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

by Huang, Yunte

  Even as he slowly warms up to Chan and recognizes the talent of the Chinese detective, Quincy still feels an insurmountable racial and cultural barrier between them. In the course of the investigation, Quincy discovers that his uncle Dan used to be a “blackbirder”—a slave and coolie trader—in the Pacific, a sordid past that may have had something to do with Dan’s murder. But, sitting across a table from Chan at a dingy Chinese restaurant in Honolulu, Quincy hesitates to reveal the vital information that may help solve the case. He is concerned that the revelation would hurt his family pride in front of a Chinaman: “His dilemma was acute. Must he here in this soiled restaurant in a far town reveal to a Chinaman that ancient blot on the Winterslip name?” Ignoring Chan’s earlier warning—“All cards should repose on table when police are called upon”—Quincy keeps mum and causes considerable delay in the case.14

  Toward the end of the book, when the murder mystery is about to be unveiled, Quincy arrives at Chan’s home on an urgent errand. Entering the bungalow on Punchbowl Hill, Quincy observes the detective in all his foreignness: “In this, his hour of ease, he wore a long loose robe of dark purple silk, which fitted closely at the neck and had wide sleeves. Beneath it showed wide trousers of the same material, and on his feet were shoes of silk, with thick felt soles. He was all Oriental now, suave and ingratiating but remote.” The interior decoration of Chan’s house widens the cultural gap between the two men. “Beneath the picture stood a square table, flanked by straight, low-backed armchairs. On other elaborately carved teakwood stands distributed about the room were blue and white vases, porcelain wine jars, dwarfed trees. Pale golden lanterns hung from the ceiling; a soft-toned rug lay on the floor. John Quincy felt again the gulf between himself and Charlie Chan.”15 The seemingly unbridgeable difference resonates with a poetic line by Rudyard Kipling, a line frequently quoted by American nativists in their push for exclusion: “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”

  Nothing, however, marks Chan’s foreignness more than his pidgin speech and his rat-a-tat fortune-cookie aphorisms. As a character, Charlie Chan belongs in the pantheon of überdetectives with the likes of Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe, and Hercule Poirot—all wise gentlemen with unforgettable idiosyncrasies. Holmes, a cocaine addict, is the incarnation of human rationality, verging on cold-bloodedness. Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled private investigator, has a knack for flushing out liars and a thing for ladies’ legs. And Poirot, Agatha Christie’s eggheaded, toupee-topped, and mustachioed Belgian sleuth, takes funny penguinlike steps and acts like a seasoned, hot-tempered hairdresser with finicky habits.

  Among this elite crowd, Charlie Chan wears a uniquely ethnic badge: his Chineseness, which is manifested above all in the manner of his speech. While the imitation of Chinese pidgin had a long tradition in American popular literature that went back to the days of John Chinaman and Ah Sin, Earl Biggers took the linguistic mimicry to a new level. In The House Without a Key, Chan’s ungrammatical first utterance, like the first note of a musical composition, sets the tone for the singsong, Peking Opera–like vocalization we will hear from him thereafter: “No knife are present in neighborhood of crime.” This is followed immediately by a verbal tussle between Chan and the prejudiced Miss Minerva:

  “The person who did this must be apprehended,” she said firmly.

  He looked at her sleepily. “What is to be, will be,” he replied in a high, sing-song voice.

  “I know—that’s your Confucius,” she snapped. “But it’s a do-nothing doctrine, and I don’t approve of it.”

  A faint smile flickered over the Chinaman’s face. “Do not fear,” he said. “The fates are busy, and man may do much to assist. I promise you there will be no do-nothing here.” He came closer. “Humbly asking pardon to mention it, I detect in your eyes slight flame of hostility. Quench it, if you will be so kind. Friendly cooperation are essential between us.”16

  As we see, Chan’s sentences often lack subjects, nouns lack articles, and verbs are not conjugated correctly. His grammar is so comically and idiosyncratically mangled that it soon becomes a trademark of Chanism. In the 1976 spoof Murder by Death, a movie with an all-star cast (Truman Capote, Peter Sellers, Peter Falk, James Coco, Eileen Brennan, and so on) and ample pastiches of supersleuths (Sidney Wang/Charlie Chan, Sam Diamond/Sam Spade, Milo Perrier/Hercule Poirot, and others), Chan’s habitual slaughtering of English grammar finally prompts a retort from Capote’s wall-mounted moose head: “Use the article!”

