Charlie Chan: A Stereotype and a Hero

New York Times ^ | August 10, 2010 | CHARLES McGRATH

[nickcarraway]

To many Asian-Americans, Charlie Chan is an offensive stereotype, another sort of Uncle Tom. Chan, the hero of six detective novels by Earl Derr Biggers and 47 Hollywood movies between 1926 and 1949, not to mention a 1970s Hanna-Barbera cartoon series, is pudgy, slant-eyed and inscrutable, and he speaks in singsong fortune-cookie English, saying things like, “If befriend donkey, expect to be kicked.” The California-born author and playwright Frank Chin, who has written essays denouncing Chan, would like to see him disappear altogether.

But Yunte Huang, who was born and grew up in China, can’t get enough of Chan and has written a book about his obsession: “Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History.” The book, which comes out from Norton next week, is part memoir, part history, part cultural-studies essay and part grab bag of odd and little-known details.

Biggers, who overlapped at Harvard with T. S. Eliot but did not exactly share his literary taste, said he got the idea for Chan while sitting in the New York Public Library in 1924 and reading about a real-life Honolulu detective named Chang Apana. Mr. Huang suggests that Biggers may have misremembered the details, but there is no doubt that Apana was the model for Chan, and Mr. Huang gives a full account of a life that was in many ways more interesting than the fictional version: born in Hawaii to Chinese parents, Apana moved to China and then back to Hawaii, where despite being virtually illiterate, he rose in the detective ranks of the Honolulu police. He wore a cowboy hat, carried a bullwhip and was said to leap from rooftop to rooftop like a human fly.

[Nepeta]

The Asians have noting to brag about when it comes to fair portrayal of whites.

Or blacks.

One of the major exceptions to this is John Woo's 1995 "Don't Cry Nanking" (aka "Nanking 1937") which unfortunately appears to never have been released in this country. It is a big screen, big budget treatment of the rape of Nanking, and truthfully shows European and American diplomats and missionaries doing what they could to protect Chinese during the Japanese occupation.

There are all sorts of historical oddities I've learned watching Asian movies made for Asian audiences, including the fact that the Japanese drafted ethnic Chinese in Taiwan into the Japanese army.

[RnMomof7]

I loved Charlie Chan ...but then I also liked Amos and Andy ...