10
The Other Canton
THE SAXTON HOUSE, CANTON, OHIO (Photo by author)
This is America—a town of a few thousand, in a region of wheat and corn and dairies and little groves.
—Sinclair Lewis, Main Street, 1920
PERMIT ME TO digress just a bit from the story of Chang Apana and Charlie Chan. In the late 1980s, I was a student of English literature at Peking University in China. During my sophomore year, in the spring of 1989, student protests broke out. Calling for democracy and freedom of speech, hundreds of thousands of students paraded through the streets of Beijing and staged demonstrations at Tiananmen Square. A hot-blooded youth despite my academic ambition, I joined the protests and camped out every day at the square, where, only two decades earlier, millions of Red Guards, participating in the Cultural Revolution, had jingoistically waved copies of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book of Sayings, shouted slogans, and pledged their allegiance to the Communist Party’s Great Helmsman. Our own protests and sit-ins, slightly less frenzied, went on for months, but Deng Xiaoping’s Communist regime turned a deaf ear to our political demands.
Hearing about the turmoil in the capital city and concerned for my safety, my family lured me out of Beijing under a false pretense: they sent me a telegram claiming that my mother was “gravely ill.” When I arrived in my hometown after a three-day journey, I was surprised to see my mother standing in front of our house, looking as healthy as a newlywed and smiling as if she had just won the lottery. On that same night, June 4, troops and tanks rolled into Beijing, killing hundreds of demonstrators—an event remembered today as the Tiananmen Square Massacre. My mother might have felt fortunate that her youngest son had stayed out of harm’s way, but the tragedy in Beijing vanquished my realistic hopes for the future of China. Two years later, I left China and landed in, of all places, Tuscaloosa, an Alabama college town. A comparison is futile here, because nothing like it exists in the People’s Republic of China. Imagine, for example, leaving Manhattan and arriving in Manhattan, Kansas; or leaving Moscow and ending up in Moscow, Idaho. This is not to say that the experience would necessarily be unpleasant, but one’s mind boggles and the senses gasp in the new air of change.
The Deep South certainly has its charms. Alabama, as Carl Carmer puts it, is “a land with a spell on it—not a good spell, always. Moons, red with the dust of barren hills, thin pine trunks barring horizons, festering swamps, restless yellow rivers, are all parts of a feeling—a strange certainty that above and around them hovers enchantment—an emanation of malevolence that threatens to destroy men through dark ways of its own.”1 Carmer was a Yankee author who taught English at the University of Alabama in the 1920s, at the height of the Ku Klux Klan reign of racial terror and violence. At the time of my arrival in the summer of 1991, Tuscaloosa had already lost the malevolent luster depicted by Carmer, but the Heart of Dixie still was a shock for me. Having grown up in China’s homogeneous society, I felt disoriented (in more ways than one) when I was suddenly thrown into an environment where race, to put it mildly, matters.
Yellow, as I was to find out, is not a visible color in the land where Uncle Tom’s cabin used to stand. Three decades after the civil rights movement, the historical effect of biracial segregation remained so strong that Asians, as the third race, simply fell into a vacuum. “You are either a white man or a nigger here,” a white Baptist minister once infamously said.2 While blacks still bore the brunt of racial discrimination, Asians were regarded more or less as foreigners, offscreen Charlie Chans, so to speak. Out of desperation and economic necessity, I opened SWEN, a Chinese restaurant in Northport, just across the Black Warrior River from Tuscaloosa, and worked for two years as co-owner, manager, chef, delivery boy, waiter, dishwasher, and kitchen hand. Owning a fast-food joint did nothing to enhance my social status; on the contrary, it had the opposite effect. Ever heard of Chinese haute cuisine? It does exist, but Chinese food in great swaths of America is still associated with the image of lowdown chop-suey joints that once populated Western mining towns in the nineteenth century, and it’s tough to shake off that stigma in the Deep South. As a result, during those two years when I made soup and fried rice every morning, delivered boxes of steaming food all over town, and mopped the tiled floors of my restaurant’s kitchen every night after closing, I constantly felt like a bottom-feeding fish, one that cannot see the light of day in the muddy pond of America.
After struggling for three years in Alabama, I decided to go to graduate school rather than return to China.
