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

by Huang, Yunte

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  * Clark’s hypothetical nightmare did, in fact, come true: When Hawaii became the fiftieth state in 1959, “a rabble” of predominantly brown and yellow voters in the islands sent the nation’s first Chinese senator, Hiram Fong, to Washington. A self-made millionaire and son of a Chinese immigrant, Senator Fong would take his seat in the congressional chamber across from Strom Thurmond and James Eastland, two staunch segregationist Dixiecrats. The more astonishing fact—that a boy born in Honolulu to a white Kansan mother and a black African father would one day be elected president of the United States—would be simply beyond the pale of Clark’s wildest imaginings.

  * When Leonard Freeman was in Honolulu in the late 1960s to work on the scripts for Hawaii Five-O, he often ate at Wo Fat, which would become the name of the Chinese villain in the television series.

  * On January 8, 1934, two years to the day after the death of Joseph Kahahawai, Thalia Massie filed for divorce on the grounds of extreme mental cruelty. In the remaining decades of her troubled life, she tried to commit suicide at least twice and eventually died of a barbiturate overdose on July 3, 1963, in an apartment near her mother in Palm Beach. Her ex-husband, Thomas Massie, was institutionalized at St. Elizabeth Hospital, near Washington, DC, in 1940. He was subsequently released and then he retired from the U.S. Navy with a permanent physical disability. After a quiet civilian life, he died on January 8, 1987, fifty-five years, again to the day, after the murder of Kahahawai. Only Grace Fortescue thrived, living comfortably off an inheritance from her father. At eighty-seven, she was once spotted parasailing in Acapulco. She died in 1979, at the age of ninety-five, sixteen years after the death of her troubled daughter.

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