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A review by saroz162
Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History by Yunte Huang
3.0
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.