decades. It would, however, provide a fitting contrast for Charlie Chan. As we will see, the honorable detective from Honolulu would have to compete with the evil doctor in a struggle for center stage, to determine which Chinaman would become foremost in the West’s popular imagination.

  16

  Charlie Chan, the Chinaman

  COVER DESIGN FOR E. D. BIGGERS’S THE HOUSE WITHOUT A KEY, 1925 (Courtesy of Lilly Library, Indiana University)

  World is large, me lowly Chinaman.

  —Charlie Chan

  IT WAS CALLED the Jazz Age, an era that commenced with the 1918 Armistice and ended with the Great Crash of 1929. The American nation experienced social changes and dislocations as profound and unsettling as any since the Civil War. Perhaps no change was as dramatic as the proliferation of the automobile, which brought an end to the horse-and-buggy era. The national registration of motor vehicles rose from fewer than six million to more than twenty-three million. Industrial production increased overall by almost 50 percent, the national income grew from $79.1 billion to almost $88 billion, and the purchasing power of American wages increased at a rate of 2 percent annually. Stimulated by salesmanship and advertising, Americans bought newfangled automobiles, radios, washing machines, refrigerators, toasters, sewing machines, and vacuum cleaners at a rate that challenged the capacity of the country’s fast-expanding factories. During this period of unprecedented prosperity and consumption, America, to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history.”1

  Such a rosy picture of the Roaring Twenties cannot, however, overshadow the fact that this was also one of the most racist and xenophobic eras in American history. Nostalgic images of flappers can be most misleading. Not everyone danced as fast as they could. Nativist frenzy, Ku Klux Klan activity, and the passage of the infamous 1924 Johnson-Reed Act—all contributed to the era’s reputation as a narrow-minded “tribal period.” It is remarkable, then, that the fictional Charlie Chan would enter the American imagination when xenophobia was so prevalent. For this reason, many of his detractors have regarded Chan as no more than a “personality reduced to a Chinese takeout menu,” a Yellow Uncle Tom, the flip side of that racist coin with the insidious Fu Manchu in the front. But Charlie Chan should not be confused with Fu Manchu, and such reductive portrayals miss the subtleties and complexities of Chan as a unique Chinaman.

  Like a multilayered Chinese box, Chan is a character whose strength and virtue extend well beyond a mere chimera of the benign Chinaman in Western fantasy. Like all racialized figures—including Uncle Tom, Aunt Jemima, John Chinaman, Ah Sin, Nigger Jim, and Fu Manchu—Chan bears the stamp of his time, a birthmark that encapsulates both the racial tensions and the creative energies of a multicultural nation. Strikingly, the Chan character—the consummate Chinaman—entered the world as the 1924 Immigration Act (Johnson-Reed Act) was being signed into law.

  The passage of this 1924 exclusionary act resulted from several key factors, including the rise of nativism, America’s transition from an agricultural to an industrial nation, and the changing structure of global geopolitics. Nativism—defined as an intense opposition to internal minorities on the ground of their presumed “foreign” connections—has a long and tortured history in American culture.2 Sometimes barely distinguishable from racial prejudice, nativist sentiments found ample expression in the anti-Chinese, anti-Irish, and anti-Italian movements of the nineteenth century. At the dawn of the twentieth century, especially during the Progressive Era, nativism lost some of its energy as many chose to celebrate America as a melting pot. But the outbreak of World War I put an end to the American dream and unleashed strong waves of patriotism and xenophobia. Demand for unity, hatred of Germans, and fear of Bolshevism each contributed to nativism’s resurgence, a sentiment that lingered on even after the war. Theodore Roosevelt’s famous motto of “America for Americans,” the grassroots campaign of “100 Per Cent Americanism,” and the rather comical renaming of sauerkraut as �
��liberty cabbage,” were just a few symbols of the nationalist fervor of the time.

