Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History
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The Charlie Chan series, however, easily passed muster with the board because these movies were regarded as the first American films with a positive, let alone brilliant and funny, Chinese character. Not only was Chan, in the eyes of the Chinese, a sea change from the sinister Fu Manchu stereotypes in earlier movies, but also, as a Chinese hero he appeared at a time when China was looked down upon by the Western powers. Even as the “made-in-USA” Chan was parading across the silver screen, charming millions of urban Chinese, the British, who policed the foreign zone in Shanghai, still had a sign hanging over the entrance to a park reading, “Neither Chinese Nor Dogs Allowed.”
The Chinese government had long fought the battle over the images of Chinese in foreign media. Beaten and oppressed by Western imperial powers since the mid-nineteenth century, China felt racially stigmatized and was all too keenly aware of its inferior standing in the brutal world of international politics. Occasionally, however, through shrewd diplomacy, the Chinese could score a victory, as in the case of Fu Manchu. In the decades when Sax Rohmer was churning out his best-selling books about the insidious Chinaman, the Chinese government, though unable to influence the publication of these stories, was successful in blocking production of some of the later Fu Manchu films. In 1932, when MGM tried to make a new Fu Manchu number after four popular earlier films, the Chinese Embassy vehemently protested it. The United States, at that point alarmed by the rapid and ambitious expansion by Japan in the Far East, wanted to recruit China as an ally against the Japanese threat. As a result, the American government pressured MGM to pull the plug on the production.7 In 1940, the Chinese also succeeded in obstructing the production of more Fu Manchu films by Republic Pictures, which in the previous year had brought out a fifteen-chapter movie serial, Drums of Fu Manchu.
With such a geopolitical context, Charlie Chan was accorded a near hero’s welcome in China. According to Chinese film historian Wei Zhang, most of Warner Oland’s sixteen Chan movies were aired in China, “to full houses and warm audience approval.”8 Even Lu Xun, perhaps China’s greatest twentieth-century writer, a man well known for his bitter, razor-sharp essays, would not miss a single show of the hilarious Detective Chan. Xu Guangping, Lu Xun’s longtime companion, recalled their frequent car rides, no matter what the distance, to cinemas in Shanghai to enjoy Oland’s artful representation of a Chinaman.9
Charlie Chan’s immense popularity in China set the stage for the warm reception of Warner Oland when he arrived for his first visit. On March 22, 1936, Oland was mobbed by journalists and cameras in Shanghai as he stepped off the steamship Asian Empress. The forgiving Chinese were ready to forget his appearance as Fu Manchu in three Paramount pictures and to embrace him enthusiastically as one of their own. “Holiday mood,” says the Chinese detective in Charlie Chan in Shanghai, is “like fickle girl—privileged to change mind.” So also was public sentiment. Not too long before, in 1930, at the showing of Harold Lloyd’s Welcome Danger, Shanghai moviegoers had been outraged by its negative portrayal of Chinese, and their protest almost turned violent. And Shanghai Express (1932), starring none other than Oland as a mixed-blood Chinese villain, was also banned in China. Moreover, at the beginning of Charlie Chan in Shanghai, which had just been screened in the city, Charlie was seen singing a charming children’s song about a Chinese princess, Ming Lo Fu, with an unfortunate reference to Emperor Fu Manchu. Despite the sweet charm of the ballad, the mention of Fu Manchu could have opened a can of worms and set off a chain of bad associations for the Chinese.
