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

by Huang, Yunte

  Several major mainland newspapers—including the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, and New York Herald Tribune—did carry respectful notices about the passing of the original Charlie Chan. Under the title “Chinese Detective, ‘Charlie Chan,’ Dead,” the obituary in the New York Times called him “one of Honolulu’s most picturesque characters.” The Los Angeles Times stated: “[Apana’s] greatest feats in detective work were in the old days of Chinese immigration when Hawaii was a hotbed of opium traffic. He was knifed and beaten in the line of duty, but never lost his courage. ‘He was the gamest creature I ever knew,’ was the comment of one of his brother officers.”18

  On Sunday, December 10, Apana’s funeral service, attended by several hundred people, was held at the Nuuanu Mortuary in downtown Honolulu. Afterward, the coffin was carried to the hearse by six pallbearers, all members of the HPD. Leading the funeral procession were “four motorcycle police officers, four mounted policemen, and two squads of officials on foot.” The Royal Hawaiian Band preceded the hearse, an honor reserved ordinarily for Hawaiian dignitaries. A handler led a white horse without a rider in the procession. It was supposedly the same mount used by the former detective while on active duty.19 Apana was buried with dignity in the Chinese Cemetery in Manoa Valley, along with his sapphire wedding ring and his police badge, number 100.20

  From his humble origins as a coolie laborer’s son to his career as one of the most legendary detectives in the country, Chang Apana had certainly trekked a very long way in life. And the same can be said of Earl Derr Biggers, born in the nineteenth century in a small Ohio town. After struggling to graduate from an elite college, he had then become one of the best-selling authors in the world. Both of their careers spanned a critical period when America emerged as a world power, when Hawaii evolved from an independent kingdom to a U.S. territory. The most unlikely of comrades, they together had given birth to an unforgettable character who is strangely both American apple pie and Chinese chop suey. Despite their sudden and untimely deaths, the American folk hero Charlie Chan would live on, immortalized as a symbol of both racial bias and cultural fantasy.

  25

  Racial Parables

  WARNER OLAND AND STEPIN FETCHIT IN CHARLIE CHAN IN EGYPT, 1935 (Courtesy of Everett Collection)

  British tenacity with Chinese patience like royal flush in poker game—unbeatable.

  —Charlie Chan

  WITH THE DEATHS of Earl Biggers and Chang Apana, there were no more original Charlie Chan stories to adapt for the screen. Earlier in 1931, Fox had tried to create its own scripts based on the Chan character, but Biggers had adamantly objected to the idea, saying, “I wouldn’t consent to that being done for any price whatever.”1 Now, with the passing of the author, Fox negotiated with Eleanor Biggers and, in early 1934, bought the screen rights to the character.

  At this time, William Fox’s company was in serious financial trouble. In fact, it was no longer Fox’s company, though it still bore his name. From the dingy Brooklyn nickelodeon he had bought in 1906, Fox had within two decades built one of the largest film empires in the world. In addition to distribution and production studios, the company had also created a chain numbering a thousand movie theaters by 1927. But a failed attempt to purchase MGM, a federal antitrust investigation, and the Great Crash did him in. In 1930, Fox was ousted from the company. Four years later, the Fox Film Corporation was still struggling, so it had high hopes for the Chan movies, as they were then, according to the Los Angeles Times, “the only successful feature series produced by Hollywood.”2

  The production team quickly set to work. They hired Philip MacDonald, a British mystery writer who was making a splash in America with his serial-killer novels, to write an original screenplay. They had the idea of launching the Chinese detective on a round-the-world trip of murder investigations. This scheme resulted in Charlie Chan in London (1934), followed the same year by Charlie Chan in Paris, both pictures inexpensive to make. As a gossip column in the Los Angeles Times reveals, “Being of simple story structure and dealing with elemental emotions, the films are quickly made, shot into the market and generally are well received at the box offices.”3

  Be that as it may, the third in the series, Charlie Chan in Egypt (1935), is perhaps one of the most controversial. In some ways, this film feels more like a racial parable than a detective mystery.4 With a young Rita Cansino (soon to be Hayworth) as an exotic, beautiful Egyptian maid, the film presents a multiethnic cast of characters—a Chinese, a black, a Jew, and an Arab—who are pitted against a cabal of arrogant and greedy white men. The plot involves the discovery of the tomb of the ancient Egyptian high priest Ameti, a burial ground that was supposedly protected by the god Sahkmet. Sent by the French Archaeological Society to investigate the possible smuggling of tomb artifacts, Charlie Chan, played again by Warner Oland, arrives in Egypt by plane and then by a donkey, which he calls the “offspring of Satan” after the animal throws him to the ground. Professor Arnold, the lead archaeologist, has been mysteriously missing for more than a month, only to be found by Chan in a mummy case by using an X-ray machine. In the course of the investigation, Chan also solves a second murder, in which a vial of poison gas, hidden in a violin, is designed to break at the pitch of a certain note.

