16

Charlie Chan, the Chinaman

COVER DESIGN FOR E. D. BIGGERS’S THE HOUSE WITHOUT A KEY, 1925 (Courtesy of Lilly Library, Indiana University)

World is large, me lowly Chinaman.

—Charlie Chan

IT WAS CALLED the Jazz Age, an era that commenced with the 1918 Armistice and ended with the Great Crash of 1929. The American nation experienced social changes and dislocations as profound and unsettling as any since the Civil War. Perhaps no change was as dramatic as the proliferation of the automobile, which brought an end to the horse-and-buggy era. The national registration of motor vehicles rose from fewer than six million to more than twenty-three million. Industrial production increased overall by almost 50 percent, the national income grew from $79.1 billion to almost $88 billion, and the purchasing power of American wages increased at a rate of 2 percent annually. Stimulated by salesmanship and advertising, Americans bought newfangled automobiles, radios, washing machines, refrigerators, toasters, sewing machines, and vacuum cleaners at a rate that challenged the capacity of the country’s fast-expanding factories. During this period of unprecedented prosperity and consumption, America, to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history.”¹

Such a rosy picture of the Roaring Twenties cannot, however, overshadow the fact that this was also one of the most racist and xenophobic eras in American history. Nostalgic images of flappers can be most misleading. Not everyone danced as fast as they could. Nativist frenzy, Ku Klux Klan activity, and the passage of the infamous 1924 Johnson-Reed Act—all contributed to the era’s reputation as a narrow-minded “tribal period.” It is remarkable, then, that the fictional Charlie Chan would enter the American imagination when xenophobia was so prevalent. For this reason, many of his detractors have regarded Chan as no more than a “personality reduced to a Chinese takeout menu,” a Yellow Uncle Tom, the flip side of that racist coin with the insidious Fu Manchu in the front. But Charlie Chan should not be confused with Fu Manchu, and such reductive portrayals miss the subtleties and complexities of Chan as a unique Chinaman.

Like a multilayered Chinese box, Chan is a character whose strength and virtue extend well beyond a mere chimera of the benign Chinaman in Western fantasy. Like all racialized figures—including Uncle Tom, Aunt Jemima, John Chinaman, Ah Sin, Nigger Jim, and Fu Manchu—Chan bears the stamp of his time, a birthmark that encapsulates both the racial tensions and the creative energies of a multicultural nation. Strikingly, the Chan character—the consummate Chinaman—entered the world as the 1924 Immigration Act (Johnson-Reed Act) was being signed into law.

The passage of this 1924 exclusionary act resulted from several key factors, including the rise of nativism, America’s transition from an agricultural to an industrial nation, and the changing structure of global geopolitics. Nativism—defined as an intense opposition to internal minorities on the ground of their presumed “foreign” connections—has a long and tortured history in American culture.² Sometimes barely distinguishable from racial prejudice, nativist sentiments found ample expression in the anti-Chinese, anti-Irish, and anti-Italian movements of the nineteenth century. At the dawn of the twentieth century, especially during the Progressive Era, nativism lost some of its energy as many chose to celebrate America as a melting pot. But the outbreak of World War I put an end to the American dream and unleashed strong waves of patriotism and xenophobia. Demand for unity, hatred of Germans, and fear of Bolshevism each contributed to nativism’s resurgence, a sentiment that lingered on even after the war. Theodore Roosevelt’s famous motto of “America for Americans,” the grassroots campaign of “100 Per Cent Americanism,” and the rather comical renaming of sauerkraut as “liberty cabbage,” were just a few symbols of the nationalist fervor of the time.