In the spring of 1936, however, the Chinese were ready to put aside all of that and celebrate the arrival of “Charlie Chan” as one of their own. Every major Shanghai newspaper and film studio sent reporters to interview the man dubbed “the great Chinese detective” in the headlines. Always a good sport and still quite fresh from his “reel” experience with Shanghai, Oland reciprocated the Chinese enthusiasm by staying in character and blurring the line, as usual, between fiction and reality. During a press conference at five o’clock on the day of his arrival, he answered reporters’ questions while maintaining the Charlie Chan persona. In his familiar Chan costume, Oland declared, in a Swedish-accented Mandarin, “Visiting the land of my ancestors makes me so happy.” At that moment, as Zhang puts it, “Warner Oland and Charlie Chan had merged into one, becoming in the eyes of those present, one and the same Chinese person.”10
Such a warm reception stood in stark contrast to the snub accorded by the Chinese only a month earlier to Anna May Wong, who had made an appearance in The Chinese Parrot and had collaborated with Oland in several major China-themed films. One of the most enigmatic, glamorous, and sensational actresses, Wong had a shining but also difficult career in an industry beset by sexism and racism. Born in 1905 in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, Anna May Wong (aka Wong Liu Tsong, yellow willow frost), was the second daughter of a Cantonese laundryman. Showing an early interest in Hollywood, she made her first cinematic appearance as a Chinese extra in 1919 in The Red Lantern, starring Alla Nazimova as a Eurasian woman who falls in love with an American missionary. Wong’s beauty was so apparent that she soon caught the attention of Hollywood filmmakers, and her career quickly took off. Her most famous roles in the 1920s and early 1930s were in Toll of the Sea, Piccadilly, The Thief of Bagdad, Old San Francisco, Daughter of the Dragon, and Shanghai Express. In many of these, she shared equal billing with Douglas Fairbanks, Marlene Dietrich, and Warner Oland, among others. Walter Benjamin, one of Europe’s most sophisticated intellectuals, after a brief encounter with Wong at a private party in Berlin, characterized her as “like the specks in a bowl of tea that unfold into blossoms replete with moon and devoid of scent.” The flamboyant flaneur was thoroughly enraptured by Wong’s stunning beauty.11 According to Graham Hodges, Andy Warhol also paid tribute to her by “designing a camp collage of ‘crazy golden slippers,’” a gesture of admiration for the Chinese actress. Another avant-garde artist, Ray Johnson, even “created an imaginary Anna May Wong Fan Club, fabricated meetings between fantasy enthusiasts, and fashioned lovely pieces of art devoted to Anna May.”12
Wong would have become an even bigger star were it not for the racial mores in Hollywood that made it impossible for her to play certain roles. Interracial kissing, for instance, was an unspoken taboo in the early films, causing filmmakers to pass over Wong. Instead, white actresses were cast in roles that would have been perfect for her. Then, too, censorship reared its head, making the situation even worse for Wong. Fearful of government regulations and mindful of criticism by social conservatives who had been unhappy with the influence of movies, the film industry set up a self-censorship mechanism by founding the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) in 1922 and hiring William Hays, former postmaster general of the United States and ex-chair of the Republican National Committee, as its head. Hays immediately began by banning scandalous actors, such as Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, from the movies and instituted a morality clause for the industry. Over the years, Hays compiled a list of don’ts that were consolidated into the official censorship rules, the Motion Picture Production Code, published in 1930. Commonly known as the Hays Code, it spelled out what was acceptable and unacceptable content for motion pictures produced for public viewing in the United States. It imposed restrictions on such subject matter as sex, violence, religion, and race, and it banned any portrayal of miscegenation or interracial romance. Such prohibitions effectively condemned Wong to an almost permanent secondary role in romance films, always having to play tragic characters who are victims of abuse or die brokenhearted, with no “happily ever after.” As she once put it, “I died so often. Pathetic dying seemed to be the best thing I did.”13
Hollywood’s most notorious snub of Wong occurred during the making of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth. At the apex of her reputation in 1935, Wong was nonetheless considered by MGM “too Asian” for the lead role of O-lan. A similar verdict befell other Asian actors who were deemed not to fit the producer’s co
nception of “what Chinese people looked like.” The film ended up using Asian extras only for “atmosphere.” The lead roles went to Austrian actress Luise Rainer and American actor Paul Muni, making the award-winning movie a yellowface extravaganza and producing what one critic has called “MGM Chinese.”14
Disgusted by MGM’s racial policy, Wong decided to leave Hollywood for a while and visit the land of her parents for the first time. In January 1936, at a farewell party for her in Los Angeles, her longtime friend Warner Oland joked that it would be amusing for him to go to China with Wong, even though she had failed to secure the part of O-lan, which sounded like his own name. But he could not yet join her. “I am still Charlie Channing,” said Oland. “This time in The Circus” (referring to the film Charlie Chan at the Circus).15 Over the years, the two had collaborated in several films—notably, Old San Francisco (1927), Daughter of the Dragon (1931), and Shanghai Express. In Old San Francisco, which in hindsight seems like straightforward propaganda for Oriental exclusion, Oland played a Chinese villain masquerading as an Anglo capitalist, and Wong was his Eurasian concubine. In Daughter of the Dragon, derived from Sax Rohmer’s novel Daughter of Fu Manchu, the Oland-Wong duo this time played a father-daughter relationship, prompting Oland, fresh from his Charlie Chan set at the Fox studio, to wisecrack: “Husband and wife? Father and daughter? This is getting pretty incestuous.”16 In Shanghai Express, Wong was a Chinese woman raped by Henry Chang, a Eurasian warlord played by Oland.
