14

The Heathen Chinee

BRET HARTE, “THE HEATHEN CHINEE,” 1870 (Courtesy of Poetry and Rare Books Library, University at Buffalo)

Ching Chong Chinaman sitting on a fence

Trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents.

Along came a choo-choo train

Knocked him in the cuckoo brain,

And that was the end of the fifteen cents.

—American children’s jump-rope song from a less-enlightened era

THE FIRST CHARLIE Chan book, The House Without a Key, was published in March 1925. A quarter of the way through the novel, Charlie Chan makes his inconspicuous entrance as a minor character, literally as “the third man,” the Chinaman:

As they went out, the third man stepped farther into the room, and Miss Minerva [Winterslip] gave a little gasp of astonishment as she looked at him. In those warm islands thin men were the rule, but here was a striking exception. He was very fat indeed, yet he walked with the light dainty step of a woman. His cheeks were as chubby as a baby’s, his skin ivory tinted, his black hair close-cropped, his amber eyes slanting. As he passed Miss Minerva he bowed with a courtesy encountered all too rarely in a work-a-day world, then moved on after Hallet…. “But—he’s a Chinaman!”¹

Chan’s idiosyncratic, ungrammatical speech is apparent from the beginning. His first utterance, like a newborn’s first cry, is unmistakably pidgin English: “No knife are present in neighborhood of crime.”²

Charlie Chan’s unceremonious debut is a prelude to his tortured legacy in American culture, a legacy that at once endears and offends millions. Depending on one’s persuasion, Biggers’s first description of Chan yields very different readings. Chan is “fat,” which means he is either chubby and lovable or oafish and ugly. He walks “with the light dainty step of a woman,” which means he is unobtrusive and agile, or he is effeminate. His close-cropped black hair suggests his neatness or lack of status. “His amber eyes slanting” projects a sense of realism to some, but a degree of repulsion to others, since “slanting” sounds pejorative. His courteous bow indicates politeness to some but docility to others. Chan’s ungrammatical speech, reminiscent of fortune-cookie witticisms, sounds hilariously funny to many but racially parodic to others.

All things Charlie, it seems, are radically polarizing.

But we are already ahead of ourselves in the story. Let us backtrack and look more closely at Charlie Chan’s literary debut, at a time in the mid-1920s when the Chinaman grabbed the attention of the reading public and film audiences nationwide, an era when American children chanted, “Ching Chong Chinaman sitting on a fence,” as they jumped rope on the streets, the chant being their first exposure to “Oriental” culture.

Charlie Chan, as we know, was not the central character in Biggers’s early conception of the novel. Biggers originally opened the story in San Francisco, and two newspapermen there, both white, were the designated heroes. “Sergeant Charlie Chan entered the story of The House Without a Key,” as Biggers recalled, “supposedly a minor character, a mere bit of local color.”³ As the writing progressed, however, Chan modestly but firmly took the spotlight. And as soon as Biggers’s story ceased running serially in the Saturday Evening Post, “Say—when are we going to have another Charlie Chan story?” became a popular cry, suggesting that Biggers’s magazine excerpts had an electrifying effect on readers, in much the same way that earlier Americans had crowded the New York docks to get the next installment of a Dickens novel more than half a century earlier.

A flood of letters descended on Biggers following the selections in the Saturday Evening Post, and his readers clamored for Charlie Chan to take center stage. Biggers soon realized that Chan, like a monkey on his back, could never be killed off. Much as Sherlock Holmes dogged Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (in fact, Doyle even tried to kill him), Charlie Chan would remain forever linked to his creator.

But why? What made Charlie Chan so appealing to the reading public of the 1920s? Why was he so popular on the silver screen in America and beyond? The answer lies, I believe, both in the kind of Chinaman that he is and in the kind of nation that America had become during the “tribal twenties.”

Just as Biggers’s first descriptive passage portends the troubled legacy of Charlie Chan, Miss Minerva’s exclamatory sentence, “But—he’s a Chinaman!”—led by a conditional “but” and broken by a dash—identifies the peculiar aura of his appeal. Indeed, a Chinaman, a loaded word in the English language, can now be applied to one character who can carry the whole burden of being a Chinaman.

So, what is a Chinaman?

