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

Feb 12, 2012 Tony rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography

CHARLIE CHAN: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History. (2010). Yunte Huang. ***.
What this book is really about is American xenophobia. Although the author does manage to get in chapters on Earl Derr Biggers and Sax Rohmer and other contemporary writers from the Golden Age of detective fiction, there’s a lot of filler in here too. A short history of Hawaii is provided in the early chapters. Then follows a history of the Chinese in Hawaii and in late 1...more CHARLIE CHAN: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History. (2010). Yunte Huang. ***.
What this book is really about is American xenophobia. Although the author does manage to get in chapters on Earl Derr Biggers and Sax Rohmer and other contemporary writers from the Golden Age of detective fiction, there’s a lot of filler in here too. A short history of Hawaii is provided in the early chapters. Then follows a history of the Chinese in Hawaii and in late 19th century America and their role in gold mining in California and in the sugar industry in Hawaii. We finally get to meet Chang Apana. Chang (1864?-1933) was a chinaman born in China but who ended up in Hawaii. He started out as a ranch hand on the Wilder ranch, one of the largest spreads in Hawaii. From there, he was employed by the newly-founded Humane Society, then on to the Hawaiian Police Department. As hard as I tried, I could only find a tenuous connection between Apana and the fictional Charlie Chan. It was rumored that the name of Charlie Chan was taken from a sign over a laundry in Ohio that was frequently passed by the author. Although the author and Apana finally met, there were no stories by Biggers that were based on any of the exploits by Apana. Apana was simply one of the best policemen in Hawaii, and maintained a good reputation for doing his job well. I didn’t realize it, but Biggers only wrote six novels featuring Charlie Chan. Where we have come to know him so well is from the films produced by Hollywood. According to the author – who provides a filmography – there were forty-seven Charlie Chan movies made between 1926 and 1949. Since then, there were also take-offs on Chan and his character made that were not referenced. Aside from the author’s research into Charlie Chan, you (or at least I) got to know a bunch of things that I didn’t know before. Hawaii’s first industry was their trade in sandalwood. I thought that sandalwood was from the sandalwood tree – but I learned that sandalwood starts out as a parasite on the roots of other trees and grows from there. I also learned that sugar cane was not native to Hawaii, but was brought by the Polynesians from India a millenium earlier. Also, Sun Yat-sen, though born in China, was raised in Hawaii before his return to take a historic role in China’s politics. There are lots of interesting facts here, but the major premise is one of Americans treating of Asiatics as, at best, second-class citizens.
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Feb 02, 2012 Steve Reid rated it 3 of 5 stars

There's a book I read a while back called "Charlie Chan" by Yunte Huang, a naturalized US citizen born in China. Huang came over to the US for college, worked odd jobs to pay his way, and stumbled upon the persona of Charlie Chan. Huang's journeys across the country lead to his "discovering" Chan and Chan's creator and make for an entertaining spin. Once he gets into Chan and his predecessorFu Manchu as image of the Chinaman in the US, the reading gets drier, but still interesting, especially wh...more

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May 14, 2011 Tommy Bat-Blog Brookshire rated it 5 of 5 stars

This extremely well researched & well written book was a total joy to read. I've always liked Charlie Chan movies but never really knew that much about the character. This book tells the story about Charlie Chan in a very unique way, from many different angles. First, there's "Charlie Chan" as he existed inside a Fictional Book. Then, the "Movie persona". There's a lot of information about him but also covers the real-life story of the Hawaiian Police Detective that inspired the Author. It a...more

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Jun 26, 2011 Mary Ronan Drew rated it 4 of 5 stars

Yunte Huang was teaching in the English department at Harvard University when his new book was released and he was scheduled to do a book signing at the Harvard book store. With a title like Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature (yawn), it was a challenge to get a crowd to attend so the English department secretary made up a poster for the event and in an attempt to make it more appealing she included a photo of Char...more Yunte Huang was teaching in the English department at Harvard University when his new book was released and he was scheduled to do a book signing at the Harvard book store. With a title like Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature (yawn), it was a challenge to get a crowd to attend so the English department secretary made up a poster for the event and in an attempt to make it more appealing she included a photo of Charlie Chan.

Now some Chinese-Americans are a bit sensitive about Charlie Chan, seeing him as an Asian Uncle Tom figure, a stereotypical racist image of a Chinaman. So the author was a little disturbed about the poster.

