Epilogue

CHANG APANA’S GRAVE AT THE CHINESE CEMETERY, MANOA, HAWAII (Photo by Susan M. Schultz)

Story are now completely extracted like aching tooth.

—Charlie Chan

SURPRISINGLY, MY FIRST trip to Hawaii only came in January 2007. I had been invited by the English Department at the University of Hawaii–Manoa to attend a conference on translation, but my secret personal mission was to find the grave of Chang Apana, the real Charlie Chan.

Earlier that day, after delivering a presentation called “Chinese Whispers,” I went to the Honolulu Police Department Museum to hear, so to speak, the whispers from the past, Chinese or otherwise. My conference host, Susan Schultz, drove me through downtown Honolulu in the midst of what is known locally as “liquid sunshine”—a brisk shower of silky threads that shine in the sun. The police headquarters is a four-story concrete stronghold, looking like a big chunk of New York’s United Nations Secretariat building lopped off, shipped around the globe, and placed in the middle of the Pacific. It is located at Beretania Street—Beretania being a Hawaiian rendering of the word Britain and named after British Consul Richard Charlton, who owned a plot of land in the area in the 1820s.

We parked the car and walked up to a front window that resembled a turnpike tollbooth. After telling the receptionist the purpose of our visit, we were each given a plastic badge and told to wait on a wooden bench by the window. I had never been inside an American police station, but I had watched enough episodes of Law & Order to know the basic protocols: hang onto your visitor’s badge and wait till you are called.

The man who greeted us, when we eventually were led through the maze of hallways to the one-room museum, was a friendly, middle-aged African American police officer. He introduced himself as Eddie Croom, curator of the museum. From the film world of the 1930s when black sidekicks were invariably portrayed as inarticulate, superstitious, and easily frightened Negroes to the present moment when a distinguished black curator stood there to provide me with a glimpse of the history of my own race, America has progressed significantly, though even at the time of Chang Apana and Charlie Chan, Honolulu had already acquired the epithet of “the melting pot of the Pacific.” It was always a city that brought all races together at the crossroads of the globe. Samuel King, Hawaii’s legendary governor, once said, “The secret of Hawaii’s racial harmony is that we’re all in the minority.” Even though King’s remark sounds a bit too rosy, it does indeed contain a seed of truth that could not be denied as I searched for the story of Charlie Chan, real and fictional.

The room we entered looked like a brightly lit curio shop. In the middle were large, glass-fronted wall-to-wall cabinets with long display cases. Photographs, uniforms, helmets, badges, weapons, certificates, motorcycles, and other kinds of memorabilia seemed to choke the room. From images of the pre-Cook kapu system to posters for Hawaii Five-O, from the rifle that once had belonged to the infamous Koolau the Leper to the mug shots and arrest file of Grace Fortescue, this museum is a Hawaiian encyclopedia of crime and punishment brought to life.

“Officer Chang Apana,” said the curator, wasting little time before turning to the subject of my interest, “joined the sheriff’s office in 1898, just when the city was incorporated, a very exciting moment for Honolulu.” While providing a brief summary of Apana’s career, Officer Croom led us to a glass cabinet tucked discreetly in a corner of the room. Displayed inside were copies of vintage Charlie Chan books, old videotapes, and DVD films that had just been released by Twentieth Century-Fox—a sign that the museum had been following closely any new career moves of the character inspired by Apana. I saw photos and portraits of Apana as well as newspaper clippings I was anxious to read, but what particularly caught my attention was a brown-skin whip coiled like a snake ready to strike, a whip that the former paniolo had actually used to wage his historic, crime-fighting battle.

“When he retired in 1932,” Officer Croom continued, “Apana was the longest-serving officer in the department. When he died a year later due to complications from leg amputation, his funeral procession rivaled the greatest royal processions of the era. In 2005, he was named one of the 100 most influential persons in the history of Hawaii.”

Despite his familiarity with Apana’s legend, the curator could not answer the question I had come there to ask: “Where is Apana buried now?” He told me that it was perhaps in the Chinese Cemetery in Manoa. He didn’t know for sure.

Then I remembered Earl Biggers’s description, in The Black Camel, of the Chinese Cemetery, “with its odd headstones scattered down the sloping hillside.” Charlie Chan drives past this place in his battered Ford flivver on his way to work every day. Whether or not it is the right cemetery, Biggers obviously knew the significance of the final resting place to an immigrant like Apana and, by extension, Chan. In the novel, Chan has buried his mother in that cemetery, close to his Punchbowl Hill home, and his filial piety is an important part of his veracity as a fictional character of Chinese descent.

Saying our heartfelt thanks, we left the museum.

After a brief lunch at a local sandwich shop, Susan and I started driving toward the cemetery in the Upper Manoa Valley. Hailing from Virginia, Susan had lived and taught in Hawaii for almost two decades. Her red Dodge Neon seemed to know the local roads as well as a seasoned paniolo’s horse would know well-trodden trails.