  In fact, with the war as catalyst, nativism developed unstoppable momentum. In 1916, Madison Grant, a leading nativist, published The Passing of the Great Race, a book that would set the benchmark for the era’s racial discourse. Grant argued passionately that there is a three-tiered hierarchy of Mediterraneans, Alpines, and Nordics within the white race; Americans are Nordics, and any mixture with the other two would lead to a destructive process of “mongrelization.”3 New editions of Grant’s book appeared after the war and enjoyed a substantial vogue, selling about sixteen thousand copies between 1921 and 1923. Major newspapers and journals published editorials endorsing the book. America’s most widely read magazine, the Saturday Evening Post (in which Charlie Chan would make his debut when The House Without a Key was serialized in 1925), actively and consistently commended Grant’s racial doctrines in the years leading up to the Johnson-Reed Act.4 As the spiritual bellwether of nativism, Grant inspired a bevy of popular writers and academic scholars, among whom the most influential was Lothrop Stoddard. A Massachusetts lawyer with a Ph.D. in history from Harvard, Stoddard published The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy in 1920. Drawing on Grant’s three-tier theory, Stoddard suggested that the Nordics, as the best stock, should be preserved by way of eugenics. Stoddard was less concerned about variety within the white race, however, than about the threat coming from the colored races. He warned that the rapid multiplication of the yellow and brown races would soon enable them to overwhelm the white world and topple white supremacy.

  Simultaneous with these articulations of racism from the late 1910s to the early 1920s was the founding, or resurrection, of a series of nativist, antiforeign organizations, including the American Protective League, American Legion, American Defense Society, and the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan, a long-defunct sect originally organized by ex-Confederates during Reconstruction to intimidate carpet-baggers and Negroes, suddenly came to life in late 1915, the year D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation was playing to great fanfare in movie theaters everywhere. Under the leadership of William J. Simmons, a former salesman and a mellifluent orator, the Klan spread like wildfire. By late 1923, the organization was claiming an aggregate membership of close to three million, with regional operations and affiliates in almost every state. The original mission of the Klan was to perpetuate white supremacy by putting down Negroes. In its twentieth-century reincarnation, however, the Klan had a much wider spectrum of agendas, ranging from anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism to Anglo-Saxon pride and hatred of foreigners. It comprised, in John Higham’s words, “the whole range of post-1919 nativism.” As a formidable force in national politics, the Klan became a major voice in calling for immigration restriction in order to keep the nation “free from all mongrelizing taints.”5

  In addition to these nativist pressures, tremendous advances in mechanization also enabled industries to reduce their reliance on immigrant labor. It was during the 1920s that America made a key transition from an agricultural society to an industrial one. In that decade, industrial capitalism matured to the point where more economic growth would come from technological advances in mass production than from continued expansion of manufacturing labor.6 In the past, it had been in the interest of big businesses and industries to lobby for more lenient immigration policies, but with machines replacing muscles on an unprecedented scale and efficiency accelerating as never before, they now had no more incentive to battle against exclusionist bills. Mechanization also brought an unintended benefit: machinery, as one business editor observed astutely, “‘stays put.’ It does not go out on strike, it cannot decide to go to Europe, or take a job in the next town.”7

  While domestic affairs on the ideological and economic fronts both favored exclusionism, global politics also contributed to the cause of immigration restriction. Xenophobia, which had reached a feverish pitch during the war, did not simply die out in November 1918. The dream of international collaboration, as reflected by Wilsonian idealism, was also short-lived; no sooner was the Treaty of Versailles signed than the League of Nations began to crumble. The result, according to Higham, “was an intense isolationism that worked hand in hand with nativism. By mid-1920, a general revulsion against European entanglements was crystallizing…. Policies of diplomatic withdrawal, higher tariffs, and more stringent immigration restriction were all in order.”8

  In the spring of 1924, with the blessing of President Calvin Coolidge—as bedrock a Calvinist as any president in the twentieth century—the bill ultimately called the Immigration Act was introduced by Representative Albert Johnson and Senator David Reed. Given the anxious climate of this time, it passed Congress with overwhelming support. President Coolidge, who had already lent his name to the nativist cause in a popular 1921 article on the Nordic theory and immigration restriction, swiftly signed the bill into law on May 26.9 Adopting the concept of national-origin quotas for the first time in U.S. immigration policy, the Immigration Act had three main components: restricting immigration to 150,000 people a year, establishing temporary quotas based on 2 percent of the foreign-born population in 1890, and excluding from immigration all persons ineligible for citizenship. It rejected the melting-pot concept of the previous decades and constructed a vision of the American nation that embodied a hierarchy of races and nationalities, serving mainly the interests of white Protestant Americans from northern European backgrounds, the Nordics.

