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25 reviews for:
Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History
Yunte Huang
3.81 AVERAGE
25 reviews for:
Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History
Yunte Huang
3.81 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
This is a look at the character and legend of Charlie Chan, and the viewpoint is unusual - from someone born in China.
Far from treating the character as a racial slur, the author sees a more complicated story, rooted in truth and, yes, bias and racism. But Charlie Chan has risen above all that.
The character was inspired by a real police detective of Chinese origin living in Hawaii, Chang Apana. The author built the character that became beloved and moved from books to the movies.
Yes, white actors played him, but it was almost inevitable in the 1920s and '30s. In contrast to the Chinese villain Fu Manchu, Chan was a hero, the smartest guy in the room, even if he did speak in fortune cookie aphorisms.
It's a complicated story, one the author handles well without waving away the racism, but without empowering it either.
Far from treating the character as a racial slur, the author sees a more complicated story, rooted in truth and, yes, bias and racism. But Charlie Chan has risen above all that.
The character was inspired by a real police detective of Chinese origin living in Hawaii, Chang Apana. The author built the character that became beloved and moved from books to the movies.
Yes, white actors played him, but it was almost inevitable in the 1920s and '30s. In contrast to the Chinese villain Fu Manchu, Chan was a hero, the smartest guy in the room, even if he did speak in fortune cookie aphorisms.
It's a complicated story, one the author handles well without waving away the racism, but without empowering it either.
This fascinating book, which won the Edgar Award for Biography, is really multiple stories, all intertwined: the nearly unbelievable (yet historically documented) story of the real man on whom the fictional Charlie Chan was modeled; the story of the fictional Charlie Chan, in print and onscreen; the story of the man who wrote the Charlie Chan stories and the men who portrayed the legendary detective; the story of Charlie Chan as a cultural icon and avatar over time; the story of racism in the American film industry; the story of America's relationship with Hawaii and of America's, Hawaii's and California's relationships with their Chinese settlers and citizens over a long period of time; and the story of the author himself, a Chinese immigrant and his travels to and through America. Highly recommended to anyone interested in cultural history, mystery, or film history. And you most certainly do not have to know anything about Charlie Chan to love this book.
I'd read Earl Derr Biggers' Charlie Chan mysteries years ago and enjoyed them so the title of this book caught my eye. It's a very good read, covering the life of the "real" Charlie Chan, Earl Derr Biggers and the screen history of Charlie Chan movies. The author does a good job putting the Chan stories in the context of prevailing race relations and international relations. I'd recommend this one.
Yunte Huang, a Chinese graduate student in Alabama, discovered Charlie Chan novels at a garage sale in Tuscaloosa--and started applying literary criticism to unpack the ambiguous legacy--fascination with Hawaii, the real life career of whip-wielding Honolulu Detective Chang Apana including the Massie case, Depression-era potboiler writing, Hollywood yellowface acting by Warner Oland, the positive reception of Charlie Chan in pre-1949 China vs. the fame of Anna May Wong, Cold War fears of Fu Manchurian candidates, 1960s awareness of racial stereotypes and current place in the Honolulu Police Museum.
Okay so NEWS FLASH--Charlie Chan was real and was a real cop in Hawaii and was pretty much the Indiana Jones of the police force and one time he cleaned out a bar with a bullwhip and yeah. He was the bomb dot com.
I am a big fan of Earl Derr Biggers' Charlie Chan books. He's a great fictional detective, on par with Sherlock Holmes, and the books are funny, clever mysteries set in Hawaii and the west coast. At the same time, I realize the stereotypes Chan was based on very much reflected the racist attitudes of the U.S. of the 1920s-'30s. Because of this, I got excited about this book. Huang has researched the creation of Chan, his real life inspiration police detective Chang Apana, and the cultural climate of the U.S. and Hawaii in the 20th century. He's done a great job of redeeming the well drawn character of Chan, whom he seems to adore, while adding his own perspectives as a Chinese American. Well researched and a compelling read. The list of Charlie Chan's "confucian" sayings at the end is very funny.
This was an interesting book, and perhaps the best compliment I can give it is it makes me want to do more reading and research of my own. I read Huang's Inseparable, about Chang and Eng, the "original" Siamese twins, a few years ago, and enjoyed it. Some of the criticisms I read about that book have resurfaced here, but for some reason, I found myself agreeing with them a little more this time. (This is actually an older book, so perhaps he's getting stronger as he goes on.)