Riding in the soft drizzle up and down the winding slopes of the Manoa Valley, we talked about the circuitous route by which I had arrived here in Honolulu. I told Susan how, at the age of eleven, I had secretly learned English by adjusting the dial of my grandfather’s battered transistor radio just so, and then memorizing the exotic language of the Voice of America. I had to keep my discovery a secret because listening to those politically subversive foreign radio stations was illegal in those days. For some reason, looking for Chang Apana’s traces made me remember those sweltering summers in Alabama and my bumbling restaurant efforts. I also recalled the immense challenges of getting a Ph.D. in a language that was, at least not yet, my own, and finally, the serendipity of stumbling upon my first Charlie Chan books at a Buffalo estate sale. In the doctoral dissertation I had finished at SUNY Buffalo, I devoted a chapter to Charlie Chan, comparing his pidgin speech to the kind of racial ventriloquism found in the works of Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and T. S. Eliot. My fascination with Charlie Chan didn’t stop there. A few years later, I published a book of poetry called CRIBS. In it, I adopted a poetic diction that imitates Charlie Chan’s pidgin, such as in this poem:

THINK HAIKU, ACT LOCU: AN EXPERIMENT IN BACK-TRANSLATION

take it

with a grain of MSG

what’s the memory size

of your abacus?

speak

in a chopsticked tongue

another day

another yen

the yin-yang

of base and superstructure

the great

Great Wall

be careful

not to get shanghaied

the Peking-duck congress

is just a bunch of lame mandarins

the two stick together

like ping and pong

he sold his birthright

for a bowl of hot & sour soup?

a writer is a man

of characters

a man is known

by his breast-strokes

sell haiku

buy locu

The rain had just stopped when we arrived at the cemetery. The entrance was a Chinese-style stone arcade, reminiscent of a paifang, the gate to a typical Chinese village. For many years, there was a tradition among overseas Chinese of shipping the bodies of their countrymen back to China for burial. As an old Chinese saying goes, “When a leaf falls to the ground, it returns to its roots.” Those Chinese wishing to be buried in America would still prefer a resting place resembling the one in their home village. Hence the stone arcade, to create a sense of familiarity and homecoming.

It was, however, Sunday, and the cemetery office was closed. There was no map or directory to help us locate Apana’s grave. We drove around in circles, passing thousands of tombstones standing mutely under a gray sky. Maybe because of the weather, but more likely the passage of time, most of the marble monuments had turned black, looking to me like a flock of black birds settled on a green meadow. Built on a slope, the cemetery faced a valley flecked with white bungalows that were almost as numerous as the graves. Under the shadows of a giant mountain, the worlds of the living and the dead now appeared in a quiet clash of black and white, as if trying to outmatch the other in number and anonymity.

Just as we were about to turn back, luck smiled on us; or, as Charlie Chan once put it, “One grain of luck sometimes worth more than whole rice field of wisdom.” A sharp turn in the road, which we had not yet explored, led us right to a sign that read:

8. DETECTIVE CHARLIE CHAN (CHAN APANA).

A red arrow pointed toward a lot at the bottom of the hill. It seemed ironic that the sign misspelled Apana’s name as “Chan Apana,” as if reality was literally falling under the “spell” of fiction.

Our discovery was in the older section of the cemetery. We saw graves dating back to the late nineteenth century, making them the resting places for some of the earliest first-generation Chinese immigrants to come across the Pacific. The lot, no more than a single acre, contained several hundred stones but had no numbering system. The mysterious “8” then became even more of a mystery, like a broken 8-ball that could tell no fortune. We ran up and down the slope, trying different ways of counting to eight—the eighth grave in the direction of the arrow, the eighth row from the bottom of the slope, the eighth row from the top—all to no avail. The elusive “8,” the luckiest number in Chinese numerology, suddenly felt like a trick to entice us, a Möbius strip that would lead us nowhere. It seemed that we needed the assistance of a sleuth like Charlie Chan.

THE GRAVESTONE OF CHANG APANA (Photo by Susan M. Schultz)

The rain, which had sensibly paused for a while, now came down heavily. Running out of time, we decided to split up to canvass the area faster. Many of the stone inscriptions were in Chinese, and thus offered no clue to Susan, but it was she who found the grave. As I was circling around at the bottom of the slope, with raindrops trickling down my face and blurring my glasses, I heard Susan, from a few rows away, shout: “I found it!”

I quickly ran over, and there he was. It was a solitary grave, with two marble steps that had turned dark with age and moisture. The tombstone bore the English name “Chang Apana” at the top, while the Chinese characters were etched below. A small bed of blooming lilies covered the back of the grave. The Chinese inscriptions provided information on Apana’s hometown in southern China, even though he had been born in Hawaii. “Oo Sack Village, Gudu County, Chungshan District,” read the inscription. His date of death was given as “December, 1934,” though he had, in fact, died in December, 1933.

Despite the apparent death-date error, the gravestone yielded an important clue that I had thus far been unable to ascertain from other sources: 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, such as “Ah Sin” and “Ah Pung” (I’m called Ah Te in my family). The last A is a Polynesian addition, because in that language, as Herman Melville reminded us in his first book, Typee, all words end with a vowel.

In Chinese, (Ping) means “peace, equilibrium,” but it occurred to me, as I stood before his grave, that the man who bore the name of peace had not enjoyed much of it. On the contrary, violence—be it physical, emotional, or racial—had accompanied his journey through life. And yet, the man I would research turned out to be self-effacing and curiously taciturn; perhaps, then, the name fits the character after all.

The story of Chang Apana, as this book affirms, is much more than just one man’s biography. Not only did his rough-and-tumble exploits inspire the creation of a memorable cultural icon, but the very creators of the Charlie Chan persona also led lives that were the stuff of legends. The stories of Earl Biggers, Warner Oland, Sidney Toler, and Anna May Wong, among others, were all part of the cultural mélange that Gertrude Stein called “The Making of Americans.”

On our way back to the car, we saw a rainbow hanging in the sky. I observed that one iridescent end dipped into the emerald ocean while the other tumbled into the lush foliage of a remote Hawaiian mountain that had been washed as clean as it had been on the first day of the world.

Recalling what Earl Biggers once said, that “most people who have been to Hawaii long to return,” I would now, “more ardently than most,” want to return and explore further the legend of Charlie Chan.