Actually, we cannot ask such a timeless question, for the image of the Chinaman changes over time. As an English word, Chinaman was first used as a neutral term for a Chinese male. Occasionally, it even referred to a man from the Far East, including Japanese and Korean men. Unlike Frenchman or Englishman, however, the connotation of Chinaman turned negative in the nineteenth century as anti-Chinese sentiments gained currency in the United States.

As in Hawaii, Chinese immigration to the United States had been sporadic before the mid-nineteenth century. Sightings of individual Chinese were reported in Pennsylvania as early as 1785, but it was the discovery of gold at John Sutter’s mill in 1848 that suddenly spiked the number of Chinese arriving in North America: 325 in 1849, 450 more in 1850, 2,716 in 1851, and 20,026 in 1852. By 1870, there were about 63,000 Chinese in the United States, and 77 percent of them were in California.⁴

At first, Chinese were welcomed in America, especially in California, which had just joined the Union in 1850. The Chinese arrivals were routinely reported in the Daily Alta California as increases to a “worthy integer of population.” In his January 1852 address to the state’s legislature, Governor John McDougall praised the Chinese immigrants as “one of the most worthy class of our newly adopted citizens.” But as the competition in the goldfields became more intense, the tide soon turned against the Chinese, and these affectionate feelings turned sour. Only four months after Governor McDougall’s speech, the California legislature, at the urging of white American miners, passed the foreign miners’ license tax, which required a monthly payment of three dollars from every foreign miner who did not desire to become a citizen. Since a 1790 federal law had already denied “nonwhite persons” their eligibility for citizenship, Chinese miners became the main target of the tax. From 1852 to 1870, California collected $5 million from the Chinese, a sum representing between 25 and 50 percent of the state’s revenue.⁵

When Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1854, “The disgust of California has not been able to drive or kick the Chinaman back to his home”—a sentence cited today by the Oxford English Dictionary as the first recorded American use of the word Chinaman—the New England sage seemed well informed about the events in the Wild West. White Californians’ resentment and discrimination toward the Chinese were indeed on the rise. The following stanza from a gold rush song entitled “California As It Was and Is,” published by John A. Stone under the pseudonym “Put” in 1855, precisely captures the anti-Chinaman sentiments of the era:

I remember, I remember when the Yuba used to pay,

With nothing but a rocker, five hundred dollars a day.

We used to think ’t’would always last, and would, with perfect ease,

If only Uncle Sam had stopped the coming of Chinese.

Here the blame of an idealized California’s passing was laid on the newly arrived, the Chinese FOBs (“fresh off boats”), whose presence in the foothills along the Yuba River was a common sight in the heyday of the gold rush.⁶

Other songs of the period caricatured the Chinaman directly, mimicking his pidgin speech, such as this one entitled “Hong Kong”:

My name is Sin Sin, come from China

In a bigee large shipee, commee long here;

Wind blow welly muchee, Kick upee blubelly

Ship makee Chinaman feelee wellee queer.

Me fetchee longee a lillee gal nicee

She com longee to be my wife

Makee bigee swear to it all her life.⁷

This kind of pidgin imitation of Chinese, while enriching the English language with such neologisms as “ching chong,” “ka-ching,” and “chop chop,” would grow into a time-honored tradition in American popular literature. Eventually, it would become fodder for Earl Biggers as he crafted the idiosyncratic speech for Detective Charlie Chan.

As Emerson keenly observed, however, white resentment and ridicule did not stop the Chinese from coming, in part because there was such great demand for cheap labor, especially in the West. In February 1865, the Central Pacific Railroad hired fifty Chinese workers to lay the tracks for the transcontinental line going east from Sacramento. The company had made the hire on a trial basis, because construction boss James Harvey Strobridge, “a tough Vermonter of Irish ancestry,” considered the Chinese men too small—most of them weighed scarcely a hundred pounds. Started in early 1863, the work on the western end of the transcontinental line had become too hard and dangerous as the tracks reached the Sierra Nevada, and many of the Irish workers had quit. Desperate to find replacements, the company’s superintendent, Charles Crocker, decided to try the Chinese, who had been driven out of the minefields. A former gold miner, Crocker was a huge man who had a reputation for roaring “up and down the track like a mad bull.” He reminded Strobridge that although they might not look as sturdy as the young lads from Ireland, the Chinese “had built the longest stretch of masonry in the world”: the Great Wall.⁸