In August 1994, having imbibed these new American vapors for a few years, I felt emboldened enough to make my first cross-country drive from Tuscaloosa, a town of tall pines and red clay now adjacent to the newly chosen American headquarters of Mercedes-Benz, to Buffalo, a faded remnant of a bygone age of Rust Belt glory, where I would study for my Ph.D. in English. Behind the wheel of my beat-up blue Toyota hatchback, I came upon a sign that said, “Canton,” about an hour after I passed Columbus, Ohio, on Interstate 71. For a second, I thought I was dreaming, but then my senses got hold of me. Still, I was intrigued by the Chinese-sounding name and hit by the distinct feeling of nostalgia, a yearning for a homeland I had once sworn I would never return to. Chinese names, I knew, were popular among those who were planning American towns in the early nineteenth century. The China trade, which had brought silk, porcelain, and tea from Canton to America, would inspire, as it turned out, the adoption of “Canton” as the name for more than thirty American municipalities. Another thirty, if not more, were dubbed China, China Grove, China Hill, or Pekin. Was this because nineteenth-century settlers wished to create an ersatz feeling that they were in some exotic, faraway land?3 This was the case for Ohio’s Canton, which was founded in 1805. When surveyor Bezaleel Wells divided the town’s land, he named it after the Chinese city as a memorial to John O’Donnell, a China trader he had admired. O’Donnell, who owned a Maryland plantation also named Canton, had been the first person to transport goods from China to Baltimore.
At the time of my first cross-country drive, I did not know much about Charlie Chan, let alone Earl Biggers. Nor was I aware of the uncanny coincidence that, while the original Charlie Chan had grown up in a rural village near Canton, China, the man who created the fictional Chinese detective hailed from the woods near a city that bears the same name—though the two Cantons are, both geographically and symbolically, at opposite ends of the earth. Only later would I learn that Biggers had spent his childhood near Canton, Ohio, tumbling in the weeds and haystacks among the oak groves and cornfields that were whizzing by my Toyota on that summer day in 1994.
In order to make ends meet as a graduate student in Buffalo, I had to work busy shifts as a deliveryman at a Chinese restaurant and as a security guard at a Korean-owned wig store in a rundown neighborhood. To relieve the tension, I went book-hunting at estate and moving sales on weekends. Once the so-called Queen City of the Great Lakes but then a virtual ghost town whose population had diminished either through aging or migration to warmer climes, Buffalo had much to offer in antique furniture and used books. At an estate sale inside an old Victorian house, I found something curious—a twin set of Charlie Chan books: crimson, hardboard-covered reprints with five novels bound into two volumes, handsomely titled Charlie Chan’s Caravan and Charlie Chan Omnibus. There was even a handwritten dedication in red wax pencil in one of the volumes: “Hurry and get well, Irving, we miss you—Eddie and Jean.” A get-well gift from many years back—the Grosset & Dunlap reprints dated to the 1940s. I took the “caravan” and “omnibus” home for a dollar each. I never figured out who Irving was and whether Charlie Chan had facilitated the desired recuperation, but I became an avid fan of Charlie Chan, renting all the movies I could find at video stores, reading all the novels, and constantly looking out for those cheap paperbacks as well as rare editions.
Through increasingly obsessive research, I found out more about the man who had created Charlie. Earl Derr Biggers was born on August 26, 1884, in Warren, Ohio, “a town of a few thousand,” as Sinclair Lewis would put it. After the Revolutionary War, the fledgling state of Connecticut was bizarrely extended to include a 120-mile-long strip of land in northeastern Ohio, which would become known as the Connecticut Western Reserve. In 1798, a wealthy man named Ephraim Quinby bought 441 acres of land in the area and built the town of Warren. Nestled close to the pencil-sharp state line dividing Ohio from Pennsylvania, Warren was called “the Capital of the Western Reserve” in the early nineteenth century. But the epithet rang hollow; two nearby cities, Cleveland and Pittsburgh, with their proximity to lake and canal shipping, stole the limelight and emerged as the Ohio Valley’s crown jewels. Warren was left with the false grandeur of its nickname and the emptiness of the promise. At the time of Biggers’s birth, Warren had become a prosaic midwestern town of mills, factories, and foundries. With elm-lined streets and a Romanesque courthouse facing a public square of war memorials and patriotic bunting each Fourth of July, it could have been plucked from a Sinclair Lewis Main Street tableau. Earl’s father, Robert J. Biggers, was a hardworking factory engineer who was able to provide handsomely for his wife, Emma, and their only child.4
Like so many children who are born into provincial insularity but grow up to become writers or artists, young Biggers was inspired by his avid reading. Newspaper comic strips were his favorite. According to his recollection, “As soon as I could write connected sentences, I appropriated the characters from Palmer Cox’s Brownie series, and wove about them many startling romances.” He would read these aloud to his grandmother.5 Aspiring to be a writer, he founded at Warren High School a monthly magazine titled The Cauldron. “The first issue led off with a grandiose editorial in which I split three infinitives,” he later reminisced, “and used the verb lay where I should have used lie. I was an author!”6
Despite his imaginative powers, young Biggers was stubbornly wedded to the truth. A case in point: There was a haberdashery on the street where the Biggers family lived. Business was dropping off, and the owner hired some New York City slickers—in recollection, Biggers called them “Potashes and Perlmutters,” after two Jewish shopkeepers featured in comic novels by Montague Glass—to help boost the sales. The haberdasher also knocked on Biggers’s door and asked if the young boy would like to work as a clerk on Saturdays. Biggers agreed and began work on a Saturday. By noontime, the gentlemen from the big city took the haberdasher aside and demanded that Biggers be let go, for he had been, like the boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” telling the truth about the goods to the customers and ruining the tall tales of these New York shysters. He was summarily fired.