  This slick and mysterious treachery pales, however, before the fantastic pairing of Chan with his black sidekick, Snowshoes, ingeniously and controversially played by Hollywood’s most famous black high-jinkser, Stepin Fetchit. In the film, Fetchit portrays a fez-wearing, hookah-puffing, and easily frightened Negro lackey who has come to Egypt because a fortune-teller in Mississippi once told him that’s where his ancestors came from. Foreshadowing the future duo of Sidney Toler’s Charlie Chan and Mantan Moreland’s Birmingham Brown, the interaction between the seemingly dimwitted Snowshoes and the supersharp Charlie, between “darkie” humor and “Chink” wisdom, actually adds, at least to many viewers, a distinct level of charm to a film that unfortunately has been reviled by subsequent critics on ideological grounds.

  Civil rights advocates in the 1960s sought to redress the grievous stereotyping of Negroes in American movies, and they saw Fetchit as a prime example. Prior to the 1930s, the stereotypes of blacks in American films ranged from toms, coons, tragic mulattoes, mammies, and brutal bucks to field jesters. During the Great Depression, with the long breadlines and severe labor problems, a new on-screen stereotype of blacks emerged to meet the demands of the time: servants. From Fetchit’s maligned handyman to Bill “Bojangles” Robinson’s smooth-as-silk butler, Louise Beavers’s jolly and submissive cook, and Paul Robeson’s lordly Pullman-car porter, these black servants, in the words of film historian Donald Bogle, “provided a down-hearted Depression age with buoyancy and jocularity.” With their degrading antics, ludicrous dialects, and incredible absurdities, the servants appeared to many at the time as “a marvelous relief from the harsh financial realities of the day. Not only their joy and zest but their loyalty, too, demonstrated that nothing in life was ever completely hopeless. The servants were always around when the boss needed them. They were always ready to lend a helping hand when times were tough.”5

  As the first distinctive black personality in American film history, Stepin Fetchit was the actor whose roles marked the transition from the old stereotypes to the new image. Born Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry in Key West, Florida, in 1902, Fetchit adopted the stage name after he performed a vaudeville act called “Step and Fetch It.” The name also fit well with the on-screen image he made famous: a plantation “darkie” who must step in (the Big House), fetch it, and then get out of the picture. When he joined Oland in the making of Charlie Chan in Egypt, Fetchit was at the height of his career. He had appeared in twenty-six films between 1929 and 1935 and sometimes was working in as many as four movies at a time. If Oland, a Scandinavian, was the top man for playing on-screen Orientals in the early 1930s, Fetchit was undoubtedly the best-known and most-successful black act
or in Hollywood. At a time when contracts for black actors were rare, Fetchit was signed and re-signed by the Fox Film Corporation, which also did much to exploit and publicize Fetchit’s flamboyant lifestyle: his six houses, sixteen Chinese servants, $2,000 cashmere suits, lavish parties, and twelve cars. Like a star athlete today, Fetchit was so popular in the 1930s that “Negro bootblacks and busboys were said to have imitated his notorious walk on the streets.”6

  In Charlie Chan in Egypt, Fetchit’s character, Snowshoes, exploits almost all the clichés about a so-called nitwit black man: he was won by his white boss in a crap game; he sits around all day in an easy chair, puffing on a hookah; he brandishes a straight razor during a scuffle; he has come to Egypt supposedly to look up his “grand-pappy” and he harbors a naïve sentiment toward life on postbellum Southern plantations as he sweet-talks his black girlfriend into going back with him to Mississippi, where they wouldn’t have to worry about getting jobs. Fetchit’s characterization is so overblown, flashy, and exaggerated that, as Ken Hanke puts it, “the very stereotypical images they ostensibly represent become mocked by the format in which they are confined.” Hanke, perhaps the most knowledgeable historian of Charlie Chan films, goes on to say, “One might go so far as to make the case that Stepin Fetchit was subversively antistereotypical.”7