  While the first two components of the law were meant to drastically reduce the number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe—the Mediterraneans and the Alpines—the last component in effect barred half of the world’s population, the Asiatics. But the law achieved more than exclusion; it did significant cultural harm from within. In fact, in 1924, “Asiatic” was a newly minted racial category, codified only a year earlier by the U.S. Supreme Court in U.S. v. Thind. Denying eligibility for citizenship to Bhagat Singh Thind, an Indian who claimed to be a white person based on his Aryan and Caucasian roots, the Court made a leap in racial logic in its ruling and lumped all peoples of Asian countries under the category of “Asiatic,” even though Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Koreans, Thais, Indonesians, and others represented discrete ethnic groups and, anthropologically speaking, different racial groups.10 Riding on the tailwind of this ruling, the 1924 Immigration Act conveniently condemned all Asians to the status of permanent foreigners. For those already living in the United States, their ties to their homelands were in effect severed, as other family members could not gain entrance to American shores, and they themselves could not become U.S. citizens.

  The passage of the Immigration Act, in the words of influential nativist Captain John Trevor, “marks the close of an epoch in the history of the United States.” Or, as Higham wrote in his classic work on American nativism, Strangers in the Land, “The country would never be the same again, either in its social structure or in its habits of mind. Although immigration of some sort would continue, the vast folk movements that had formed one of the most fundamental social forces in American history had been brought to an end. The old belief in America as a promised land for all who yearn for freedom had lost its operative significance.”11

  It was at this turning point in American culture that Charlie Chan, the aphorism-spouting Chinaman, entered the arena. I am not alluding to a cause-and-effect relation between President Coolidge’s signing of the bill in May and Biggers’s adding the Chan character to his novel-in-progress in the summer of that year; crude historical determinism is mostly a self-fulfilling prophesy, an insult to the magic of literary imagination. It cannot escape even a casual reader, however, that Charlie Chan bears the distinctive mark of the time: his exotic manners, his pidgin speech, his multitudinous family, and even his anti-Japanese sentiments. All are symptoms of a culture that had just closed its doors to the so-called foreigners.

  For readers of the Saturday Evening Post, the buzz over immigration must have still been
ringing in their ears when the chubby Chinese detective materialized on the magazine’s pages. Over the years, the Post, drumming for immigration constraints, not only had published editorials replete with quotes from Madison Grant and his ilk but also had hired Kenneth Roberts to do a series of immigration stories condemning “the good-for-nothing mongrels of Central America and Southeastern Europe.” In the days leading up to the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act, Roberts practically camped in the congressional committee’s offices while working on his immigration articles for the Post.12 Years later, Earl Biggers would claim that it was the enthusiastic reader responses to The House Without a Key that had pushed him to write more Chan novels. Obviously, in creating Charlie Chan, Biggers had his finger on the pulse of the nation.

  As we saw in chapter 14, when Charlie Chan makes his debut in the novel, he is described as a fat man with the chubby cheeks of a baby and the dainty step of a woman. His exotic appearance—ivory skin, short black hair, and slanting amber eyes—is so shocking to Miss Minerva Winterslip that she cannot help exclaiming, “But—he’s a Chinaman!” Later in the book, Biggers continues to play up the motif of Chan’s foreignness, his marked difference from characters with distinctively Anglo-Saxon names and cultural backgrounds, such as Minerva Winterslip and John Quincy. A blue-blooded Bostonian, John Quincy is initially skeptical of a Chinaman’s ability to find his uncle’s murderer. “Damn clever, these Chinese!” he tells his aunt, Miss Minerva. “You don’t mean to say you’ve fallen for that bunk. They seem clever because they’re so different.”13 “Racial difference” was a nativist shibboleth used to reject the melting-pot concept and justify racial exclusion.