  Interestingly, Chan’s troubles with grammar—or what he calls “my reckless wanderings among words of unlimitable English language”17—enable Biggers to craft some Chanisms that border on comedy, absurdity, and poetry. “Endeavoring to make English language my slave,” as Chan tells John Quincy, “I pursue poetry.”18 A grandmaster of circumlocution like Henry James might even envy Chan some of his colorful sentences, such as: “Relinquish the fire-arms, or I am forced to make fatal insertion in vital organ belonging to you,” “Let us not shade the feast with gloomy murder talk,” “Story are now completely extracted like aching tooth,” and “Is it that you are in the mood to dry up plate of soup?”

  Among the famous fictional detectives, Hercule Poirot perhaps comes closest to Chan in also having a distinguishable, though not as memorable, manner of speech. Agatha Christie, a British hospital nurse during World War I, created Poirot’s character in her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, published in 1920. Even though there is no evidence that Christie and Biggers influenced each other in any way, they did have something in common on their résumés: both became best-selling authors by creating a distinctively “foreign” detective character in an era when wartime xenophobia was a very recent memory. Like pidgin-speaking Charlie Chan, Christie’s Belgian sleuth, when agitated, also flounders in a comical version of English: “I demand of you a thousand pardons, monsieur. I am without defense. For some months now I cultivate the marrows. This morning suddenly I enrage myself with these marrows. I send them to promenade themselves—alas! not only mentally but physically. I seize the biggest. I hurl him over the wall. Monsieur, I am ashamed. I prostrate myself.”19

  Occasionally, there are also linguistic infelicities in Poirot’s speech, as seen in the following dialogue:

  “I thank you, no,” said Poirot, rising. “All my excuses for having deranged you.”

  “Not at all, not at all.”

  “The word derange,” I remarked, when we were outside again, “is applicable to mental disorder only.”

  “Ah!” cried Poirot, “never will my English be quite perfect. A curious language. I should then have said disarranged, n’est ce pas?”

  “Disturbed is the word you had in mind.”20

  Poirot is allegedly well read in British Romantic poetry: he once exposes the cover of a suspect posing as a John Keats expert by intentionally misquoting from memory a line by Percy Shelley; and he is often seen reading a volume by William Wordsworth. Given such a literary background, Poirot’s linguistic blunders seem much less credible than those verbal slips of Charlie Chan, who allegedly received no formal education but worked his way up in the world from the humble position of a houseboy.

  In addition to their shared linguistic difficulties, the Belgian and Chinese detectives have something else in common: their penchant for proverbs. But this seeming similarity will ultimately set them apart. Unlike Chan’s Chinese aphorisms, Poirot relies exclusively on well-known English proverbs as he addresses native English speakers. “And there came your proverb,” Poirot once said to an Englishman, “the death of the goose that laid the golden eggs.” Or, another time, “It’s better late than never, as you English say.” Due to their familiarity, Poirot’s proverbs sound very plain and their meanings quite precise.

  By contrast, Charlie Chan’s pseudo-Confucian aphorisms, which he dishes out as the occasion demands, are often intended more to baffle than to enlighten his interlocutors. Their confounding effect derives less from t
he semantic opacity of these sayings than from the unfamiliarity of their origin. In The House Without a Key, most of Chan’s fortune-cookie sayings may be easy enough to understand semantically, such as “Patience are a very lovely virtue,” “A picture is a voiceless poem,” and “Appearance are a hellish lie.” What makes them sound grating on a reader’s ear is their unfamiliarity in the English language, a sense of being off-key that is compounded by the pidgin. It takes a cosmopolite like Miss Minerva to figure out both the philosophical meaning and the Confucian origin of a quote like “What is to be, will be.” Others are not so lucky. In The Black Camel (published in 1929), for example, Chan confronts an arrogant and insulting suspect by pulling out a spicy item from his proverbial stock:

  Jaynes pushed forward. “I have important business on the mainland, and I intend to sail at midnight. It is now past ten. I warn you that you must call out your entire force if you propose to keep me here—”

  “That also can be done,” answered Charlie amiably.