In fact, with the war as catalyst, nativism developed unstoppable momentum. In 1916, Madison Grant, a leading nativist, published The Passing of the Great Race, a book that would set the benchmark for the era’s racial discourse. Grant argued passionately that there is a three-tiered hierarchy of Mediterraneans, Alpines, and Nordics within the white race; Americans are Nordics, and any mixture with the other two would lead to a destructive process of “mongrelization.”³ New editions of Grant’s book appeared after the war and enjoyed a substantial vogue, selling about sixteen thousand copies between 1921 and 1923. Major newspapers and journals published editorials endorsing the book. America’s most widely read magazine, the Saturday Evening Post (in which Charlie Chan would make his debut when The House Without a Key was serialized in 1925), actively and consistently commended Grant’s racial doctrines in the years leading up to the Johnson-Reed Act.⁴ As the spiritual bellwether of nativism, Grant inspired a bevy of popular writers and academic scholars, among whom the most influential was Lothrop Stoddard. A Massachusetts lawyer with a Ph.D. in history from Harvard, Stoddard published The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy in 1920. Drawing on Grant’s three-tier theory, Stoddard suggested that the Nordics, as the best stock, should be preserved by way of eugenics. Stoddard was less concerned about variety within the white race, however, than about the threat coming from the colored races. He warned that the rapid multiplication of the yellow and brown races would soon enable them to overwhelm the white world and topple white supremacy.

Simultaneous with these articulations of racism from the late 1910s to the early 1920s was the founding, or resurrection, of a series of nativist, antiforeign organizations, including the American Protective League, American Legion, American Defense Society, and the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan, a long-defunct sect originally organized by ex-Confederates during Reconstruction to intimidate carpet-baggers and Negroes, suddenly came to life in late 1915, the year D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation was playing to great fanfare in movie theaters everywhere. Under the leadership of William J. Simmons, a former salesman and a mellifluent orator, the Klan spread like wildfire. By late 1923, the organization was claiming an aggregate membership of close to three million, with regional operations and affiliates in almost every state. The original mission of the Klan was to perpetuate white supremacy by putting down Negroes. In its twentieth-century reincarnation, however, the Klan had a much wider spectrum of agendas, ranging from anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism to Anglo-Saxon pride and hatred of foreigners. It comprised, in John Higham’s words, “the whole range of post-1919 nativism.” As a formidable force in national politics, the Klan became a major voice in calling for immigration restriction in order to keep the nation “free from all mongrelizing taints.”⁵

In addition to these nativist pressures, tremendous advances in mechanization also enabled industries to reduce their reliance on immigrant labor. It was during the 1920s that America made a key transition from an agricultural society to an industrial one. In that decade, industrial capitalism matured to the point where more economic growth would come from technological advances in mass production than from continued expansion of manufacturing labor.⁶ In the past, it had been in the interest of big businesses and industries to lobby for more lenient immigration policies, but with machines replacing muscles on an unprecedented scale and efficiency accelerating as never before, they now had no more incentive to battle against exclusionist bills. Mechanization also brought an unintended benefit: machinery, as one business editor observed astutely, “‘stays put.’ It does not go out on strike, it cannot decide to go to Europe, or take a job in the next town.”⁷

While domestic affairs on the ideological and economic fronts both favored exclusionism, global politics also contributed to the cause of immigration restriction. Xenophobia, which had reached a feverish pitch during the war, did not simply die out in November 1918. The dream of international collaboration, as reflected by Wilsonian idealism, was also short-lived; no sooner was the Treaty of Versailles signed than the League of Nations began to crumble. The result, according to Higham, “was an intense isolationism that worked hand in hand with nativism. By mid-1920, a general revulsion against European entanglements was crystallizing…. Policies of diplomatic withdrawal, higher tariffs, and more stringent immigration restriction were all in order.”⁸

In the spring of 1924, with the blessing of President Calvin Coolidge—as bedrock a Calvinist as any president in the twentieth century—the bill ultimately called the Immigration Act was introduced by Representative Albert Johnson and Senator David Reed. Given the anxious climate of this time, it passed Congress with overwhelming support. President Coolidge, who had already lent his name to the nativist cause in a popular 1921 article on the Nordic theory and immigration restriction, swiftly signed the bill into law on May 26.⁹ Adopting the concept of national-origin quotas for the first time in U.S. immigration policy, the Immigration Act had three main components: restricting immigration to 150,000 people a year, establishing temporary quotas based on 2 percent of the foreign-born population in 1890, and excluding from immigration all persons ineligible for citizenship. It rejected the melting-pot concept of the previous decades and constructed a vision of the American nation that embodied a hierarchy of races and nationalities, serving mainly the interests of white Protestant Americans from northern European backgrounds, the Nordics.