Right from the start, Huang is setting himself a massive task, because the book is never about just one thing. Unlike Inseparable, calling it a biography is a little too simple; it's the history of a fictional character, as well as a biography of the man who inspired the character, as well as an examination of how the character reverberates throughout American culture, as well as an analysis of how audience reception of the character is affected by racism. Wow! That's a lot, and full credit to the author for trying to keep all those balls in the air. I don't think he quite manages it - but only because of my (and probably most readers') expectations of this kind of book.
First of all, the straightforward history of Charlie Chan is probably the least interesting element of what Huang has to say. There's a story there, but not much of one, and the impact that novelist Earl Dean Biggers has on the narrative is relatively small. The story of detective Chang Ampana of Hawaii is far more intriguing but based on limited recorded data and a certain amount of speculation. That's fine—genuinely—but it does mean that all three elements of biography to the book feel like they come up just a little short. The most interesting moments are when these brief little stories overlap: the meeting between Biggers and Apana, the influence the Chan character had on Apana's late life, and his visit to one of the Chan film sets. That makes the short or fragmented biographies worthwhile, but it can't stop them from feeling a bit episodic.
The most developed part of the book, by far, is Huang's wrestling with the cultural relevance of a popular character, born out of a certain amount of stereotype, performed on film in yellowface. I thought it was really striking that Huang could never quite come to one conclusion, obviously finding a lot to be proud of in the character but ready to expose the troubling aspects. Because of that, I think the book works best thought of almost as a series of lectures that examine this topic from different directions (and it's no mistake that Huang is a professor of English at the University of California). Some of the tangents are a little extreme, and occasionally, whole short chapters are made of assertions that seem more theoretical than not, but the author makes a good point that cultural responses reflect act like mirrors, reflecting and skewing each other. Relativism isn't a popular topic today, but there's a compelling argument here that the highest praise and the harshest critiques of Charlie Chan don't exist in a vaccuum: they are both products of the time in which they were made, and based at least in part on the experiences of the people making them.
It's a little fragmentary, a little tangent-y, and at times feels a little bit like somebody's doctoral dissertation, but there's a lot of good in this book. As I said before, if nothing else, it leaves the reader with a lot of interesting new things to think about, read about, and explore further. Just don't go in expecting a tidy biography or a concrete argument.
Right from the start, Huang is setting himself a massive task, because the book is never about just one thing. Unlike Inseparable, calling it a biography is a little too simple; it's the history of a fictional character, as well as a biography of the man who inspired the character, as well as an examination of how the character reverberates throughout American culture, as well as an analysis of how audience reception of the character is affected by racism. Wow! That's a lot, and full credit to the author for trying to keep all those balls in the air. I don't think he quite manages it - but only because of my (and probably most readers') expectations of this kind of book.
First of all, the straightforward history of Charlie Chan is probably the least interesting element of what Huang has to say. There's a story there, but not much of one, and the impact that novelist Earl Dean Biggers has on the narrative is relatively small. The story of detective Chang Ampana of Hawaii is far more intriguing but based on limited recorded data and a certain amount of speculation. That's fine—genuinely—but it does mean that all three elements of biography to the book feel like they come up just a little short. The most interesting moments are when these brief little stories overlap: the meeting between Biggers and Apana, the influence the Chan character had on Apana's late life, and his visit to one of the Chan film sets. That makes the short or fragmented biographies worthwhile, but it can't stop them from feeling a bit episodic.
The most developed part of the book, by far, is Huang's wrestling with the cultural relevance of a popular character, born out of a certain amount of stereotype, performed on film in yellowface. I thought it was really striking that Huang could never quite come to one conclusion, obviously finding a lot to be proud of in the character but ready to expose the troubling aspects. Because of that, I think the book works best thought of almost as a series of lectures that examine this topic from different directions (and it's no mistake that Huang is a professor of English at the University of California). Some of the tangents are a little extreme, and occasionally, whole short chapters are made of assertions that seem more theoretical than not, but the author makes a good point that cultural responses reflect act like mirrors, reflecting and skewing each other. Relativism isn't a popular topic today, but there's a compelling argument here that the highest praise and the harshest critiques of Charlie Chan don't exist in a vaccuum: they are both products of the time in which they were made, and based at least in part on the experiences of the people making them.
It's a little fragmentary, a little tangent-y, and at times feels a little bit like somebody's doctoral dissertation, but there's a lot of good in this book. As I said before, if nothing else, it leaves the reader with a lot of interesting new things to think about, read about, and explore further. Just don't go in expecting a tidy biography or a concrete argument.
Please read my full review here: http://cineastesbookshelf.blogspot.com/2010/09/review-charlie-chan-by-yunte-huang.html