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

by Huang, Yunte

  The Chinese agent who controls Shaw’s mind turns out to be a real “queen,” Shaw’s mother, who plots to overthrow the U.S. government by orchestrating and manipulating the presidential election. Her plan is foiled by Captain Bennett Marco, who was captured and brainwashed along with Shaw in Manchuria but has been having nightmarish flashbacks that give him a glimpse of the truth. With Marco’s help, Shaw eventually is able to “deprogram” and free himself from his mental captor by fatally shooting his mother, her husband, and then himself.

  Despite the popularity of the movie—it was so popular that it was remade in 2004 with Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep, and Liev Schreiber—only literary aficionados would know that the concept of having a brainwashed Communist mole inside the White House has its roots in Sax Rohmer’s 1936 novel, President Fu Manchu.

  It is hard to tell to what extent Richard Condon might have been self-consciously borrowing from Rohmer’s book for his Machurian Candidate, but even a passing glance at the basic plots of the two novels reveals a striking resemblance. In President Fu Manchu, the insidious Chinaman attempts to conquer “the free world” by taking over the White House. For years, Fu Manchu has carefully and secretly groomed a presidential candidate who commands an irresistible appeal to the masses through his beautiful elocution. Fu has built a vast, catacomblike network named the Si-Fan, a secret society that “embraced in its invisible tentacles practically the whole of the colored races of the world.” Through the Si-Fan, he bankrolls a bogus grassroots, patriotic movement, the League of Good Americans (called the “Loyal American Underground” in The Manchurian Candidate), to put his puppet in the White House.1 But the most devious part of his design is to train, through posthypnotic suggestion, an amnesiac assassin who is programmed to kill upon hearing a trigger word from the controller.

  What Raymond Shaw fails to accomplish in The Manchurian Candidate—he is supposed to shoot the presidential nominee at the party’s convention six minutes into his acceptance speech, at the precise point where the speaker finishes a sentence ending with liberty (a cold-war buzzword)—the assassin in President Fu Manchu succeeds in doing. He kills the presidential nominee at a political convention in the middle of the latter’s speech, right at the point where the speaker utters Asia (also a loaded word in the race war, as imagined by Rohmer). After the assassination, the deceased candidate’s secretary, acting as Fu Manchu’s mole, rises to the occasion and immediately becomes the obvious front-runner in the presidential campaign—something Shaw’s “queen” mother has planned to do, thus instantly propelling her senator-husband, Johnny, into the national spotlight.2

  What is most sensational about “the Fu Manchurian Candidate,” as depicted by both Rohmer and Condon, is his supposed skill at brainwashing and mind control. It is said that Fu Manchu (an obvious prototype for Dr. Yen Lo) is a master of posthypnotic suggestion. Even an inadvertent look into Fu’s jade-green eyes will immediately place you under the magic spell of the evil doctor, who can then creep up on you like a cat during your sleep and control your mind through dreams. After that, you will simply become his unwitting agent in your somnambulist state.

  Such a mind-control technique might seem merely literary pulp, relegated to the confines of cheap paperback thrillers. The cold-war era, however, reified these nightmares and fears. In his introduction to the 2003 edition of The Manchurian Candidate, cultural historian Louis Menand puts Condon’s 1959 book in excellent context:

  United Nations ground forces began military action in Korea on July 5, 1950. On July 9, an American soldier who had been captured two days before delivered a radio speech consisting of North Korean propaganda. Similar broadcasts by captured soldiers continued throughout the war. At the end of the war, the army estimated that one out of every seven American prisoners of war had collaborated with the enemy; twenty-one Americans refused to return to the United States; forty announced that they had become Communists; fourteen were court-martialed, and eleven convicted.3

  In 1951, eight years before the appearance of Condon’s novel, a journalist named Edward Hunter, who had served in the military during World War II, published Brain-washing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Men’s Minds. Part ethnographic exotica and part anti-Communist propaganda, the book first introduced the Chinese term xi nao into the English vocabulary as “brainwashing.” Based on his interviews with informants and hearsay from former POWs, Hunter made a sweeping claim:

  Brain-washing became the principal activity on the Chinese mainland when the Communists took over. Unrevealed tens of thousands of men, women, and children had their brains washed. They ranged from students to instructors and professors, from army officers and municipal officials to reporters and printers, and from criminals to church deacons. There were no exceptions as to profession or creed. Before anyone could be considered trustworthy, he was subjected to brain-washing in order to qualify for a job in the “new democracy.” Only then did the authorities consider that he could be depended upon, as the official expression is worded, to “lean to one side” (Soviet Russia’s) in all matters, and that he would react with instinctive obedience to every call made upon him by the Communist Party through whatever twists, turns, or leaps policy might take, no matter what the sacrifice. He must fight by all possible means and be ready, too, with the right answer for every contradiction and evasion in Party statements.4

  Hunter asserted that the Chinese government also used the indoctrination procedures on POWs and any luckless foreigners who fell into their “talons” and tried to convert them to agents in its crusade against the free world.

  Published in the midst of the Korean War, Hunter’s book fed into the anti-Chinese hysteria. Two years after the armistice that ended the Korean War, the U.S. Army issued POW: The Fight Continues after the Battle, a deeply influential report on the Chinese treatment of American prisoners. Based on interviews with every surviving prisoner of war, the report revealed that many POWs had been brainwashed by Chinese Communists:

  The Chinese had carefully segregated the prisoners they had identified as incorrigibles, housing them in separate camps, and had subjected the prisoners they figured to be potential converts to five hours of indoctrination a day, in classes that combined propaganda by the instructors with “confessions” by the prisoners. In some cases, physical torture accompanied the indoctrination, but in general the Chinese used the traditional methods of psychological coercion: repetition and humiliation. The army discovered that a shocking number of prisoners had, to one degree or another, succumbed. Some were persuaded to accuse the United States, in radio broadcasts, of engaging in germ warfare—a charge that was untrue, but was widely believed in many countries.5

  The army report, as Menand describes, “instigated a popular obsession with brainwashing” that lasted well into the late 1950s, if not beyond. “Stories about the experiences of American prisoners appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, Life, the New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker. The term itself became a synonym for any sort of effective persuasion, and writers struggled with the question of whether things like advertising or psychiatric therapy might constitute subtle forms of brainwashing.”6

  Richard Condon, before publishing his 1959 best-seller, must have read some of these reports and articles. As a publicist for various Hollywood studios since 1936, he must also have been familiar with the fantastic tales of the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, whose films raked in millions for the industry. The juxtaposition of these two sources—cold-war propaganda and racial fantasy—provided juicy material for Condon’s suspenseful political thriller. The new anti-Communist hysteria now twinned with old anti-Chinese racism formed a combustible new weapon. A telling scene from the film even has Marco (Frank Sinatra) recollecting his nightmare about the Pavlovian Chinese brainwasher: “I can see that Chinese cat standing there smiling like Fu Manchu.”

  It was in this toxic political climate that the reruns of Charlie Chan, with their suggestively “Orientalese” titles—Charlie Chan in Sha
nghai, The Chinese Cat, The Jade Mask, The Shanghai Cobra—were aired. The honorable detective was now wisecracking in the poisoned air that every American was breathing. Alarmingly, it became good business to exploit these prevalent fears. In the decades to come, Hollywood continued to release films with faux- or proto-Mandarin titles, even though their plots had little to do with China or, for that matter, the Chinese: Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles’s Lady from Shanghai (1948), Frank Borzage’s China Doll (1958), Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), and Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon’s The China Syndrome (1979), to name just a few. Many of these films used the suggestion of “China” for no other purpose than to create a noirish atmosphere and evoke a feeling of paranoia.

  The material is rich for analysis. In Lady from Shanghai, for instance, Rita Hayworth plays the seductive, bored Mrs. Rosalie Bannister opposite Orson Welles’s Irish seaman character, Mike O’Hara. Hayworth, who made a brief appearance as a brunette maid in Charlie Chan in Egypt, had by now changed her last name from Cansino, used electrolysis to raise her hairline, and dyed her hair auburn. In the movie, the only reference that would justify the use of “Shanghai” in the title is an enigmatic conversation between Rosalie and Mike on a boat, where she confides to him that she once worked in Shanghai and that one would need more than luck in that Oriental den of iniquity. As she quotes the Chinese saying, “It is difficult for love to last long,” Rosalie affects an air of the Shanghaiese, Oriental mystique. But the film’s exploitation of the Chinese proverbial cliché was merely a weak imitation of Charlie Chan’s marvelous aphoristic somersaults.