While the first two components of the law were meant to drastically reduce the number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe—the Mediterraneans and the Alpines—the last component in effect barred half of the world’s population, the Asiatics. But the law achieved more than exclusion; it did significant cultural harm from within. In fact, in 1924, “Asiatic” was a newly minted racial category, codified only a year earlier by the U.S. Supreme Court in U.S. v. Thind. Denying eligibility for citizenship to Bhagat Singh Thind, an Indian who claimed to be a white person based on his Aryan and Caucasian roots, the Court made a leap in racial logic in its ruling and lumped all peoples of Asian countries under the category of “Asiatic,” even though Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Koreans, Thais, Indonesians, and others represented discrete ethnic groups and, anthropologically speaking, different racial groups.¹⁰ Riding on the tailwind of this ruling, the 1924 Immigration Act conveniently condemned all Asians to the status of permanent foreigners. For those already living in the United States, their ties to their homelands were in effect severed, as other family members could not gain entrance to American shores, and they themselves could not become U.S. citizens.

The passage of the Immigration Act, in the words of influential nativist Captain John Trevor, “marks the close of an epoch in the history of the United States.” Or, as Higham wrote in his classic work on American nativism, Strangers in the Land, “The country would never be the same again, either in its social structure or in its habits of mind. Although immigration of some sort would continue, the vast folk movements that had formed one of the most fundamental social forces in American history had been brought to an end. The old belief in America as a promised land for all who yearn for freedom had lost its operative significance.”¹¹

It was at this turning point in American culture that Charlie Chan, the aphorism-spouting Chinaman, entered the arena. I am not alluding to a cause-and-effect relation between President Coolidge’s signing of the bill in May and Biggers’s adding the Chan character to his novel-in-progress in the summer of that year; crude historical determinism is mostly a self-fulfilling prophesy, an insult to the magic of literary imagination. It cannot escape even a casual reader, however, that Charlie Chan bears the distinctive mark of the time: his exotic manners, his pidgin speech, his multitudinous family, and even his anti-Japanese sentiments. All are symptoms of a culture that had just closed its doors to the so-called foreigners.

For readers of the Saturday Evening Post, the buzz over immigration must have still been ringing in their ears when the chubby Chinese detective materialized on the magazine’s pages. Over the years, the Post, drumming for immigration constraints, not only had published editorials replete with quotes from Madison Grant and his ilk but also had hired Kenneth Roberts to do a series of immigration stories condemning “the good-for-nothing mongrels of Central America and Southeastern Europe.” In the days leading up to the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act, Roberts practically camped in the congressional committee’s offices while working on his immigration articles for the Post.¹² Years later, Earl Biggers would claim that it was the enthusiastic reader responses to The House Without a Key that had pushed him to write more Chan novels. Obviously, in creating Charlie Chan, Biggers had his finger on the pulse of the nation.

As we saw in chapter 14, when Charlie Chan makes his debut in the novel, he is described as a fat man with the chubby cheeks of a baby and the dainty step of a woman. His exotic appearance—ivory skin, short black hair, and slanting amber eyes—is so shocking to Miss Minerva Winterslip that she cannot help exclaiming, “But—he’s a Chinaman!” Later in the book, Biggers continues to play up the motif of Chan’s foreignness, his marked difference from characters with distinctively Anglo-Saxon names and cultural backgrounds, such as Minerva Winterslip and John Quincy. A blue-blooded Bostonian, John Quincy is initially skeptical of a Chinaman’s ability to find his uncle’s murderer. “Damn clever, these Chinese!” he tells his aunt, Miss Minerva. “You don’t mean to say you’ve fallen for that bunk. They seem clever because they’re so different.”¹³ “Racial difference” was a nativist shibboleth used to reject the melting-pot concept and justify racial exclusion.

