Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History
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“An ingenious and absorbing book, that provides a convincing new mode for examining the Chinese experience through both Chinese and Western eyes. It will permanently change the way we tell this troubled yet gripping tale.”—Jonathan Spence, leader of The Search for Modern China and Return to Dragon Mountain On a balmy July night in 1904, a wiry figure sauntered alone through the dim alleys of Honolulu’s Chinatown. He strolled up a set of rickety steps and into a smoky gambling den ringing with jeers of card sharks and crapshooters. By the time anyone recognizable the infamous bullwhip dangling from his hand, it was too late. Single-handedly, the feared, five-foot-tall Hawaiian cop, Chang Apana, had lined up forty gamblers and marched them down to the police station.
So starts Charlie Chan, Yunte Huang’s absorbing history of the legendary Cantonese detective, born in Hawaii around 1871, who inspired a series of fiction and movie doubles that long defined America’s distorted perceptions of Asians and Asian Americans. In chronicling the real-life tale and the fraught narrative of one of Hollywood’s most iconic detectives, Huang has fashioned a past drama where none was known to exist, making a work that will, in the words of Jonathan Spence, “permanently change the way we tell this troubled yet gripping tale.”
Himself a literary sleuth, Huang has traced Charlie Chan’s evolution from island legend to pop culture icon to vilified, postmodern symbol, ingeniously juxtaposing Apana’s rough-and-tumble career against the larger backdrop of a territorial Hawaii torn apart by virulent racism. Apana’s bravado prompted not only Earl Derr Biggers, a Harvard graduate turned leader, to write six Charlie Chan mysteries but also Hollywood to manufacture over forty movies starring a grammatically challenged detective with a knack for turning Oriental wisdom into singsong Chinatown blues.
Examining hundreds of biographical, literary, and cinematic sources, in English and in his native Chinese, Huang has pursued the trail of Charlie Chan since the mid-1990s, searching for clues in places as improbable as Harvard Yard, an Ohio cornfield, a weathered Hawaiian cemetery, and the Shanghai Bund. His efforts to refashion the Charlie Chan legend became a personal mission, as if the answers he sought would reshape his own identity—no longer a top Chinese student but an immigrant American keen to absorb the bewildering history of his adopted homeland.
“With rare personal intensity and capacious intelligence,” Huang has ascribed a starring role to “the honorable detective,” one far more enduring than any of his wisecracking movie parts. Huang presents American history in a way that it has never been told before. 35 illustrations
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The gushing and condescending reviews of this miscellany of memoir, well loved cultural history, trivia, and recycled Orientalism are an indication that the audiences that relished the Charlie Chan tales and movies flourish even today. His book provides an alibi for the guilty pleasure of Orientalism.
This book is awkwardly written, teeming with run off descriptions, superficial analysis, and fake bonhomie. Under the guise of offering a new take on racism, the book revives the evocative and quaint delights of Orientalism.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
An vital and entertaining work of cultural criticism, literary memoir and excellent ancient fashion detective work. Highly recommended for independent thinkers, less so for axe-grinding academics puling pieities of political correctness.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
I establish this to be a compelling re-telling of Charlie Chan’s history. On one level, it’s a straight past journey into the tale of the “real” Charlie Chan, Chang Apana. The book delves into his fascinating history and depicts how Biggers was (possibly) inspired by a newspaper clipping of Apana running around Honolulu with a bullwhip. On another level, it’s a tale about East-West cultural borrowing and refashioning to make loaded icons that reflect the best and worst of art and politics. Further still, it’s a work of detective fiction, with the leader doing his best to figure out “whodunnit.” Highly recommended.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
My name is Gilbert Martines, and I am now writing a book, about Detective Chang Apana, called “Charlie Chan’s Hawaii”. Yunte Huang based much of his writing on Chang Apana, from my master’s thesis, “Modern History Of Hawaii”. If you check the pointer of Huang’s book, my name is listed there, and also on copious citations from my thesis throughout the book. Professor Huang did not contact me during the writing of his book. Yunte Huang was kind enough, though, to mention me in his Acknowledgment page, “..and Gilbert Martines for his pioneering research on Chang Apana.” I did the original research in 1982 on Chang Apana, that proved for the first time, that the fictional character Charlie Chan, was based on a real person. At that time I recorded interviews, which I have since digitized, with Apana’s three daughters, and his Number One Favorite relative, Walter Wan Chang (he is also mentioned in Yuang’s book). Sadly though, they have all since passed away. If you log on to my blog “Charlie Chan’s Hawaii” at: [...] you will be able to listen on-line to excerpts from these recordings. I will be including a CD of these recordings with my book. My blog also contains many additional Chang Apana exclusives, that you may find appealing. My book differs in many ways from Huang’s book, but essentially, the information that I have is first-hand, from the people who knew and loved Chang Apana, and its all primary sources collected by me twenty-eight years ago. Enough has been said about Charlie Chan, but not enough about Detective Chang Apana, and my book will remedy that. One can bandy about and over-intellectualize Charlie Chan’s cultural and past significance, but one must not forget, that a excellent man, a decent man, who once lived and loved: is the “real” Charlie Chan, and not enough has been said about him. If you want more information, please feel free to contact from my blog. I am now retired, and spend all my time writing the definitive Chang Apana book.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5