Being polite (the Chinese he tells us are very polite, kind of like Charlie Chan), he thanked the woman for the poster and asked her why she had included Charlie Chan? “Oh,” she replied, “I grew up watching Charlie Chan movies. He was so smart and wise and they called him in to solve the most difficult murders and he was always able to figure them out and he was witty and polite . . . He was my hero!”
This set Yunte Huang to thinking and eventually to investigating the Charlie Chan books and movies and this book is the result. The story is fascinating.

There really was a Charlie Chan, called Chan Apana, a detective with the Honolulu Police Department in the late 19th and early 20th century. He spent a decade in his youth as a cowboy (the second largest cattle ranch in the US is in Hawaii.) As a police officer he was delegated to keep Honolulu’s Chinatown under some semblance of control (closing gambling dens, brothels, opium dens, etc.) Although he was only 5 ft tall and weighed 130 pounds at his heaviest, he carried only a bull whip and he routinely rounded up 40 bad guys single-handedly.

Enter Earl Derr Biggers, a Harvard graduate (from a town in Ohio very near Canton, interestingly) who needed to make some money when he graduated from college. He decided to write a book and the first Charlie Chan mystery, The House Without a Key, was the very popular result. Published in 1925 it was set in Hawaii and the exotic tropical setting, combined with the clever and witty Chinese detective, made it a best-seller. Biggers went on to write five more Charlie Chan books before his early death in 1933.

Yunte Huang’s book takes off from the mystery, its author, and the man who was its inspiration to talk about the history of Hawaii and the story of Chinese in America, the figure of Charlie Chan in the movies and the various actors who played him, the two most famous being Scandinavians, Werner Oland and Sidney Toler. He describes the years when Chinese laborers were encouraged to come to the US to do the dangerous work on the trans-continental railroad, and the years when they were forbidden to immigrate to this country or to become citizens. Things were always a little better for various racial groups in Hawaii but when the islands became a US territory in 1898, the Chinese Exclusion Act applied there. (Hawaii became our 50th state in 1959.)

2011 No 92 Coming soon: Son, by Jack Olsen
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Oct 11, 2010 Bookmarks Magazine rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: nov-dec-2010

Described as a "heady mixture of scholarship, essay and memoir" (Washington Post), Charlie Chan energetically deconstructs the social and cultural milieu of the fictional detective as it examines the people and events that contributed to his popularity. Huang interweaves a vast number of historical and cultural topics in this sprawling work, including the class system of prestatehood Hawaii, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the "Yellow Peril," American literature, and Hollywood. Critics praised H...more

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Dec 17, 2011 Sketchbook rated it 2 of 5 stars

Another "best-seller" that always verges on being Interesting.
The Chinese-b. author, now a US professor, comingles his personal
odyssey with that of Chang Apana, the #1 Law & Order man (also
Chinese) who tackled opium gangs, gambling dens and assorted
thugs in Hawaii in the early 20thC. Costarring is Earl Derr
Biggers, the American who created the iconic Charlie Chan.
Biggers, who grew up in Ohio, began writing stories when weekly
zines w fiction flooded the US. He visited Hawaii once, then
alleged...more

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Jan 22, 2011 Jeff rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: literary-history

Reading Huang, it occurs to me that a basic tenet of postmodernism is the repudiation of the New Left's emphasis on secular American exceptionalism, a repudiation that could be summarized as: democracy is just another human value, not a final one -- as it was, for instance, in Whitman. What Huang shares with Tsinghua American Studies students, for example, might be said to be a fascination with a secularism that places democracy at its center, an attraction to ideas that decenter the privileging...more Reading Huang, it occurs to me that a basic tenet of postmodernism is the repudiation of the New Left's emphasis on secular American exceptionalism, a repudiation that could be summarized as: democracy is just another human value, not a final one -- as it was, for instance, in Whitman. What Huang shares with Tsinghua American Studies students, for example, might be said to be a fascination with a secularism that places democracy at its center, an attraction to ideas that decenter the privileging of secularism. Here is how Huang concludes his book:

As a man from China, a Chinese man come to America, I say: Chan is dead! Long live Charlie Chan! [italics mine]

For those Americans who grew up in the period of the New Left (Huang came here in 1989, by which time the New Left's Cultural Revolution -- inspired, after all, by Mao's -- had faced the revanche of a culture war), Huang's conclusion will seem ironic; the majesty of authenticity in this society-which-escaped-monarchy is for Huang identification with the folkloric figure, Charlie Chan. If it's not ironical, it's puzzling.