Years later, when Biggers was working as a columnist for a Boston newspaper, he again got sacked, in his own words, “for telling the truth in my dramatic criticisms.” Such unfortunate run-ins with truth-telling made Biggers wiser, and he decided to stick to storytelling from then on. Reflecting about them at a dinner party that celebrated the successful production of his first play in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1912, he said, “It was about that time I decided to let Truth remain crushed to earth—and become a liar on a large scale. And from that time on I have lied ambitiously with what success—the future alone will prove.”7
Young Biggers seems to have explored his local area and was well acquainted with the two nearby cities, Canton and Akron, as his later writings would show. In Charlie Chan Carries On (published in 1930), Ohio, a state that has produced a passel of U.S. presidents, figures prominently in a murder mystery on a global scale. The plot involves a killer stalking a U.S. tour group on a globe-trotting vacation. The first victim—a Detroit automobile executive—is found strangled in a ritzy London hotel, his hand clutching a key marked “Dietrich Safe and Lock Company, Canton, Ohio,” obviously inspired by Diebold Safe and Lock Company. Two prominent characters, Akron rubber baron Elmer Benbow and his socialite wife, Nettie, seem to be an amalgamation of Seiberlings and Firestones—founding families of the Goodyear and Firestone tire companies, respectively. Other connections to Canton and Akron include characters named Spicer and Everhard, both recognizable names of pioneering clans in the early days of the Buckeye State.8
The most interesting connection is perhaps the name of Charlie Chan. It is a common assumption that Biggers based his character on Chang Apana. But during the time Biggers was growing up, there actually was a Chinese man named Charlie Chan living in Akron. Listed as thirty-six years old in the 1900 census, Chan was, coincidentally, also born around 1864 in Canton, China. He immigrated to the United States as a teen and opened a laundry in Akron in the late 1890s. Located downtown at 40 North Howard Street, the laundry doubled as Chan’s home. He ran the business for about fifteen years.
It turns out that Akron’s Charlie Chan, unlike many Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century, was not a mute witness to history. According to a 2008 report, the Akron Beacon Journal interviewed Chan for an article about China’s Boxer Rebellion, the uprising against foreigners and imperialistic aggression in the summer of 1900. The unnamed reporter, almost as if anticipating Biggers, decided to write in dialect: “Chan was busy, but he came out from the rear of his laundry long enough to be interviewed. He was told that there was a great war raging in China and he was asked to say something about the Boxers. ‘War! War in China! Me no care. Me safe. China bad. Me no go back China.’”9
While the passage of more than a century prevents us from knowing whether this was Chan’s real sentiment, we do know that his laundry was in a prominent location within walking distance of the train station. If Biggers hopped aboard the Pittsburgh, Akron & Western Railroad, he could get to the big city in two hours, and he would not have missed seeing Charlie Chan’s laundry sign.
In September 2008, fourteen years after I first saw the road sign for Canton on my northward migration, I flew from California to Indiana to examine Biggers’s papers in the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington. Arriving on a Saturday, aware that the library would not open until Monday, I rented a car at the Indianapolis Airport and drove toward Ohio’s flatlands for a closer look at the state that now is called not only “Mother of Presidents” but also the venerable home of Charlie Chan’s creator.