Even as he slowly warms up to Chan and recognizes the talent of the Chinese detective, Quincy still feels an insurmountable racial and cultural barrier between them. In the course of the investigation, Quincy discovers that his uncle Dan used to be a “blackbirder”—a slave and coolie trader—in the Pacific, a sordid past that may have had something to do with Dan’s murder. But, sitting across a table from Chan at a dingy Chinese restaurant in Honolulu, Quincy hesitates to reveal the vital information that may help solve the case. He is concerned that the revelation would hurt his family pride in front of a Chinaman: “His dilemma was acute. Must he here in this soiled restaurant in a far town reveal to a Chinaman that ancient blot on the Winterslip name?” Ignoring Chan’s earlier warning—“All cards should repose on table when police are called upon”—Quincy keeps mum and causes considerable delay in the case.¹⁴

Toward the end of the book, when the murder mystery is about to be unveiled, Quincy arrives at Chan’s home on an urgent errand. Entering the bungalow on Punchbowl Hill, Quincy observes the detective in all his foreignness: “In this, his hour of ease, he wore a long loose robe of dark purple silk, which fitted closely at the neck and had wide sleeves. Beneath it showed wide trousers of the same material, and on his feet were shoes of silk, with thick felt soles. He was all Oriental now, suave and ingratiating but remote.” The interior decoration of Chan’s house widens the cultural gap between the two men. “Beneath the picture stood a square table, flanked by straight, low-backed armchairs. On other elaborately carved teakwood stands distributed about the room were blue and white vases, porcelain wine jars, dwarfed trees. Pale golden lanterns hung from the ceiling; a soft-toned rug lay on the floor. John Quincy felt again the gulf between himself and Charlie Chan.”¹⁵ The seemingly unbridgeable difference resonates with a poetic line by Rudyard Kipling, a line frequently quoted by American nativists in their push for exclusion: “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”

Nothing, however, marks Chan’s foreignness more than his pidgin speech and his rat-a-tat fortune-cookie aphorisms. As a character, Charlie Chan belongs in the pantheon of überdetectives with the likes of Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe, and Hercule Poirot—all wise gentlemen with unforgettable idiosyncrasies. Holmes, a cocaine addict, is the incarnation of human rationality, verging on cold-bloodedness. Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled private investigator, has a knack for flushing out liars and a thing for ladies’ legs. And Poirot, Agatha Christie’s eggheaded, toupee-topped, and mustachioed Belgian sleuth, takes funny penguinlike steps and acts like a seasoned, hot-tempered hairdresser with finicky habits.

Among this elite crowd, Charlie Chan wears a uniquely ethnic badge: his Chineseness, which is manifested above all in the manner of his speech. While the imitation of Chinese pidgin had a long tradition in American popular literature that went back to the days of John Chinaman and Ah Sin, Earl Biggers took the linguistic mimicry to a new level. In The House Without a Key, Chan’s ungrammatical first utterance, like the first note of a musical composition, sets the tone for the singsong, Peking Opera–like vocalization we will hear from him thereafter: “No knife are present in neighborhood of crime.” This is followed immediately by a verbal tussle between Chan and the prejudiced Miss Minerva:

“The person who did this must be apprehended,” she said firmly.

He looked at her sleepily. “What is to be, will be,” he replied in a high, sing-song voice.

“I know—that’s your Confucius,” she snapped. “But it’s a do-nothing doctrine, and I don’t approve of it.”

A faint smile flickered over the Chinaman’s face. “Do not fear,” he said. “The fates are busy, and man may do much to assist. I promise you there will be no do-nothing here.” He came closer. “Humbly asking pardon to mention it, I detect in your eyes slight flame of hostility. Quench it, if you will be so kind. Friendly cooperation are essential between us.”¹⁶

As we see, Chan’s sentences often lack subjects, nouns lack articles, and verbs are not conjugated correctly. His grammar is so comically and idiosyncratically mangled that it soon becomes a trademark of Chanism. In the 1976 spoof Murder by Death, a movie with an all-star cast (Truman Capote, Peter Sellers, Peter Falk, James Coco, Eileen Brennan, and so on) and ample pastiches of supersleuths (Sidney Wang/Charlie Chan, Sam Diamond/Sam Spade, Milo Perrier/Hercule Poirot, and others), Chan’s habitual slaughtering of English grammar finally prompts a retort from Capote’s wall-mounted moose head: “Use the article!”

Interestingly, Chan’s troubles with grammar—or what he calls “my reckless wanderings among words of unlimitable English language”¹⁷—enable Biggers to craft some Chanisms that border on comedy, absurdity, and poetry. “Endeavoring to make English language my slave,” as Chan tells John Quincy, “I pursue poetry.”¹⁸ A grandmaster of circumlocution like Henry James might even envy Chan some of his colorful sentences, such as: “Relinquish the fire-arms, or I am forced to make fatal insertion in vital organ belonging to you,” “Let us not shade the feast with gloomy murder talk,” “Story are now completely extracted like aching tooth,” and “Is it that you are in the mood to dry up plate of soup?”