Seriously, the essentializing of the folkloric figure is a trope from post-WWII disciplinary turf-wars in the academy; it's an atavism, an emergent trope within the period before the triumph of Chomskyan linguistics and the post-structuralist revolution in criticism. When Huang compares Charlie Chan to "Huck and Jim" from Twain's novel, I'm at a loss. The argument implicit in this is that for American (or is it post-modern?) audiences, the folkloric figure of Huckleberry Finn is Twain's contribution to American culture -- on par, then, with Chang Apana's contribution of his own life story to Earl Derr Biggers to be a model for Biggers' fictional hero, Charlie Chan. That is a bewildering argument to make. It would appear to me to completely deracinate Twain's characters from the linguistic sublime that is Twain's text. Just so, for Huang, "[Charlie Chan is] a legend for the ages." I can enjoy Huang's book, then, as an index to various tropes in the history of post-war literary exposition. But in terms of its thought, the critical performance partakes of the very minstrelsy it finds so amusing in the folkloric figure of Charlie Chan.

[NB: Perhaps the claim that for Whitman democracy is a final value deserves a footnote. A sentence, then, from Democratic Vistas:

What Christ appear'd for in the moral-spiritual field for human-kind, namely, that in respect to the absolute soul, there is in the possession of such by each single individual, something so transcendent, so incapable of gradations (like life), that, to that extent, it places all beings on a common level, utterly regardless of the distinctions of intellect, virtue, station, or any height or lowliness whatever -- is tallied in like manner, in this other field, by democracy's rule that men, the nation, as a common aggregateof living identities, affording in each a separate and complete subject for freedom, worldly thrift and happiness, and for a fair chance for growth, and for protection in citizenship, etc., must, to the political extent of the suffrage or vote, if no further, be placed, each and in the whole, on one broad, primary, universal, common platform.

When Beijing American Studies students claim, as I heard them the other night on The News Hour, that democracy is a, but not a final, value, I would have them reckon with the Whitman quote above. (The Xigurs are obviously far away from such inferences.) The use of a kind of fashionable skepticism within the United States that would de-center such a value is a very interesting development in recent debate here. I take Whitman's text as a spiritual touchstone -- one consummate, perhaps, with Chinese values in the family, in tradition. Secularism, then, is very much at issue in the way the family is looked at in both countries.] (less)

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May 01, 2011 Orion rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: library-book

Yunte Huang was born in China, came to the US in 1991, and is now an English professor at UC Santa Barbara. Charlie Chan is a fictional Chinese police detective created by the White American author Earl Derr Biggers, who wrote six popular Charlie Chan mystery novels. Biggers based Charlie Chan on a real Honolulu Chinese detective named Chang Apana who was a respected member of the department. Hollywood made 47 Charlie Chan movies with White actors in "yellowface" makeup playing the Chinese detec...more

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May 30, 2011 Cheryl rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book was eye-opening on many levels. Not only does it cover the Hawaiian and Chinese American history generally, it brings those strands together with early twentieth century American literature and popular culture. While some reviewers have criticized the book for being broken into sections, the final impression is one of amazing connections among all these aspects of the character "Charlie Chan," and how truth and fiction weave together. The life of Chang Apana, the Chinese detective, is...more This book was eye-opening on many levels. Not only does it cover the Hawaiian and Chinese American history generally, it brings those strands together with early twentieth century American literature and popular culture. While some reviewers have criticized the book for being broken into sections, the final impression is one of amazing connections among all these aspects of the character "Charlie Chan," and how truth and fiction weave together. The life of Chang Apana, the Chinese detective, is truly amazing in and of itself, and Huang's biography of him blasts through all the naive ideas that I had long held about Hawaiian history, and made my understanding of it much richer as a result. The fact that Huang also connects Chang Apana's origins in Guangdong with the leaders of early Republican China, many of whom spent time in Hawaii while Chang was fighting crime there, highlights how small a world it was. Huang doesn't flinch from exploring all the ugly racist issues of that time in American history, particularly the bizarre prejudices that made yellowface in film "normal," but ultimately he contends that the character Charlie Chan is more than just a racist cariacature. Werner Oland (a Swedish-American) as Charlie Chan was one of the most popular film characters in 1930s China, and Chang Apana himself loved watching Charlie Chan movies--the author himself discovered the detective when he bought some old books at a yard sale and became a great fan.