As soon as I left the airport, I encountered an almost impenetrable thunderstorm. The skyline disappeared, and all I could see was the blurred glow from the taillights of the car immediately in front of me. Having becoming inured to the seemingly eternal California sun-shine, I had forgotten how nasty a Midwest storm could get, and how quickly it could dissipate, especially at that time of year.
After a night at a most hospitable Super 8 Motel in Columbus, I resumed my pilgrimage the next morning, the first day of autumn. Driving past the vast cornfields, where remaining patches of green were melting fast into a sea of gold, I could sense that the sun, having already surpassed the Hawaiian Islands, was inching across the equator on its annual journey south.
My first stop of the day was Canton, that American homage to my homeland. Arriving in the midwestern town on a Sunday morning was like walking into a deserted movie set during a production break: all the props were there, but not a soul was to be seen. Downtown Canton, with its cluster of concrete office buildings, limestone churches, and faded Victorian houses, reminded me of Buffalo, albeit on a smaller scale. I remembered the many Sundays when I had strolled down Main Street to Buffalo’s deserted business district, where the stony façades of the Guaranty (now Prudential) Building, the Central Terminal, and art deco City Hall stood as mute witnesses to the glorious past of that Queen City. Canton’s Saxton House interested me most, for I knew it had a tragic connection to Buffalo. The three-story Victorian, on the corner of Market Avenue and Fourth Street, had been the home of Ida Saxton McKinley and her husband, William McKinley, before his 1896 election to the presidency. In September 1901, while attending the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo, President McKinley was assassinated by anarchist Leon Czolgosz. The grieving First Lady withdrew to her home in Canton, where she died just six years later.
Biggers had just begun his junior year at Warren High School at the time of McKinley’s assassination. After lying in state at both Buffalo’s City Hall and the White House, the president’s body was returned for burial to Canton, where thousands of Ohioans lined up to pay final tribute to their native son. We do not know whether Biggers, living only forty miles away, was one of the mourning spectators. In the unlikely event that he wasn’t, he most certainly was riveted by the dramatic events unfolding in his corner of the world. Judging from his choice of postgraduate careers in journalism and playwriting, we can be sure that affairs of such magnitude and theatricality as McKinley’s death and the execution of his assassin would leave an indelible impression on his young mind and give him an early taste for the thrill of dramatic news.
My next stop was Akron. In particular, I was hoping to find the site where Ohio’s Charlie Chan had run his laundry business. Prior to the trip, I had used Google Earth to pinpoint the spot and map out the route, but when I arrived at 40 North Howard Street, all I saw was a deserted lot covered with litter and weeds, adjacent to a barn-like building with boarded-up windows. At a fork just down the road stood a nightclub with a comical façade: the one-story brick structure was painted in spotted yellow, rather like SpongeBob SquarePants. Not too far from the highway, I did see railroad tracks, and I imagined what a curious sight it would have been for a nineteenth-century train passenger to spot Mr. Chan’s laundry sign in the American heartland.
My final stop of the day was Biggers’s birthplace. To get to Warren, I had to turn east on Interstate 76 and then take a local westbound highway a few miles past Youngstown, where in 1878 a twenty-one-year-old young man named Clarence Darrow had just begun his law practice. Darrow would one day become the nation’s first celebrity attorney, but his spectacular career would end after losing the infamous Massie Case in Hawaii in 1932, a trial so sensational and so rife with racial tension that it might be called a harbinger of the O. J. Simpson trial more than sixty years later.
Driving on rural Route 82 after Youngstown, I was reminded of the landscape in a realist novel. Sleepy hamlets broke the monotony of expansive corn-and wheatfields. In and out of view came huddled wooden houses framed by their parched lawns and broken wooden fences, and occasionally, trailers scattered behind clumps of oaks and birches. Barns and silos, standing back from the road in the shrouds of thin mist, looked like giant toys in a fairyland dreamed up by some kids but then abandoned after play.
Warren, I must confess, was not quite as grand as I had imagined. The proverbial “diamond in the rough” label would not apply to the hometown of the famous author. As a midwestern town on the fringe of the Rust Belt, Warren showed evidence of decline. Traces of old mills and factories, formerly the lifeblood of the city, were still visible here and there, including a rusty railroad track that seemed to have been unused for years. Pothole covers protruded in the middle of the streets as if someone had started to pull them up for scrap metal but was interrupted.