Reluctantly, Strobridge gave the fifty men their so-called Chinaman’s chance but soon found them to be, as Crocker put it in a report, “nearly as equal to white men in the amount of labor they perform.” Leland Stanford, owner of the company, also praised the Chinese workers as “quiet, peaceable, industrious, economical—ready and apt to learn all the different kinds of work.” By the fall of 1865, the company had hired 3,000 Chinese, and more were on their way from Canton. Within two years, 12,000 Chinese were employed by the Central Pacific, representing 90 percent of the entire workforce. These thousands of men contributed physical labor, technical skills, and even their lives to a railroad project that eventually would transform America. One observer of the construction site described the Chinese workers as “a great army laying siege to Nature in her strongest citadel. The rugged mountains looked like stupendous ant-hills. They swarmed with Celestials, shoveling, wheeling, carting, drilling, and blasting rocks and earth.” The winter of 1865–66 was particularly brutal, with a record forty-four snowstorms that piled snowdrifts more than sixty feet high. Avalanches, a constant threat on the job, buried camps and crews. Not until the following spring would the thawing corpses be found, standing upright, “their cold hands gripping shovels and picks and their mouths twisted in frozen terror.”⁹

In the spring of 1869, the railhead crossed into the salt flats of Utah and pushed toward Promontory Point, where the Central Pacific Railroad would meet the Union Pacific Railroad coming from the east with its Irish crews. As the two grading gangs—“Irish workers heading west and Chinese workers heading east”—drew close, competition turned ugly. Resenting the Chinese for taking their fellow countrymen’s jobs, the Irish, themselves often targets of ethnic bias, “secretly placed a charge of blasting powder so that it blew up Chinese workers.” On May 10, 1869, the last rail was laid down, the last spike—a golden spike—was rammed home, and engines of the two companies moved forward until they touched. To commemorate the completion of the first railroad to span the North American continent, the cheering crowd gathered for an official photo. In this picture, however, there is not a single Chinese face.¹⁰

The end of the transcontinental railroad project also meant unemployment for the thousands of Chinese workers. Many of them went to San Francisco, a city that, in the words of Will Rogers, “was never a town.” After growing exponentially during the heat of the gold rush, San Francisco by 1870 had developed into “a locus of industry,” becoming the ninth-biggest manufacturing city in the United States. The Chinese population of the city had also soared, from 2,719 in 1860 to 12,022 in 1870. Most Chinese immigrants in America crammed into crowded urban neighborhoods and made their living in retail business, service, vice, or entertainment within the confines of Chinatowns. In San Francisco, they also fanned out and sought employment in the city’s booming manufacturing industry. By one account, nearly half of the workers in San Francisco’s factories in 1872 were Chinese.¹¹

For employers, the advantage of hiring Chinese laborers was all too obvious: they were cheaper than white workers. Just as Mark Twain had pointed out in one of his Hawaiian letters, “You will not always go on paying $80 and $100 a month for labor which you can hire for $5.” While Twain’s numbers sound a bit exaggerated, it is a fact that by hiring the Chinese workers, the Central Pacific Railroad was able to reduce its labor costs by one-third. The competition from cheap Chinese workers produced white-labor resentment, as it had done previously in the mines. Racial antagonism was further exacerbated by the business owners’ practice of using Chinese replacements as a wedge for breaking strikes led by white workers. As a result, anti-Chinese riots erupted constantly in the American West, a region already notorious for violence.

While it is impossible to know how many Chinese were murdered or brutalized in isolated areas where the rule of law was a phantom, some of the worst outrages did not go unnoticed. The earliest recorded urban anti-Chinese riot took place in 1871 in Los Angeles, then a sleepy town of 5,728 souls, when twenty-one Chinese were shot, hanged, or burned to death by white mobs. One historian lists thirty-one California urban centers that experienced burnings of Chinese stores and homes and expulsions of Chinese residents in the 1870s. During an 1880 riot in Denver, a mob shouted death threats to the Chinese, overwhelmed the eight police officers on duty, and destroyed most of the buildings in Chinatown. Then they wrapped a rope around the neck of a Chinese laundryman, dragged him through the streets, and kicked and beat him to death. In another incident in 1885 in Rock Springs, Wyoming, a mob of 150 disgruntled white miners, armed with Winchester rifles, stormed into the Chinese quarter. They killed twenty-eight Chinese, wounded fifteen, and burned much of the district to the ground. According to one eyewitness, “the Chinamen were fleeing like a herd of hunted antelopes, making no resistance. Volley upon volley was fired after the fugitives. In a few minutes the hill east of the town was literally blue with hunted Chinamen.” Some linguists believe that the word hoodlum comes from the anti-Chinese cry of “huddle ’em,” a signal for mobs to surround and harass the Celestials.¹²