  “Good lord!” The Britisher looked helplessly at Wilkie Ballou. “What kind of place is this? Why don’t they send a white man out here?”

  A rare light flared suddenly in Charlie’s eyes. “The man who is about to cross a stream should not revile the crocodile’s mother,” he said in icy tones.

  “What do you mean by that?” Jaynes asked.21

  Chan seems to know the effect of his talk, which is at best only half-comprehensible to many of his listeners. He enjoys forcing people to ask, as Jaynes does, “What do you mean by that?” or “What does it mean in English?” although he is speaking English, pidginized English. The psychological advantage he gains by baffling people is one of his hidden weapons in the sleuthing business. “The secret,” as he tells a fellow police officer in Keeper of the Keys, “is to talk much, but say nothing.”22

  Charlie’s secret seems to work against the grain of common assumptions about aphorism. Like its cousins—maxim, proverb, adage, epigram, axiom, dictum, and so on—aphorism is meant to achieve the greatest meaning with the fewest words. Civilizations were founded on the cornerstones laid by great thinkers whose doctrines have been crystallized into a body of memorable sayings, such as Heraclitus’s “You cannot step twice into the same river,” and Confucius’s “The nature of man is always the same; it is their habits that separate them.” The post-Renaissance, early modern world also boasted such master aphorists as Francis Bacon, Montaigne, Goethe, and even Benjamin Franklin, born in Boston in 1706. Bacon, for instance, writes specifically of aphoristic virtue:

  The writing in aphorisms hath many excellent virtues, whereto the writing in Method doth not approach. For first, it trieth the writer, whether he be superficial or solid: for Aphorisms, except they should be ridiculous, cannot be made but of the pith and heart of sciences; for discourse of illustration is cut off: recitals of examples are cut off; discourse of connection and order is cut off; descriptions of practice are cut off. So there remaineth nothing to fill the Aphorisms but some good quantity of observation: and therefore no man can suffice, nor in reason will attempt to write Aphorisms but he that is sound and grounded.23

  Bacon’s notion exemplifies the traditional belief that behind the seeming fragmentation of aphorisms lies a larger truth. And such a mother ship of truth guarantees the integrity of these adorable, spattering babies of wisdom, babies who can see through the emperor’s new clothes.

  Benjamin Franklin, who published the Pennsylvania Gazette (which the Saturday Evening Post claims as its forerunner), is perhaps the most significant aphorist in American history. As “Poor Richard” Saunders, Franklin composed, recast, or simply plundered countless aphorisms and stuffed them into his tremendously popular books. Many of these sayings, such as “God helps them that help themselves” and “A penny saved is a penny earned,” have been built into the foundation of American wisdom. Most readers of the Post, nurtured in their youth on Franklin’s aphorisms, must have found it striking to read a Chinaman’s proverbial wisecracking in the magazine’s pages. There is wisdom in Chan’s sayings. In fact, many Chanisms are quite profound and funny, such as “Aged man should not consort with ruffians. Eggs should not dance with stones,” “Talk will not cook rice,” “Can you borrow a comb in a Buddhist monastery?” and “The fool in a hurry drinks his tea with a fork.” But most Chanisms, contributing significantly to the charm of the character, sound too much like their generic cousins, fortune cookies, which are more symbols of exoticism than carriers of wisdom. In an age that had just legally codified Asians as foreigners, a pidgin-speaking, aphorism-spouting Charlie Chan would fit the label of “foreigner” like a glove.

  In addition, Charlie Chan’s obvious dislike for the Japanese reveals him as a product of the age. In remarks such as “Cooking business begins to get tiresome like the company of a Japanese,” Chan conveys anti-Japanese sentiments that may at first seem representative of the age-old animosity between the Chinese and the Japanese. However, considering the geopolitical climate of the 1920s, Chan was perhaps more a spokesperson for American rather than Chinese anti-Japanese racism. With the rise of Japan as a modern global power, the United States increasingly regarded this Asian nation as a menacing competitor. The Japanese were the main Asian target for the 1924 Immigration Act, because a series of anti-Chinese laws had, since 1882, effectively halted Chinese immigration. Chinese, thus, were no longer a threat, and the Yellow Peril found a new incarnation. This distinct anti-Japanese streak in the Chinese detective would continue to manifest itself in later Chan films, especially those produced during World War II.