After driving around aimlessly, I turned to the Warren–Trumbull County Public Library. Perched at the corner of a main thoroughfare and shaded by large elm trees, the library was a two-story brick building with a huge parking lot. At the entrance were racks of used paperbacks and dusty VHS tapes for sale, all donated or withdrawn from circulation. Approaching the information desk, I asked the bespectacled, white-haired librarian about their E. D. Biggers holdings.
“Who?” she responded.
I repeated the name and emphasized that Biggers was a hometown author and the creator of Charlie Chan. This, however, elicited little enthusiasm, though my mention of Chan made her look at me as if I were a Chinese orphan looking for my long-lost father. She typed in the name on a computer terminal to search the database. There was only one item, a Chan novel, in the library’s collection, and it was a 1970s paperback reprint. Sensing my disappointment, she kindly told me that I might be able to find something in their History and Genealogy section upstairs. She pointed her finger toward the stairwell in the middle of the room, “That lady up there knows a lot and might be able to help you. But her office is closed on Sunday.”
This information put an abrupt end to my pilgrimage of the day. Feeling let down, I decided to reward my efforts with a Chinese buffet before returning to Bloomington. When I got to the Golden Dragon (I’m always amazed by the names given to Chinese restaurants in America), situated in the corner of a nondescript shopping plaza with a red Chinese paper lantern hanging outside its door, it was already past the lunch rush. Only a few diners still lingered in this forty-seat dive. A big man, with a sizable beer belly, a ponytail, and wearing a black Jesus and Mary Chain band T-shirt, was brooding over his dessert—chunks of cantaloupe and almond tofu. When he lifted his face and stared at the stacks of empty plates and crumpled napkins that mounted before him, he smiled like a hunter pleased with game birds bagged on a good day. Two teenage girls, one wearing braces, were giggling over their fortune cookies. The food trays on the buffet island had run low at this hour. I filled my plate with the few remaining options and sat down near the window.
Wistfully chewing my beef broccoli and kung pao chicken, I looked out at the deserted parking lot and the red lantern swinging gently in the breeze. The lantern had the Chinese character “Fortune” printed upside down on its sides and a bunch of golden threads tied together as the tail. The Chinese word for “upside down” is dao, a homonym of the word for “arrival.” “Fortune” written upside down means “fortune arrives.” This lantern reminded me of a curious object in Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street that appears only once in the book and remains unelaborated by the narrator. Early on in the novel, Carol Milford, a footloose, free-spirited student at Blodgett College, is invited to dinner at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Marbury, a couple who epitomize small-town America’s cultural narrowmindedness and smug complacency. The Marburys, writes Lewis, “regarded Carol as their literary and artistic representative. She was the one who could be depended upon to appreciate the Caruso phonograph record, and the Chinese lantern which Mr. Marbury had brought back as his present from San Francisco.”10 Like a recording of Enrico Caruso’s voice, the Chinese lantern is a perfect souvenir from cultural excursions that nice folks take outside God’s Country. Mr. Marbury is an insurance salesman; he must have bought the lantern in San Francisco’s Chinatown on a business trip. A gilded bust of a half-naked laughing Buddha would be too pagan for a Bible-worshipping home like the Marburys’. A lantern is just about right.
Looking at the lantern, I had an epiphany. Until then, I had tried to track the story of Charlie Chan from one Canton to another, from colonial Hawaii to postbellum Ohio. I had always wondered how Biggers, a boy from a milquetoast midwestern town, could have created a Chinaman so alive, so distinct from almost everything in the environment that had nourished his creator. I realized, sitting in that aromatic dining room of the Golden Dragon, that Charlie Chan to Biggers’s Ohio was the Chinese lantern to Lewis’s Main Street America. He was a whiff of Oriental mystique blown into the insular flatland.
On my way back to Indiana, I turned on the radio. A previous driver, or maybe the rental-car company, had preset the radio to local Christian music and gospel stations. In between evangelical rock and Bible readings, there was also some news, which that day was dominated by America’s economic meltdown. The national unemployment rate had just breached the 6 percent mark. Even though that percentage remained a far cry from Great Depression levels, the economists interviewed on the news broadcast all predicted that the worst was yet to come. It seemed inevitable that the rural area through which I was driving, hit hard by the Great Depression, would again bear the brunt of the impending recession. That 1929 stock-market crash, as we will see, caused no small havoc in the life of Earl Biggers.
It was sunset when I crossed the state line separating Ohio from Indiana. Shadows grew longer on the ground. The last rays of the sun burned the edges of the clouds as hot as prairie fire. Over the western horizon, atop rolling hills, the sun hung like a Chinese lantern, about to be extinguished.