  It would be hard to convince Fetchit’s detractors that his roles were antistereotypical, just as it would be difficult to make a case for Charlie Chan in front of a jury that has already categorically denied any artistic or cultural merit of yellowface by white actors. Yet, to echo the sentiment expressed by Donald Bogle in his study of black film history, the essence of blackface or yellowface is not found in the racial stereotype itself but rather in “what certain talented actors have done with the stereotype,” or what they have accomplished with even demeaning stereotyped roles.8 What Fetchit accomplished with the Snowshoes character was, in a nutshell, a portrait of what he himself termed the “lazy man with a soul.” Such a soulful person has, as Bogle puts it, become an integral part of the white household and involves himself in the affairs and troubles of his boss. He may still “be used for crude comic relief,” but at heart he is “a harmless creature” who at crucial moments will come through.9

  In Charlie Chan in Egypt, Snowshoes may be shoved around and yelled at by his white master, but it is he who is constantly relied upon; it is he who teams up with Chan, calls the police in time, and catches the guilty person in the act. His philosophical outlook on life, especially, is more in tune with Charlie Chan’s Oriental wisdom than with his white master’s greedy addictions. In fact, the whole film pitches colored—black, yellow, Arab—men against Anglo-European whites, with the former united by their interest in truth and justice and the latter condemned by their insatiable hunger for material wealth.10 Chan is only interested in hunting down the wrongdoer; Snowshoes is completely nonchalant about the priceless unearthed treasures; and the Arab butler, Edfu Ahmad, is trying to protect his own cultural heritage. By contrast, the Anglo-Europeans, pursuing the “treasures of an ancient civilization primarily for material gain,” have committed murder, larceny, and betrayal. At a telling moment in the film, Tom Evans, a headstrong, single-minded scholar, is able to translate the hieroglyphic symbols for “life” and “death” found inside the tomb, but he remains “insensitive to their meaning.” Chan, however, immediately figures out their deeper, philosophical resonance by referring to the Confucian notion that between life and death is the reach of a man.11 In the last scene of the film, Snowshoes, as the lazy man with a soul, completely shines through. When he asks Chan where he is going next, the latter dishes out a nice Chanism: “Journey of life like feather on stream—must continue with current.” Pretending not to understand, Snowshoes replies blankly, “I guess you are right, but I’m going with you.” Thus, Snowshoes, a seemingly dimwitted lackey, decides to follow a Chinaman’s path of spiritual enrichment rather than the white men’s expedition that has spawned nothing but death, sadness, and destruction.

  Produced in 1935, Charlie Chan in Egypt was a racial parable that appeared in a fraught and incendiary age in which the world seemed to be careening again toward war and cataclysm. Two years earlier, Hitler had seized power in Germany, Mao Zedong and his Red Army had begun the Long March, and Stalin had started purging his political rivals after the assassination of S. M. Kirov. As those who are familiar with the 1930s know, the Nuremberg Laws, enacted on September 15, 1935, deprived German Jews of citizenship and the swastika became the official symbol of Nazi Germany. On October 3, led by its dictator, Benito Mussolini, Italy invaded Abyssinia, while the next year, the Spanish Civil War ignited the flames of discontent across Europe. Charged with racial and ethnic tensions, the world seemingly was waiting to explode, and Hollywood would not fail to notice. According to an article published on October 19, 1935, in the industry’s flagship journal, Motion Picture Herald, “Hollywood is listening, even as the world listens to the newer rumblings of Mars on the Russo-Japanese border and on the waters at Malta and the Suez Canal.”12 If anything, setting Charlie Chan on a course of globe-trotting was a sure sign that both the filmmakers and the audience were turning their attention to events of a grave political nature, not just a murder on Waikiki Beach or a jewelry theft in the Mojave Desert.

  After London, Paris, and Egypt, Chan’s next stop would be Shanghai. Born in Canton half a century earlier, Chan was now, as he put it, “most anxious to renew acquaintance with land of honorable ancestors.”