  It is obvious that the character of Charlie Chan did not emerge from a vacuum. Inspired by the colorful exploits of the real-life, legendary Detective Apana, the fictional Chan was a creation that embodied the Zeitgeist of America in the 1920s. As he burrowed deeper into the American psyche, and as American culture underwent transformations over the ensuing decades, Charlie Chan would always stay on top of his game—as the iconic Chinaman.

  17

  Kaimuki

  CHANG APANA’S HOUSE, KAIMUKI, HAWAII (Photo by author)

  He don’t like us violate the law. He arrests his own brother even, you know.

  —Walter Chang, referring to his uncle, Chang Apana

  WHEN THE FIRST Charlie Chan novel was published in 1925, Chang Apana had already become the “Grand Old Man,” a nickname given him by his fellow officers at the Honolulu Police Department. According to John Jardine, who had joined the force two years earlier, at the age of twenty-two, and would later become a famous detective himself, Apana was “no longer sent out on ‘live’ cases but remained at the station to supervise trusties assigned to clean up the place.”1 “If the local police station is always ship shape,” said a Honolulu Police Department report, “it is the quiet efficiency of Chang [Apana] that is responsible.”2 When he did get called upon, the case usually would involve Chinatown or Chinese. The publication of The House Without a Key made Apana even more famous: Honolulu residents soon figured out the striking resemblance between Charlie Chan and their local legend. From then on, Apana became known as “Charlie Chan,” a moniker he readily accepted with a smile. He would happily autograph the Chan novels for any admiring locals and curious tourists. In recognition of his great service and superb performance, Apana was promoted to Second Grade Detective on April 1, 1925, followed by another promotion to First Grade Detective three years later.

  Young Jardine recalled that the table in the detectives’ room had an ornamental top made from black-and-white dominoes and mah-jongg pieces that Apana and others had seized in gambling raids in Chinatown. A reticent man, Apana disliked bragging about his illustrious past. “He has been in on the inside of many of the big cases at the police station,” reads an HPD report about Apana, “but no leaks have ever been traced to him.” When he did talk about some of the old cases from years back, Jardine said, “Young men like myself liked to listen.”3 But even when the stories were told, Apana tended to err on the sket
chy side; when his younger colleagues pestered him for more details, Apana would shake his head and say, “I could do it again. Just wait till they need a good man in an emergency.”4

  Under Captain John Kellett, the Detective Division consisted of twenty members, a mixture of old-timers like Apana and young rookies like Jardine. The diverse backgrounds of these detectives made the division look like the struggling League of Nations. John Nelson McIntosh had been born in Ireland and served in constabularies in South Africa and New Zealand before joining the force in Honolulu. Thomas J. Finnegan, another Irishman, had been a constable in Dublin before coming to Hawaii. Juan Oxiles had been a policeman in his native Philippines. Harry K. Noda, the smallest man on the entire force, who “looked half-asleep most of the time [but] in fact missed very little that went on,” was of Japanese ancestry. And Kam Kwai, who had been a member of the force since 1910, was half-Chinese and half-Hawaiian.5 All the detectives could speak at least two languages; one of them, named Stein, was fluent in eight languages. Jardine was the son of a Portuguese sailor who had come to the islands on a whaler. To become a cop, Jardine had had to take a physical exam and a written test in spelling, geography, and history at the eighth-grade level—a sign that things had changed at the HPD since the days when Apana, an illiterate man, had been allowed to join the force. As a rookie cop, Jardine walked some of the toughest beats in the city, including Aala Park and Hell’s Half Acre. Within a year, he was promoted to the Detective Division and began to learn the tricks of the trade from Apana and other veterans, one important technique being the necessity to cultivate stool pigeons. The HPD might have instituted educational requirements for hiring officers, but it still lagged in adopting modern scientific methods of crime detection and evidence analysis. The first lie detector, a small machine retired from service by the Berkeley, California, Police Department, did not arrive at the HPD until the spring of 1924.6 So, over the years, according to the recollection of fellow officer Joaquin Lum, Apana had received most of his clues from “an elaborate network of informants.”7 “Just like the harness cops,” Jardine wrote in his memoir, “the detectives built their own strings of stool pigeons. A man was only as good as his stool pigeons were.”8