Among the famous fictional detectives, Hercule Poirot perhaps comes closest to Chan in also having a distinguishable, though not as memorable, manner of speech. Agatha Christie, a British hospital nurse during World War I, created Poirot’s character in her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, published in 1920. Even though there is no evidence that Christie and Biggers influenced each other in any way, they did have something in common on their résumés: both became best-selling authors by creating a distinctively “foreign” detective character in an era when wartime xenophobia was a very recent memory. Like pidgin-speaking Charlie Chan, Christie’s Belgian sleuth, when agitated, also flounders in a comical version of English: “I demand of you a thousand pardons, monsieur. I am without defense. For some months now I cultivate the marrows. This morning suddenly I enrage myself with these marrows. I send them to promenade themselves—alas! not only mentally but physically. I seize the biggest. I hurl him over the wall. Monsieur, I am ashamed. I prostrate myself.”¹⁹

Occasionally, there are also linguistic infelicities in Poirot’s speech, as seen in the following dialogue:

“I thank you, no,” said Poirot, rising. “All my excuses for having deranged you.”

“Not at all, not at all.”

“The word derange,” I remarked, when we were outside again, “is applicable to mental disorder only.”

“Ah!” cried Poirot, “never will my English be quite perfect. A curious language. I should then have said disarranged, n’est ce pas?”

“Disturbed is the word you had in mind.”²⁰

Poirot is allegedly well read in British Romantic poetry: he once exposes the cover of a suspect posing as a John Keats expert by intentionally misquoting from memory a line by Percy Shelley; and he is often seen reading a volume by William Wordsworth. Given such a literary background, Poirot’s linguistic blunders seem much less credible than those verbal slips of Charlie Chan, who allegedly received no formal education but worked his way up in the world from the humble position of a houseboy.

In addition to their shared linguistic difficulties, the Belgian and Chinese detectives have something else in common: their penchant for proverbs. But this seeming similarity will ultimately set them apart. Unlike Chan’s Chinese aphorisms, Poirot relies exclusively on well-known English proverbs as he addresses native English speakers. “And there came your proverb,” Poirot once said to an Englishman, “the death of the goose that laid the golden eggs.” Or, another time, “It’s better late than never, as you English say.” Due to their familiarity, Poirot’s proverbs sound very plain and their meanings quite precise.

By contrast, Charlie Chan’s pseudo-Confucian aphorisms, which he dishes out as the occasion demands, are often intended more to baffle than to enlighten his interlocutors. Their confounding effect derives less from the semantic opacity of these sayings than from the unfamiliarity of their origin. In The House Without a Key, most of Chan’s fortune-cookie sayings may be easy enough to understand semantically, such as “Patience are a very lovely virtue,” “A picture is a voiceless poem,” and “Appearance are a hellish lie.” What makes them sound grating on a reader’s ear is their unfamiliarity in the English language, a sense of being off-key that is compounded by the pidgin. It takes a cosmopolite like Miss Minerva to figure out both the philosophical meaning and the Confucian origin of a quote like “What is to be, will be.” Others are not so lucky. In The Black Camel (published in 1929), for example, Chan confronts an arrogant and insulting suspect by pulling out a spicy item from his proverbial stock:

Jaynes pushed forward. “I have important business on the mainland, and I intend to sail at midnight. It is now past ten. I warn you that you must call out your entire force if you propose to keep me here—”

“That also can be done,” answered Charlie amiably.

“Good lord!” The Britisher looked helplessly at Wilkie Ballou. “What kind of place is this? Why don’t they send a white man out here?”

A rare light flared suddenly in Charlie’s eyes. “The man who is about to cross a stream should not revile the crocodile’s mother,” he said in icy tones.