None of these films would endear Wong to the Chinese population she was soon to meet, even though Oland’s roles in the same films were conveniently forgotten by the same constituency. Over the years, Wong had also starred or had cameo roles in several other movies that had raised the hackles of her critics in China. The first of such controversial roles was The Thief of Bagdad (1924), directed by Raoul Walsh. Starring Douglas Fairbanks as a carefree pickpocket enjoying a life of mischievous thievery and romantic love, the Arabian adventure was a feast for the eyes, with a spectacular display of production design and special effects. In the film, Wong is cast as a Mongol slave who betrays her mistress. What made Wong a sensation was also what scandalized her Chinese audience: her character was made to reveal ample sections of bare skin. In a crucial scene, as Fairbanks’s character, bare-chested, holds a knife against the small of the scantily attired Mongol slave’s back, “she pivots her body so that her face looks back with fear while the rest of her trembles with a mixture of terror and sensuality.”17 When the film was screened in China, many reviewers found her performance “degrading.” Some ridiculed her as merely “a cat’s paw, who plays minor roles.” Her own father, a man devoted to Chinese traditions and values, felt disgraced by her role in the film.18 The Thief of Bagdad subsequently was banned in China as a result of public outcry.
Wong’s appearance in the second Charlie Chan film, The Chinese Parrot, similarly offended Chinese audiences. Starring Kamiyama Sojin, who as Chan does not even receive any feature billing, the movie casts Wong as a belly-dancing nautch girl, a role that drew scathing criticism in China. One reviewer stated that Wong was “losing face for China again.” Another wrote: “In the movie, I saw Miss Wong dancing in a crowd of naked natives, violently twisting her bottom and her dance displayed no other movements.” Her performance, the critics declared, was unacceptable to the Chinese audience.19
Such harsh criticism, though widespread, was hardly uniform. In Chinese artistic circles, Wong had a coterie of influential friends who rallied to her side. They included Mei Lan Fang, Peking Opera’s most famous twentieth-century singer (Wong’s ostensible goal for this China trip was to learn stage techniques from Mei and, upon return, to build an English-speaking Chinese theater company to tour the globe); Wu Liangde, the editor of Liangyou Huabao, the Chinese Cosmopolitan of the day; and Hu Die, the so-called Empress of Movies in 1930s China. It is worth noting that, according to recent cultural historians, the kind of moralistic condemnation leveled at Wong and others came mostly from leftist hard-liners and Nationalist conservatives who frowned upon fantasies in movies and expressions of modern femininity. In fact, more open-minded intellectuals, artists, and other cultural elites, who had followed Wong’s career for years, had great admiration for the world’s most famous Chinese actress.20
This divergence of opinion set the stage for the dramatically contrasting receptions during Wong’s China visit. When she arrived on February 9, 1936, aboard the SS President Hoover, thousands of fans flocked to the Shanghai dock and crowded along the Huangpu River to greet the illustrious star. Wellington Koo, soon to depart for his ambassadorial post in France, gave a lavish dinner reception in Wong’s honor, a grand occasion attended by such Chinese elites as Lin Yutang, Mei Lan Fang, and others. Nonetheless, a month later in Hong Kong, a welcome scene turned vengeful, with an angry crowd shouting, “Down with Wong Liu Tsong—the stooge that disgraces China. Don’t let her go ashore.” Even her father, who had been staying for a while in his birthplace, a small village near Canton, was urged by the district delegation not to allow his daughter to come home to visit him. If she insisted on coming, they warned, “the entire [Wong] family might be expelled.”21