Vigilante violence was coupled with a series of anti-Chinese ordinances and legislation enacted by cities, states, and Congress. In the 1870s, San Francisco passed a number of ordinances with the stated intent to “drive [the Chinese] to other states to be their own educators against” further Chinese immigration. The Cubic Air Ordinance called for each tenement to have at least 500 cubic feet of air for each inhabitant. The city officials enforced the ordinance only in Chinatown and arrested not the predominantly white landlords but the Chinese tenants. The Laundry Ordinance set licensing fees punishingly high for Chinese laundries, charging them $15 every three months but only $2 or $4 for laundries run by whites.¹³

In the state of California, following the 1852 foreign miners’ license tax bill, the legislature passed an 1855 law entitled “An Act to Discourage the Immigration to this State of Persons Who Cannot Become Citizens Thereof.” In 1862, newly elected Republican governor Leland Stanford, whose railroad company would soon become the largest employer and exploiter of Chinese labor, used his inaugural address to decry “the presence among us of a degraded and distinct people,” and to call for “any constitutional action, having for its object the repression of the immigration of Asiatic races.” In the same year, the legislature passed “An Act to Protect Free White Labor against Competition with Chinese Coolie Labor, and Discourage the Immigration of Chinese into the State of California.” While an 1849 state statute had already provided that “No Black or Mulatto person, or Indian, shall be allowed to give evidence for or against a white man,” an 1854 ruling by the California Supreme Court added Chinese to the list and barred them from testifying.¹⁴ Most states had in the nineteenth century adopted the 1661 Maryland law against miscegenation, but the California version was designed to include the Chinese in the prohibition. As a white politician warned in 1878, “Were the Chinese to amalgamate at all with our people, it would be the lowest, most vile and degraded of our race, and the result of that amalgamation would be a hybrid of the most despicable, a mongrel of the most detestable that has ever afflicted the earth.” Two years later, the California legislature passed a bill to ban the marriage of any white person with a “negro, mulatto, or Mongolian.”¹⁵

Although some of these racist laws, such as the foreign miners’ license tax, were voided by the federal Civil Rights Act (the Enforcement Act) of 1870, the anti-Chinese movement gained momentum in post–Civil War America. As economic depression hit the country and led to job losses and labor strikes, Chinese immigration became a national issue. In 1879, President Rutherford B. Hayes—who had won the highly disputed 1876 election by one electoral vote but lost the popular vote to his opponent—placed what he called “the Chinese Problem” within the broad context of racial relations in America. He argued that the “Chinese invasion” was pernicious and should be discouraged. “Our experience in dealing with the weaker race—the Negroes and Indians,” he said, was not encouraging. The Chinese appeared to be a bigger threat because they were seen as intelligent and competitive, and their population was increasing. “I would,” Hayes concluded, “consider with favor any suitable measures to discourage the Chinese from coming to our shores.”¹⁶ Although Hayes ultimately would veto the so-called Fifteen Passenger Bill, which only allowed fifteen Chinese per ship to enter the United States, a landmark immigration bill was passed by Congress in May 1882, during the term of President Chester A. Arthur. Known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, the bill suspended the immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years and reconfirmed the inadmissibility of Chinese for citizenship. Renewed in 1892 and then extended in 1902 until its repeal in 1943, the exclusion led to a sharp decline in the Chinese population: from 105,465 in 1880 to 89,863 in 1900 to 61,639 in 1920.¹⁷ The bill was the first significant restriction on free immigration in U.S. history and the first immigration law to target a specific ethnic group. In the words of Senator George Frisbie Hoar, a Massachusetts Republican who was one of a handful of the bill’s opponents, “Chinese exclusion represented nothing less than the legalization of racial discrimination.” Hoar’s stance made him a target for scorn, especially in the western states. He was burned in effigy in Nevada, and California newspapers labeled him a “dwarf” and a “chicken-hearted Puritan of the east.”¹⁸