Being a fan of classic mysteries, I am inspired to read them for myself, because I only know Charlie Chan as a cultural reference. Ironically, it is difficult to find the original books to encounter Chan for oneself. Earl Biggers' Chan mysteries aren't available any more at the local public libraries (even in Pasadena, where Biggers wrote them!), and only the first one is available out of copyright through archive.org ... so I will file a later report on it.

The big question for all mystery fans that Yunte Huang's book forces is this: are we allowed to appropriate detective characters (who by the rules of the genre must be "others" in some fashion) and refashion them to suit our contemporary needs and cultural visions, even if their authors could only see them through the lens of their own place, time and (often) prejudice? (less)

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Suzanne I agree with everything you've said, and would have rated it higher if I'd been reviewing its scholarly value. I think I agree with those who found it...more
Jul 11, 2011 10:57am

Cheryl Having spent a summer in Hawaii I could imagine the setting, which made the book more fun and less academic for me. I never really saw a Charlie Chan...more
Jul 11, 2011 11:15am

Suzanne Well, it certainly made me want to visit Hawaii. I'm thinking of convincing Karen to make a trip out to Warren when I'm up there next month, visiting...more
Jul 11, 2011 04:59pm

Nov 08, 2011 Nancy rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I liked this book overall, although 1) it did, indeed, meander a bit, as other reviewers have noted; and 2) it did not have as much about the real Charlie Chan as I would have liked (or photos). But it was readable, reasonably well-written, interesting, by an author who seemed invested in his tale.

I will note that I found a kind of interesting similarity in some of the rhetoric about immigrants and the Chinese as the illegal immigrant issues today. Maybe I am the only one who thought that...

I w...more

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Jul 11, 2011 Suzanne rated it 3 of 5 stars

Well-researched work that puts the novels and films into historical and social context. Chang Apana, the Hawaiian police officer who was the model for Charlie Chan, plays a very small role in the work. Warner Oland gets at least as much time, and Earl Derr Biggers more. This is, in part, due to the scanty historical record available on Chang, but also to the reality that it is through the character of Charlie Chan that he had his "rendezvous with American history."
Huang skillfully weaves togeth...more

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Mar 03, 2011 Brad Hodges rated it 3 of 5 stars

I have never read a Charlie Chan book or seen a Charlie Chan movie (except for the Neil Simon mystery spoof Murder By Death, in which the Chinese detective is played by Englishman Peter Sellers), but I was interested in reading Yunte Huang's comprehensive study of the fictional sleuth and his inspiration, a Honolulu policeman named Chang Apana.

Huang, a scholar born in China but now living and teaching in America, covers quite a few bases in his book. He starts with a brief biography of Apana, wh...more I have never read a Charlie Chan book or seen a Charlie Chan movie (except for the Neil Simon mystery spoof Murder By Death, in which the Chinese detective is played by Englishman Peter Sellers), but I was interested in reading Yunte Huang's comprehensive study of the fictional sleuth and his inspiration, a Honolulu policeman named Chang Apana.

Huang, a scholar born in China but now living and teaching in America, covers quite a few bases in his book. He starts with a brief biography of Apana, who was born in Hawaii, moved to China as a boy, and then returned for good, where he became a celebrated detective, using a bullwhip to corral the bad guys. The legend has it that an Ohio-born, Harvard-educated writer, Earl Derr Biggers, read about one of his exploits and got the idea to write a novel featuring a wise, inscrutable Chinese detective: Charlie Chan.

Huang gives us Biggers' story, as well as the development of his wildly popular creation as a movie character. There were silent films made, starring Asian actors, but they were unsuccessful. It wasn't until the talkies, and a Swedish actor named Warner Oland took the role, that he became a household name. Fox Pictures churned them out, as many as four a year, and made Oland a rich man, even though he ended up a hopeless alcoholic and dead at 57.

The part was taken over by an American actor, Sidney Toler, and then another, Roland Winters, before the series died out in 1949 (the very same year that Mao's revolt succeeded in making China red). But he persisted in American culture, featured in board games, radio programs, comic books, and a Saturday-morning cartoon series.