  Never averse to exploring the darker crevices of the human imagination, Roman Polanski of course was aware of the sinister suggestiveness of Chinese names. In Chinatown, the title merely hovers in the background like a black cloud. As with Hayworth’s Lady from Shanghai, the lead character—sharp-tongued, nosy private eye Jake Gittes (played by Jack Nicholson)—also boasts about having worked in Chinatown when he was in the police force. “It was bad luck to work there,” he says, because you “can’t always tell what’s going on,” and all you are doing is “putting Chinamen in jail for spitting on laundry.” In this classic mystery work—laced with murder, conspiracy, corruption, incest, and adultery—Chinatown serves as the symbol for the crime-ridden dark side of the City of Angels. At the end of the film, after the brutal killing of Evelyn Mulwray (played by Faye Dunaway) on Alameda Boulevard, the camera zooms out to reveal a fading shot of the dreadful, cold, hard pavements of Chinatown. At this moment, Gittes’s associate delivers the film’s punch line, a hellish echo that penetrates the filthy, deadly night air: “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” The “C word” here has yielded its full subliminal potency.

  In The China Syndrome, the “C word” is used to significant effect again, this time in the realm of nuclear science. In 1971, the nuclear physicist Ralph Lapp, one of the participants in the Manhattan Project, had used the term China Syndrome to describe a hypothetical situation in which a nuclear meltdown at a U.S. power plant might cause radioactive material to burn a hole in the earth all the way to “the other side of the world.” As a result, a generation of American children would come to associate the nuclear meltdown, a scene of Armageddon, with China. The 1979 film, with memorable performances by Jack Lemmon, Jane Fonda, and Michael Douglas, used the China image once again to represent a world where the most dangerous forces of nuclear physics could no longer be harnessed. In the film, Lemmon plays the nuclear-plant supervisor Jack Godell, who tries to expose a cover-up of safety violation and to stop a “China Syndrome” from becoming reality. With the eerie backdrop of the cold war and a nuclear disaster, the “C word,” once having stood for a child’s curiosity for the proverbial bottom of the world, now represents something totally nightmarish and unnerving.

  In the neo-noir China Moon, starring Ed Harris and Madeleine Stowe, a story of seduction, murder, and deception in small-town America hinges on the signifying power of the title phrase—and this was released in 1994. “My grandmother used to call that a china moon,” Harris’s character says, as he and his lover row under a full moon on a lake where they will soon dump her husband’s body, “like a big old plate of china. She said people would get affected by them, that they’d do strange things.” Here the lowercase “c word,” like the “China Syndrome,” may not at first sound sinister, but as the story unfolds, the innocent reference to porcelain gives way to a far more powerful symbolism.

  Charlie Chan—a double-C, like 007 the superspy—becomes, in effect, the supersign in this chain of symbolism: China, Chinatown, Chinaman, Chink, chop suey, chop chop, ching chong, and even the cynical, onomatopoeic ka-ching. To most audiences in the post–World War II years, Charlie Chan indeed came to represent China and the nefarious cultural meanings that were associated with Mao’s Communist domain.

  It would, of course, be an exaggeration, even folly, to claim that Charlie Chan was responsible for the prevalence of dark “C words” in postwar America. “World is large,” Chan says, “me lowly Chinaman.” But there is no denying that as the most prominent Chinese icon in those decades, Chan had unwittingly become a Fu Manchurian Candidate, a figure who tapped into the paranoia and hysteria unleashed by cold-war propaganda. It was this image of Charlie Chan that would, as we shall see, make him the prime target of Asian American criticism.

  29

  Will the Real Charlie Chan Please Stand Up?

  WARNER OLAND AND HIS STAND-IN ON THE SET, EARLY 1930S (Courtesy of Everett Collection)

  I feel I must find the last surviving Charlie Chan of the movies and kill him. I will use what I learned being his Number One Son against him. Gee, pop, have I got a surprise for you!