Recently, historians have pointed out that the exclusionist policy had as much to do with class tensions as with race. Ronald Takaki, in his monumental study of Asian American history, writes:

In fact, there was very little objective basis for the Congress to be worried about Chinese immigrants as a threat to white labor. The Chinese constituted a mere. 002 percent of the U.S. population in 1880. Behind the exclusion act were fears and forces that had little or no relationship to the Chinese…. The Chinese Exclusion Act was in actuality symptomatic of a larger conflict between white labor and white capital: removal of the Chinese was designed not only to defuse an issue agitating white workers but also to alleviate class tensions within white society.¹⁹

Whether class tension, economic necessity, or outright racism was the real cause for the passage of the bill—most likely it was a combination of all three factors—the Chinese served as highly visible scapegoats for the social ills in the decades following the Civil War. Not surprisingly, the white working class resented “cheap Chinese labor” way out of proportion to the actual number of Chinese laborers. Nowhere was this racist sentiment captured more colorfully and cogently than in the poem “The Heathen Chinee,” by F. Bret Harte. Like his close friend Mark Twain, Harte was otherwise sympathetic to the plight of Chinese workers in the Western states, but he was also responsible for a work that would greatly enrich American racist vocabulary, particularly pertaining to the Chinese. Also known as “Plain Language from Truthful James,” the narrative poem, first published in September 1870 in Overland Monthly, was originally meant to be a parody of racial animosity toward the Chinese. It began with a plain-speaking “Truthful James” as the narrator:

Which I wish to remark—

And my language is plain—

That for ways that are dark

And for tricks that are vain,

The heathen Chinee is peculiar,

Which the same I would rise to explain

The second stanza introduces a prototype of a Chinaman whose name will become a “John Doe” for all Chinese in racist literature:

Ah Sin was his name;

And I shall not deny

In regard to the same

What that name might imply,

But his smile it was pensive and child-like

As I frequent remarked to Bill Nye.

The trio—James, Bill Nye, and Ah Sin—taking a break from their backbreaking toil in the minefield, are playing a card game, euchre, in which Ah Sin claims to be a beginner:

It was August the third

And quite soft was the skies,

Which it might be inferred

That Ah Sin was likewise;

Yet he played it that day upon William

And me in a way I despise.

Which we had a small game,

And Ah Sin took a hand;

It was Euchre. The same

He did not understand;

But he smiled as he sat by the table,

With the smile that was child-like and bland.

Bill, it turns out, is cheating, hiding cards inside his sleeve:

Yet the cards they were stocked

In a way that I grieve,

And my feelings were shocked

At the state of Nye’s sleeve;

Which was stuffed full of aces and bowers,

And the same with intent to deceive.

But for some reason, Ah Sin seems to have beginner’s luck, soundly beating them both:

But the hands that were played

By that heathen Chinee,

And the points that he made,

Were quite frightful to see—

Till at last he put down a right bower,

Which the same Nye had dealt unto me.

And here comes the moment of enlightenment: a question that would later be quoted over and over in the annals of American foreign-labor policy, a refrain that can still be heard today:

Then I looked up at Nye,

And he gazed upon me;

And he rose with a sigh,

And said, “Can this be?

We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor?”…

At this point, a mob, led by indignant Bill Nye, beat up Ah Sin, that heathen Chinee, who is actually a better cheater but has played dumb. According to Truthful James, Ah Sin has stacked twenty-four packs of cards up his sleeve. “I state but the facts,” James claims.

Which is why I remark,

And my language is plain,

That for ways that are dark,

And for tricks that are vain,

The heathen Chinee is peculiar—

Which the same I am free to maintain.²⁰

Truth be told, Harte, who had reported sympathetically about the Chinese for newspapers in the region (Mark Twain lost his job because he did the same), intended the poem to be a satire about racial prejudice held by the likes of Truthful James and Bill Nye rather than an outright caricature of Ah Sin. The Irish working class, targets of ethnic slurs themselves, were often portrayed in literature of the period as the main instigators of racial discrimination against the Chinese, their chief competitors for menial jobs in minefields and railroads.

The poetic irony, however, was completely lost on mostly white readers who embraced Harte’s poem not as a satire but as an accurate depiction of the Chinese. Soon reprinted in the New York Evening Post, Prairie Farmer, New York Tribune, Boston Evening Transcript, Providence Journal, Hartford Courant, and Saturday Evening Post, Harte’s poem became a defining piece that shaped the American conception of the Chinese, making Harte one of the most popular American writers in 1870.