Huang's book also branches off into many other topics. The book is a brisk 297 pages, but only about half is directly about Charlie Chan. He discusses the history of Hawaii, Chinese immigration into America, the character of Fu Manchu (the dark side of Orientalism), and includes a long chapter on the Massie case of 1931, in which a white woman falsely accused a gang of Hawaiian men of raping her. They were let go after a hung jury, but one of them was murdered by Massie's mother, and she was represented by Clarence Darrow. It's a fascinating tale, but only tangentially involved with the subject at hand.

I might have been annoyed by Huang's frequent off-topic forays, especially when he starts writing about movies that simply have the world "China" in the title, but he's a wonderful raconteur, and I didn't mind. I liked that he frequently got personal, describing being a student in Alabama and working at a Chinese restaurant, and his epilogue, in which he hunts down the grave of Apana, is poignant.

The best parts of the book are about Chan and what he means to American society and Asian Americans in particular. Though I've never read the books or seen the movies, I know who he is--a kindly and sage detective who speaks in fortune-cookie aphorisms. Huang has collected them, and here are a few: "Mind, like parachute, only function when open," "Talk cannot cook rice," "Too late to dig well when honorable house is on fire," and "Advice after mistake is like medicine after dead man's funeral."

Huang clearly has affection for the character, but recognizes the anger the character inspires in Asians. He does point out that at the time, the character was popular in China--here was a virtuous, positive character, never mind that he wasn't played by an actual Chinese person. Keye Luke, who for years played Chan's Number One Son, dismisses criticism, citing he was a "Chinese hero."

But during the 1960s, when racial pride was exerting itself in all ethnicities in America, a streak of political correctness submerged Charlie Chan. Not too long ago a push to ban his films from being aired on television succeeded on the Fox Movie Channel, which then relented from counter arguments. Huang seems a little miffed at the consternation, writing: "When some people complain about Charlie Chan's deferential docility, especially in the presence of white men, they have simply underestimated the real strength of his character. Chan is a peculiar American brand of trickster prevalent in ethnic literature and incarnated by Mark Twain's Huck Finn and Herman Melville's Confidence Man (curiously named China Aster). It is a legend that also includes Jim Crow, the Bunker brothers, Al Jolson's Jazz Singer, and Stepin Fetchit and his numerous step-chillun. All these characters are indeed rooted in the toxic soil of racism, but racism has made their tongues only sharper, their art more lethally potent. This undeniable fact, insulting and sobering, has uniquely identified America."(less)

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Sep 10, 2012 Read1000books rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: misc-non-fiction

This book was such a disappointment. For those unfamiliar with Charlie Chan, he is a fictional Chinese detective, created by Earl Derr Biggers in 1925, who was featured in six best-selling original novels and, in the 1930's & 40's, forty-seven movies (sorry, Mr. Bond). The premise of this book by Yunte Huang, at first glance, appears to be that Chan was based on a real person and that the reader will find out all about him and lots of fun facts about the fictional Chan too. Sadly this was no...more This book was such a disappointment. For those unfamiliar with Charlie Chan, he is a fictional Chinese detective, created by Earl Derr Biggers in 1925, who was featured in six best-selling original novels and, in the 1930's & 40's, forty-seven movies (sorry, Mr. Bond). The premise of this book by Yunte Huang, at first glance, appears to be that Chan was based on a real person and that the reader will find out all about him and lots of fun facts about the fictional Chan too. Sadly this was not exactly the case. Some might conclude that the author is a bitter, race-obsessed America-hater, who really wanted to write a book chronicling (in his mind) "the racist foundation of American culture" [his words, p.228] and chose as his vehicle a figure he knew was popular:Charlie Chan. In every chapter, the author just can't seem to help himself as, beginning to end, the reader is treated to instance after instance of "examples" of racism in America's past. One entire chapter (#23) is about the rape (that may or may not have taken place) of a white woman by a group of Hawaiians back in the 1920's, the only connection to Charlie Chan being that it took place on the island where this fictional character lives! I, for one, happen to like Charlie Chan. The facts about the original author of the Chan stories (Biggers), the six novels themselves (of which I have read the first five and own the other), the actors who portrayed Chan, and the movies (of which I have seen most, both as a youth and in more recent years)are quite interesting. But to wade through Mr. Huang's constant haranguing about events that took place decades or even centuries before he was even born, is wearying to say the least. If you do not know the definition of "xenophobia", you might as well look it up before reading this book because the author uses it-a lot. Even the Christians come in for bashing in a latter chapter. And all the while Mr. Huang seems totally oblivious to the hypocrisy of despising the country that gave him a fine education (Harvard) and now no doubt handsomely employs him (as a college professor). If Mr. Huang thinks he can find a more perfect place to live, with a history as pristine as the wind-driven snow, he is certainly free to go find it. In the meantime, I know of a good detective novel I'm going to go read. (less)