  —Frank Chin, “The Sons of Chan”

  “CHARLIE CHAN IS dead,” the writer Jessica Hagedorn dramatically proclaimed back in 1993. In the introduction to her groundbreaking anthology of contemporary Asian American fiction, Hagedorn declared, “Charlie Chan is our most famous fake ‘Asian’ pop icon…and a part of the demeaning legacy of stereotypes.”1 But the old Charlie Chan seemed to have died long before that.

  In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a storm of protests by Asian Americans, in part inspired by the civil rights and Black Power movements, swept through the United States. The activists called for the end of the Vietnam War. They also called for the development of ethnic-studies programs in universities and reparations for Japanese internment during World War II. College campuses provided the most fertile ground for the movement. Students formed political alliances, published leftist journals, and held strikes at West Coast universities demanding curriculum reforms to include ethnic studies. The movement gave birth to the term Asian American. Indicating a new political and social consciousness, “Asian American” provided a clear break from the old labels of “Oriental” and “Asiatic,” which carried a long association with racism and prejudice. As a character born at the exact moment when the 1924 Immigration Act codified “Asiatic” as a racial category, as a paunchy detective created by a white man and possessed of “Oriental” charm, Charlie Chan became a target of the activists’ protests. Under pressure, major TV networks and local stations, which had been running Charlie Chan films for decades, decided to take him off the air. Thus began what Ken Hanke has dubbed “The Great Chan Ban.”2

  What the Asian Americans objected to may be summarized in a paragraph from the “Who is Charlie Chan?” entry in Everything You Need to Know about Asian-American History by Lan Cao and Himilce Novas: “In the eyes of many Asian Americans, Charlie Chan is in essence an effeminate, wimpy, nerdy, inscrutable Asian male, who helped plant the seed of the pervasive racist stereotype of Asian Americans as the ‘model minority.’”3 Such a characterization, however, is a far cry from the Charlie Chan on the screen. It may be true, as I have described, that Chan is one of the many images of the “Chinaman” minted by whites in the past century, and many of these are negative, demeaning stereotypes. In the postwar period, especially, Chan’s image wa
s further tarnished by his metamorphosis into a Fu Manchurian Candidate—which may have been exacerbated by the sprawl of Red China. But to characterize Chan as “effeminate,” “wimpy,” and “nerdy” is well off the mark. In fact, blaming him for acting “inscrutable” is like accusing Jerry Seinfeld of being too funny or whining too much. It seems that just as Chan might have been used by some uninformed whites as an unflattering representative of a Chinaman, he has also been caricatured by Asian Americans, unaware of his historical reception in China itself, as merely a product of white racism.

  Among Charlie Chan’s chief opponents, Frank Chin is probably the most articulate and forceful. A self-styled “Chinatown Cowboy” and a first-rate writer of pugilist prose, Chin has, over the years, tried to hunt down Charlie Chan with a tenacity that may be matched only by the on-screen detective himself. In his essay “The Sons of Chan,” Chin calls Charlie Chan “my movie father,” for all the years he lived under the portly shadow of the iconic Chinaman. In his colorful Chinatown buck-caw-caw lingo, Chin revisits the origin of his “fake” ancestry and depicts the genesis of his movie father as a racial burlesque:

  So here, Earl Derr Biggers, the reincarnation of an antebellum southern cracker overseer sitting on the verandah, sippin his mint julep, listening to the happy darkies choppin cotton in the fields making racial harmony, was fixed in Hawaii, sitting on the lanai, sippin’ his mai tai, whooping his ears out to hear the Kanakas harmonizing on a hit of the period as they chopped sugar. “Sing song, sing song, so Hop Toy/Allee same like China Boy,/But he sellee girl with joy/Pity poor Ming Toy!” And Earl Derr Biggers read about a Chinese detective named Chang Apana. He’d never heard of an “Oriental detective” before. A vision came to him. God kicked Earl Derr Biggers in the head and commanded him to give us Chinamans a son, in almost His image. And Charlie Chan was born. And, in a sense, so was I.4