Harte himself would in later years call the poem “trash,” “the worst poem I ever wrote, possibly the worst poem anyone ever wrote.”²¹ But the damage was done, the image was sealed for American posterity, and key phrases from the poem have become commonplace sayings in American life since then. As a heathen Chinee, Ah Sin wears a queue, waxing tapers on his fingernails, with a soft, childlike expression; he cheats in “ways that are dark” at a card table and ruins American prospects with “Chinese cheap labor” in the workplace.

Poems and songs such as “The Heathen Chinee” appeared at a time when popular music was attracting a mass audience and songsters were crafting new tunes to satisfy demand. These ditties were recited and sung around campfires, in parlors and saloons, and at political rallies. Harte’s poem, in particular, was recited in public among opponents of Chinese immigration. Eugene Casserly, a senator from California who was “vehemently opposed to the admission of Chinese labor,” wrote Harte to thank him for supporting his legislative agenda.²² The profound ways in which a poem like “The Heathen Chinee” had molded American minds and attitudes would only be matched by the influences of Charlie Chan novels and films, which struggled against the legacy of earlier songs and poems.

In 1931, when Earl Biggers was contemplating the title for his sixth Charlie Chan novel, he had actually considered adopting Harte’s “Heathen Chinee” catchphrase, “Ways That Are Dark.” The idea had originally come from a press agent at the Fox Film Corporation (predecessor of Twentieth Century-Fox). In February 1931, Fox was producing a movie version of Biggers’s fifth Chan novel, Charlie Chan Carries On, with the Swedish actor Warner Oland debuting in the leading role. In his communication with Biggers, Willoughby Speyers of Fox’s press department wrote, “Incidentally, could you use the Bret Harte—heathen Chinee phrase of ‘Ways that are dark’ as a possible title for some forthcoming exploits? It doesn’t seem to have ever been used as a film title, though of course it may have been used for a book.”

Two days later, Biggers wrote to Laurence Chambers at Bobbs-Merrill: “The enclosed letter from the Fox press department is in answer to some data about Charlie I sent them at their request…. ‘Ways That Are Dark’ is not a bad title for a mystery, but I feel sure it must have been used before. Besides, it might be dangerous to accept a title from a press agent.”

Sensing an opportunity, Chambers immediately looked into the matter and within days sent Biggers a reply: “‘Ways That Are Dark’ is a pretty slick title, and the Publishers Weekly office says it has not been used before on a book.”²³

The idea stuck with Biggers for quite a while when he was working on what eventually would be published in 1932 as Keeper of the Keys, in which a main character is a Chinese houseboy named Ah Sing. Biggers explained to Chambers why he had opted not to adopt Harte’s phrase, even though he had named a character after the poem’s protagonist: “I think KEEPER OF THE KEYS the best title. For a while I feared it might tip off the ending. But I guess we can chance that. I’ll hold WAYS THAT ARE DARK up my sleeve. I fear that, used on this one, it would shove Ah Sing into too much prominence. I don’t want him to overshadow Chan.”²⁴

Charlie Chan might have narrowly escaped a damning title for his last story and avoided the humiliation of being outshone by Ah Sing, but the American cultural landscape offered few hiding places where he could avoid racial humiliation and negative stereotypes. Museum exhibitions and minstrel shows, for example, provided prominent, pre-cinema venues for the display of visual caricatures of exotic Chinese. In 1784, the same year the Empress of China docked in Canton, Peale’s Museum in Philadelphia displayed Chinese curiosities among its collections of objects from Africa and India. Among the items were everyday utensils, weapons, and bric-a-brac. Best of all was a collection of wrappings used to bind Chinese women’s feet and accompanying tiny shoes and slippers.²⁵ The success of Peale’s soon inspired similar exhibit openings elsewhere, including Salem, Massachusetts, and New York City. But what astounded the museum world half a century later was the appearance of Chang and Eng, the “Siamese twins.”