Arriving in China a month after Wong did, and enthusiastically received by the Chinese as the honorable “Mr. Chan,” Warner Oland crossed paths with his friend and costar in Hong Kong, toward the end of his trip. Wong treated Oland to a special Cantonese dim sum lunch. Over a tableful of delicacies, the two Hollywood stars compared notes about their China trips. Despite the huge gap between their backgrounds—a Swede born in a small village tucked away in the snowy climes of northern Europe and a Chinese girl born in the steam and starch of her father’s laundry in Los Angeles’s Chinatown—they had one thing in common: they both had careers portraying Chinese on the silver screen, which had brought them fame as well as notoriety.
MOVIE POSTER FOR CHARLIE CHAN SMASHES AN EVIL PLOT, 1941 (Courtesy of Wei Zhang)
In a period when the Chinese film industry was still in its infancy, when many Chinese cinematographic productions tended to imitate Hollywood movies, it was only natural that the popularity of Charlie Chan would spawn made-in-China imitations. Almost immediately after Oland’s visit, studios in Shanghai and Hong Kong began making a series of “homegrown” Charlie Chan films, including The Disappearing Corpse, The Pearl Tunic, and The Radio Station Murders in the 1930s, followed by Charlie Chan Smashes an Evil Plot and Charlie Chan Matches Wits with the Prince of Darkness in the subsequent decade.22
At the same time, all six of Earl Biggers’s novels were translated into Chinese by Xiaoqing Cheng, one of the most gifted Chinese detective-fiction writers and translators of his day.
In the Chinese movies, most of which were directed by Xu Xinfu and starred Xu Xinyuan, the “Chinese” Chan was no longer a police officer but a private investigator like the American “private eyes” Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. He was ably assisted not by his Number One or Number Two son, but instead by his daughter Manna—reminiscent of some of the later Sidney Toler Monogram Pictures films, in which Chan’s daughter Iris would appear as one of his eager helpers. Unfortunately, most reels of these Chinese “knockoffs” have been lost. According to contemporary testimonies, Xu’s Charlie Chan followed Oland’s incarnation closely in almost all aspects: walk, talk, and dress.
Here we seem to have reached the final, if not slightly bizarre, frontier of yellowface, where a real Chinaman imitates a Swede’s imitation of a Chinaman. Charlie Chan might have come home, but the exact location of home—in the age of the global circulation of images, meanings, and values—remains as elusive as clues to an unsolvable murder case.
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Charlie Chan Soldiers On
SIDNEY TOLER, CIRCA 1910 (Courtesy of Poetry and Rare Books Library, University of Buffalo)
Carry on, Charlie.
—Inspector Duff of Scotland Yard1
THE PURPLE-BLUE blossoms of jacaranda signaled that spring was in full bloom in California that May of
1936. Warner Oland had returned from China just in time for the production of Charlie Chan at the Race Track, which began on May 18. At this point in his career, owing to the enormous success of the Chan series, Oland had accumulated considerable wealth. He and his wife now owned a ranch in the Carpinteria Valley near Santa Barbara; a farmhouse in Southboro, Massachusetts; a 7,000-acre ranch on the Mexican island of Palmita de la Virgen, and a cozy pied-à-terre in Beverly Hills. His initial salary for the Chan role a decade earlier had been $10,000 a picture, and that figure increased steadily over the years. After the merger of Fox and Twentieth Century Pictures in 1935, the new company, Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, had agreed to pay Oland $20,000 for Race Track.