“What do you mean by that?” Jaynes asked.²¹

Chan seems to know the effect of his talk, which is at best only half-comprehensible to many of his listeners. He enjoys forcing people to ask, as Jaynes does, “What do you mean by that?” or “What does it mean in English?” although he is speaking English, pidginized English. The psychological advantage he gains by baffling people is one of his hidden weapons in the sleuthing business. “The secret,” as he tells a fellow police officer in Keeper of the Keys, “is to talk much, but say nothing.”²²

Charlie’s secret seems to work against the grain of common assumptions about aphorism. Like its cousins—maxim, proverb, adage, epigram, axiom, dictum, and so on—aphorism is meant to achieve the greatest meaning with the fewest words. Civilizations were founded on the cornerstones laid by great thinkers whose doctrines have been crystallized into a body of memorable sayings, such as Heraclitus’s “You cannot step twice into the same river,” and Confucius’s “The nature of man is always the same; it is their habits that separate them.” The post-Renaissance, early modern world also boasted such master aphorists as Francis Bacon, Montaigne, Goethe, and even Benjamin Franklin, born in Boston in 1706. Bacon, for instance, writes specifically of aphoristic virtue:

The writing in aphorisms hath many excellent virtues, whereto the writing in Method doth not approach. For first, it trieth the writer, whether he be superficial or solid: for Aphorisms, except they should be ridiculous, cannot be made but of the pith and heart of sciences; for discourse of illustration is cut off: recitals of examples are cut off; discourse of connection and order is cut off; descriptions of practice are cut off. So there remaineth nothing to fill the Aphorisms but some good quantity of observation: and therefore no man can suffice, nor in reason will attempt to write Aphorisms but he that is sound and grounded.²³

Bacon’s notion exemplifies the traditional belief that behind the seeming fragmentation of aphorisms lies a larger truth. And such a mother ship of truth guarantees the integrity of these adorable, spattering babies of wisdom, babies who can see through the emperor’s new clothes.

Benjamin Franklin, who published the Pennsylvania Gazette (which the Saturday Evening Post claims as its forerunner), is perhaps the most significant aphorist in American history. As “Poor Richard” Saunders, Franklin composed, recast, or simply plundered countless aphorisms and stuffed them into his tremendously popular books. Many of these sayings, such as “God helps them that help themselves” and “A penny saved is a penny earned,” have been built into the foundation of American wisdom. Most readers of the Post, nurtured in their youth on Franklin’s aphorisms, must have found it striking to read a Chinaman’s proverbial wisecracking in the magazine’s pages. There is wisdom in Chan’s sayings. In fact, many Chanisms are quite profound and funny, such as “Aged man should not consort with ruffians. Eggs should not dance with stones,” “Talk will not cook rice,” “Can you borrow a comb in a Buddhist monastery?” and “The fool in a hurry drinks his tea with a fork.” But most Chanisms, contributing significantly to the charm of the character, sound too much like their generic cousins, fortune cookies, which are more symbols of exoticism than carriers of wisdom. In an age that had just legally codified Asians as foreigners, a pidgin-speaking, aphorism-spouting Charlie Chan would fit the label of “foreigner” like a glove.

In addition, Charlie Chan’s obvious dislike for the Japanese reveals him as a product of the age. In remarks such as “Cooking business begins to get tiresome like the company of a Japanese,” Chan conveys anti-Japanese sentiments that may at first seem representative of the age-old animosity between the Chinese and the Japanese. However, considering the geopolitical climate of the 1920s, Chan was perhaps more a spokesperson for American rather than Chinese anti-Japanese racism. With the rise of Japan as a modern global power, the United States increasingly regarded this Asian nation as a menacing competitor. The Japanese were the main Asian target for the 1924 Immigration Act, because a series of anti-Chinese laws had, since 1882, effectively halted Chinese immigration. Chinese, thus, were no longer a threat, and the Yellow Peril found a new incarnation. This distinct anti-Japanese streak in the Chinese detective would continue to manifest itself in later Chan films, especially those produced during World War II.

It is obvious that the character of Charlie Chan did not emerge from a vacuum. Inspired by the colorful exploits of the real-life, legendary Detective Apana, the fictional Chan was a creation that embodied the Zeitgeist of America in the 1920s. As he burrowed deeper into the American psyche, and as American culture underwent transformations over the ensuing decades, Charlie Chan would always stay on top of his game—as the iconic Chinaman.