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Jul 09, 2012 Marie rated it 3 of 5 stars

There is a lot of fascinating stuff in this, but I wanted more detail... more about Chang Apana, the Hawaiian detective who inspired Earl Biggers to create the character of Charlie Chan. (A character that had little in common with Apana, aside from being Chinese, living in Hawaii, and being a police detective.) I'm lowering this to a 3 star rating largely because much of the book felt like filler, with details I don't think a reader needed, like reminding us when WWII started, or unintersting pe...more

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Dec 20, 2010 Scot rated it 4 of 5 stars

A quick and easy read, full of interesting facts and historical anecdotes to make you go "aha!" Through exploring the real life circumstances that inspired that fictional character of Charlie Chan, Yunte Huang creates a soft-entry point into the political and social dynamics of Chinese immigration, white backlash and resistance to the globalization and racial diversification of Hawaii and the U.S. mainly around the turn of the last century end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. I'd c...more

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Jan 19, 2013 Lee Miller rated it 4 of 5 stars

Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History, is by Yunte Huang, an English professor at UC-Santa Barbara. Born and raised in China, Huang protested on Tiananmen Square and immigrated to the US after the crackdown. He’s a poet and specialist in transpacific thought: how concepts and memes bounce around the Pacific Rim and back and forth between Asia and North America.

Huang attempts to give Chan a historical and literary perspective. The autho...more

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Sep 03, 2011 Victoria rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 climat...more

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Oct 28, 2010 Eric rated it 3 of 5 stars

Very informative even if it did meander, the problem is that it's really three books in one. 1) Biography of Chang Apana, the real person the character is based upon 2) Biography of Earl Diggers who wrote the Chan books 3) Biography and cultural impact of Charlie Chan on the psyche of Chinese Americans.

Each of these is a fascinating tale, but as all three are in a book less than 300 pages (discounting notes) it feels more like a survey (or hagiography in Apana's case) than an actual flushed out...more

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Apr 08, 2013 Eddy Allen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: arts-and-historical

Hailed as “irrepressibly spirited and entertaining” (Pico Iyer, Time) and “a fascinating cultural survey” (Paul Devlin, Daily Beast), this provocative first biography of Charlie Chan presents American history in a way that it has never been told before. Yunte Huang ingeniously traces Charlie Chan from his real beginnings as a bullwhip-wielding detective in territorial Hawaii to his reinvention as a literary sleuth and Hollywood film icon. Huang finally resurrects the “honorable detective” from t...more

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Jul 10, 2011 Dawn (& Ron) marked it as to-read

Recommended to Dawn (& Ron) by: Bookmarks magazine Jul/Aug 2011

Shelves: asian-fiction, classic-films-hollywood-broadway, around-between-the-world-wars, read-by-ron, mystery

I, (Ron) always enjoyed the Charlie Chan movies since I was a kid and in more recent years have read and enjoyed many of the books by Chan creator, Earl Derr Biggers. I have always liked the quiet, honorable way he carried himself, he never lost his temper, rarely used a weapon or resorted to violence, and he was my first introduction to Asian philosophy. I have since learned that a lot of these traits were based on western views of the Chinese and their philosophies and that Chan represents a s...more

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Sep 24, 2012 Doctor Sax rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: life-stories, history-united-states, film-entertainment

If you had no clue what Xenophobia is...you most certainly will by the time you finish this book. There were some good things here and although I can appreciate the sociological aspect of where the author was heading regarding Chan, it was incredibly overdone. Again I didn't want this book to read like a dime store novel, but the author beats you to death with "Xenophobia" and issues concerning the Chinese population at large. I wanted not only more of Charlie Chan from a media standpoint (films...more

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Jun 01, 2011 Kathryn rated it 4 of 5 stars

I wasn't too sure I'd like a book about a B actor, but this book came highly recommended by Bookmarks. And I always enjoy the books they highly recommend! This book was much more than the story of the actor and the movies I remembered. This book looked at the Chinese who came to this country, why and how they came, and what affect they had on the history of the US. The character of Charlie Chan was based on a real dectective in the early 20th century in Honolulu. The book examined this dectectiv...more

