BIOGRAPHY: PATRICK SKENE CATLINGreviews Charlie ChanBy Yunte Huang Norton, 354pp. £19.99
CHARLIE CHAN, the celebrated fictitious Hawaiian-Chinese detective hero of six novels and 48 films, is elevated to new heights of inter-racial significance in this scholarly, imaginative and witty work of cultural analysis by Yunte Huang, an academic with a sense of humour. Huang was born in China, gained a doctorate in Buffalo, New York, taught at Harvard and is now a professor of English at the University of California, and, like Charlie Chan, demonstrates in person that Rudyard Kipling was wrong: East is East and West is West and the twain have met.
In this admirable and enjoyable biography of someone who existed only in the minds of his creator and millions of fans worldwide, even in China, Huang demonstrates that xenophobia can be overcome.
In the West, long before China’s threateningly competitive industrialisation, there was a fear of what Bismarck called the yellow peril. Americans in the late 19th century adopted that catchy phrase and were also anti-Irish and anti-Italian, anti-almost-everyone but the supposedly pure Nordic Anglo-Saxons. The Ku Klux Klan aggressively promoted a doctrine called nativism, endorsing only indigenes – except, of course, original natives, known as Red Indians, and blacks. Prejudice against most foreigners persisted in the US in the 1920s, when Charlie Chan first appeared and, surprisingly, was enthusiastically accepted. He became so popular that eventually he shared the status of Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe and Hercule Poirot.
It was a young novelist by the name of Earl Derr Biggers, born in Warren, Ohio, and educated at Harvard, who had the bright idea of writing detective stories about an inscrutable, wise caricature of a Chinaman. Biggers was inspired initially by a newspaper report of a coup by a Honolulu policeman, Chang Apana, the son of a Cantonese coolie who was imported to Hawaii to work on a sugar plantation. Apana was no ordinary policeman. Having started as a paniolo, a cowboy, he had learned to crack a whip, which came in handy when he joined the police force. The denizens of Chinatown opium dens and gambling joints, seeing him coming at them with his whip, were quick to surrender. Biggers raised Apana intellectually and gave him the name of an Ohioan Chinese laundryman noticed by chance from a train window.
Charlie Chan is in striking contrast with Dr Fu Manchu, the Chinese villain dreamed up earlier by Sax Rohmer, the pen-name of Arthur Henry Ward, an English novelist who cheerfully admitted that he wrote about traditionally evil chinoiserie as he did “because I know nothing about the Chinese”. Huang’s accounts of the real-life Hawaiian-Chinese policeman’s heroism and the fantastic Fu Manchu’s wickedness are good preparations for the history of the most beneficial of the Chinese good guys.
To enhance the notion of the inter-racialism of Charlie Chan, Huang calls attention to the fact that the great Chinese detective was always portrayed on the screen by occidental actors, most often and most successfully by Warner Oland, who was Swedish. With the minimum of yellowing, a bit of eye make-up and a droopy moustache, Oland looked just as a Chinese detective should have looked. He spoke in a slightly refined version of the dialect of American Chinese laundrymen, in pidgin English, expressing Confucian wisdom in the flippancy of fortune cookies. Huang provides an appendix of “Charlie Chanisms”, including “Dollars going into a gambling house are like criminals led to execution”; “Always harder to keep murder secret than for egg to bounce on sidewalk”; “Mind, like parachute, only function when open”; “Tongue often hang man quicker than rope”; “The wise elephant does not seek to ape the butterfly.”
Here is an entertaining book that may help to avert the third World War.
Patrick Skene Catling is an author of novels and books for children
