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.
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