  PART FIVE

  CHARLIE CHAN CARRIES ON

  CHARLIE CHAN’S BAR, SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA (Photo by Susan M. Schultz)

  26

  Charlie Chan in China

  CHINESE MOVIE POSTER FOR CHARLIE CHAN IN SHANGHAI, 1936 (Courtesy of Wei Zhang)

  I’m Anna May Wong

  I come from Old Hong Kong

  But now I’m a Hollywood Star

  —Anonymous1

  IN THE SPRING of 1936, the widowed Eleanor Biggers found herself traveling in Asia. On April 6, she sent a postcard from the Philippines to Laurance Chambers, her late husband’s publisher and close friend. On the back of a card depicting the Shanghai Bund, she wrote, “In Manila, at the [undecipherable] Theatre, ‘C.C.’s Secret’ is playing this week and ‘7 Keys to Baldpate’ announced for next. Huge posters of both adorn the building. Warner Oland is in Peiping, on vacation.”2

  Eleanor’s postcard gives us a precious glimpse of the tremendous popularity of Charlie Chan in Asia, even as early as the 1930s. Especially in areas of large ethnic-Chinese populations, such as mainland China, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia, the Chinese detective had amassed an enthusiastic following among movie fans who were supposedly his compatriots.

  In the early twentieth century, urban Chinese were quickly drawn to the newest form of mass entertainment, dianying (film; literally, electrical shadows). According to government reports, by 1927 there were 106 movie theaters in China, with a total seating capacity of about 68,000. These were divided among eighteen large cities, chiefly treaty ports. Shanghai, taking the lion’s share, had twenty-six cinemas and boasted the most lavish one of them all—the 1,420-seat Odeon, with modern-design floors and heavily upholstered balconies—a theater that rivaled if not outdid those great art-deco palaces in America in the 1920s and 1930s.3

  Hailed as “the Paris of the Orient,” Shanghai, in the decade before the 1937 Japanese invasion, enjoyed a flowering of modern urban culture unprecedented in Chinese history. With a population already surpassing three million in the early 1930s, the city was divided, like a highly intricate jigsaw puzzle, into foreign concessions [enclaves] and Chinese districts. At the heart of the so-called shili yangchang (ten-mile-long foreign zone) was the Bund, a strip of riverfront embankment famous for its majestic skyline. Department stores, movie theaters, coffeehouses, dance halls, and public gardens flourished both inside and outside the foreign zone. The latest models of Ford and Rolls-Royce whirred up and down the overcrowded streets, flaunting t
heir breezily up-to-date modernity amid a sea of jinrickshas and wheelbarrows. In the words of British writer J. G. Ballard, who was born in Shanghai in 1930, the city was “a place of bizarre contrasts.” Incongruously juxtaposed with graceful boulevards, elegant skyscrapers, and architecturally impressive art-deco apartment blocks were fetid back alleys, gambling dens, opium parlors, and a preponderance of prostitutes, ranging from the mink-coated to the scraggly and desperate. Ballard, the future dystopian novelist, was raised in the periphery of wealth, in a gated community of the foreign concessions. He recalled seeing, on the way to school in his chauffeured car, trucks touring the streets and removing the bodies of emaciated Chinese who had died during the night. “If Shanghai’s neon lights were the world’s brightest,” Ballard concludes in his poignant autobiography, “its pavements were the hardest.”4

  In contrast to Americans, who had reacted largely with euphoria to the explosion of commodity culture in the 1920s, most Chinese came to regard these symbols of Western materialism and colonialism—skyscrapers, automobiles, department stores, even soap bars—with a mixed sense of wonder and oppression. Their response to Hollywood films was also quite mixed.

  According to a 1927 report by the U.S. Department of Commerce, “The American motion picture enjoys far greater popularity among the Chinese than do the films of any other country outside of China. Aside from the greater lavishness of American pictures and their superior direction and technique, the Chinese also prefer the ‘lived happily ever after’ and ‘triumph of right over wrong’ ending which concludes most of our films, as compared with the more tragic finales of many European pictures.”5 A bit self-serving, the report nonetheless hints at the fact that the Chinese did not embrace Western culture without ambivalence or reservation. They were actually quite selective in their choice of movies, and the Chinese government, especially, practiced strict censorship over the distribution and screening of foreign motion pictures. After Chiang Kai-shek gained control of China in 1927, his Nationalist government established a review board that maintained an iron grip on the importation of foreign films. The board regularly banned foreign imports that, in its view, either portrayed Chinese in a negative manner or demonstrated any hostility toward Chinese. Famous English titles on the banned list included The Thief of Bagdad, Shanghai Express, and The Bitter Tea of General Yen. Interestingly, the board also blocked the distribution of movies for other reasons: Frankenstein and Forgotten Commandment because the board thought they carried an “aura of superstition,” and High Society for having “pornographic content.”6