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Oct 06, 2010 Bernard Norcott-mahany rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I thought this was an outstanding work of a personal quest and of the intersection of history, legend and pop culture. The author, himself Chinese, having escaped from China following the Tienanmen Square incident, worked hard to become part of America, where he now teaches literature in an American University, just as Chang Apana, the Hawaiian police officer who served as the inspiration for Charlie Chan, also worked hard as he rose from worker to cowboy to police officer in turn of the century...more

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Jun 20, 2011 Mark Bruce rated it 5 of 5 stars

Written by a naturalized Chinese American, this fascinating book tells the story of the real Chinese detective who worked for the Honolulu Police--as well as the development of the famed detective created by Earl Derr Biggs. The surprising conclusion the author comes to--while giving all sides a fresh hearing--is that Charlie Chan is not the racist figure he's cracked up to be. Instead, he is a canny and wise man, often offended by the racism of his times, who never lets the white man's world cl...more

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Jan 13, 2013 Karen Gygli rated it 4 of 5 stars

A very interesting analysis of the Charlie Chan novels and films by a Chinese-American cultural critic and professor. The Hawaiian history and the portrait of the guy Charlie Chan was modeled on--a Chinese police officer in Honolulu who was legendary for his tough sweeps of the gambling dens, his debonair style and his devotion to his family--is really engaging. The analysis by the author, a Chinese academic, of what has been called a racist and stereotypical Chinese character, is also thought-p...more

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Jan 15, 2011 The Library Lady rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: adult-non-fiction

This is immensely readable and the material is fascinating. I knew about Chang Apana because he appeared in a novel I'd read last year--Honolulu, I think--but Huang fleshed him out more fully,and the material about Biggers and about the movies was terrific.
The problem with this--and the reason I am giving it 3 rather than 4 (think about 3.75) is that in his eagerness to fully cover his multiple topics, Huang meanders over everything from his relationship with his own child to conditions in 19th...more

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Nov 30, 2010 Jasmine rated it 3 of 5 stars

As a hater of Charlie Chan, I went into this book knowing that I'd be reading a lot about Earl Biggers' inspiration for his series, the actual detective Chang Apana, and the historical/social forces that went into and surrounded the book at the time. I really enjoyed Huang's easy-to-understand, interesting analysis of Charlie Chan in Shanghai and other Chan films, in addition to the books and characters. I found his comparison sections between Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan especially intriguing, be...more

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Jan 30, 2012 Erik rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: bio, crime, film, library, mystery, animals

p.296 ...his name in Chinese, (Zheng Ping in Mandarin or Chang Pung in the Cantonese pronunciation). For a long time, I had wondered what kind of name “Apana” was. Now I can be certain that “Apana” is a Polynesian variation of the Cantonese “Pung.” The first A derives from the Chinese custom of adding “Ah” to a given name as a casual way of addressing someone. The last A is a Polynesian addition, because in that langauge, as Herman Melville reminded us in his first book, Typee, all words end wit...more

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Oct 09, 2010 Bob rated it 3 of 5 stars

Recommended to Bob by: heard an author interview on NPR

This was promoted, and libraries classed it, as a biography of Chang Apana, a Honolulu detective who worked in the first three decades of the 20th century, and Huang does provide a brief sketch of this remarkable man's career. The real theme of the book, though, is American racism, and Apana's career, the changing fortunes of Charlie Chan (book detective and film icon), a sensational Honolulu criminal trial, and the author's personal and research experiences are neatly woven together to illustr...more

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Aug 02, 2011 Kay rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: biogr-memoir, hawaii, popular-culture, social-issues, nonfiction, true-crime

Boy, am I ever fatigued by publishing hype. Granted, an examination of the Charlie Chan phenomenon certainly sounded like a great concept, and it’s buttressed by an attractive book cover and catchy subtitle, “The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History.” Who can resist a “rendezvous with American history?” Well, not me.

Alas, from the first pages, I detected the whiff of a reworked doctoral thesis -- and, in fact, at the end of the book the author reveals...more

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title link	preview: Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History
avg rating	preview: Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History Goodreads rating: 3.63 (212 ratings)
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BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7884913-charlie-chan?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1349046594l/7884913.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7884913-charlie-chan?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History by Yunte Huang[/url]

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

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