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

by Yunte Huang 

ISBN-13   : 9780393069624
Publisher : Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Published : 08/30/2010
Pages     : 384


Winner of the 2011 Edgar Award for Best Critical/Biographical Book and

Shortlisted for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography: "An

ingenious and absorbing book…It will permanently change the way we tell this

troubled yet gripping story." —Jonathan Spence



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 recognized 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 begins 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 story and the fraught

narrative of one of Hollywood’s most iconic detectives, Huang has fashioned a

historical drama where none was known to exist, creating a work that will, in

the words of Jonathan Spence, “permanently change the way we tell this

troubled yet gripping story.”



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 author, 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 eager 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.



“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.



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