Born in Siam (now Thailand) of Chinese ancestry in 1811, the Bunker brothers were joined at the sternum by a piece of cartilage with a fused liver. They were discovered by British merchant Robert Hunter and taken, like zoo specimens, on a world tour. The twins, combining the exotic with a rare physical anomaly, were first displayed in 1829 at Peale’s, where they caused a stir, especially in a century when the study of phrenology was very popular. After successfully touring the United States and England for a decade, the twins “retired” to Wilkesboro, a county seat in western North Carolina, where they established themselves as landed Southern gentry. They purchased two farms, built two separate residences, and became slaveholders. In 1843, Chang and Eng married the Yates sisters, Sarah and Adelaide, and between them fathered twenty-two children. The twins died on the same day in 1874, Chang first and Eng a few hours later.

The “freak shows” of the Siamese twins only sensationalized the perceived Chinese exoticism. Their later attempt to live a normal life through gentrification did nothing to normalize the image of the Chinaman in the public eye. Their marriages to the Yates sisters, especially, heightened a fear of miscegenation among whites. Hinton Rowan Helper (1829–1909), a famous abolitionist during the Civil War who later became a white supremacist, was one such American statesman whose ideological views might have been affected by racial anxieties. Growing up in the county adjacent to where the Bunkers had settled, the young Helper, “in addition to sharing the salacious but almost universal fascination with the imagined sexual practice of the twins and their wives, resented the fact that the Siamese twins were land owners of substance and slaveholders to boot, while Helper’s own family found itself in reduced financial circumstances on its small farm as the result of his father’s early death.”²⁶ The local gossip mills churned out juicy and lurid stories about how the Bunker wives squabbled, forcing the conjoined twins to set up two households within miles of each other and to alternate spending three days at each home and each conjugal bed.

In his influential book The Land of Gold (1855), written before his abolitionist treatise, The Impending Crisis of the South (1857), made him a household name, Helper, in the words of Robert G. Lee, “is obsessed with the presence of the Chinese as a deterrent to the immigration of respectable white women and thus a barrier to ‘normal’ family development.”²⁷ Perhaps with images of the Siamese twins in mind, Helper ridicules the Chinese:

[John Chinaman’s] feet enclosed in rude wooden shoes, his legs bare, his breeches loosely flapping against his knees, his skirt-less, long-sleeved, big-bodied pea-jacket, hanging in large folds around his waist, his broad-brimmed chapeau rocking carelessly on his head, and his cue [queue] suspended and gently sweeping about his back! I can compare him to nothing so appropriately as to a tadpole walking upon stilts.²⁸

Like the Siamese twins, the John Chinaman referred to in Helper’s passage was a stock character in minstrel shows of the mid-nineteenth century. Before he was replaced by the more sinister “Ah Sin,” “John Chinaman” had been the “John Doe” for all Chinese. Performed in “yellowface” on the minstrel stage, John Chinaman often integrated the pidgin mimicry as portrayed in songs and rhymes with the freak-show quality of the Siamese twins. A variation of the “Hong Kong” song quoted earlier in this chapter features John Chinaman lamenting the loss of his “lillie gal” to minstrelsy’s archetypal white working-class hero, Mose:

Me stopee long me lillee gal nicee

Wellee happee Chinaman, me no care,

Me smokee, smokee, lillie gal talkee,

Chinaman and lillee gal wellee jollee pair.

…

Me catchee white manee lillee gal talkee

Kiss-kiss lillee gal, give her lots of smack.

At this point, the chorus joins in and attributes John Chinaman’s loss of love to his grotesque dietary choice:

Me likee bow wow, wellee goodee chow-chow,

Me likee lillee gal, she likee me

Me fetchee Hong-Kong, whitee man come long,

Takee lillee gal from a poor Chinee.

Many minstrel shows, such as the duo of Charley Fox and Frank Dumont, made John Chinaman as well as Siamese twins part of their comedy routines.²⁹

All of these popular cultural representations joined forces to create a demeaning stock image of the Chinaman: a yellow coolie who is either an emaciated walking chopstick or fat and greasy like an oafish butcher. With slits for eyes and a bland, round face, he wears a pair of blue pantaloons and a skullcap, his long queue swinging like a rat’s tail. What comes out of his mouth, if he speaks at all, is pidgin English, grating singsong of dubious significance.

Such is the caricature of the Chinaman that Charlie Chan sets out to undo. But before we look at Chan’s globetrotting career, we have yet to account for another super-Chinaman who is often regarded as Chan’s “evil twin,” Dr. Fu Manchu.