19

A Meeting of East and West

EARL DERR BIGGERS WITH A STAND-IN CHARLIE CHAN, JULY 1928 (Courtesy of Lilly Library, Indiana University)

If Charlie Chan must have an original, he could not have a better one.

—Earl Derr Biggers

CONTRARY TO RUDYARD Kipling’s famous claim, the East and West do meet.

On June 30, 1928, Earl Biggers and his family sailed for Honolulu on board the Malolo. With three best-selling Charlie Chan novels to his credit, Biggers was looking for new material, especially island material, for his future work. Since Chan’s two most recent exploits had taken place on the West Coast, fans had been asking when they would see the Honolulu sleuth in action again on his home turf. South Seas romance was, after all, one of the key ingredients in the tangy chop suey that made up a Charlie Chan mystery. As Biggers reminded his publisher when they were still discussing the promotion of the first book, The House Without a Key:

I wanted to talk to you regarding the handling of this book. I haven’t any revolutionary ideas, but I felt that in pushing it it might be well to soft pedal murder and play up the setting. I have never mentioned Honolulu to anybody but heard what they said—“Oh, I have always wanted to go there” if they hadn’t already been. Mr. Leslie Hood of Vroman’s bookstore here, told me the other day that he couldn’t ask for a better setting than Honolulu in appealing to his clientele—unless it was Southern California. Of course he had to add that. But I do believe that the biggest point of appeal on this story will be the setting, and it may be that we can break through the ranks and sell a few outside the regular mystery story clientele by the Hawaii appeal. Certainly everyone who has been there will want the book—and there are lots of them. So I felt that in any advertising you might bring in the color stuff I didn’t get in the title—as for instance “The House Without a Key” stood by the white beach of Waikiki at the Crossroads of the Pacific, etc. etc. You might advertise it as a “Crossroads Puzzle.”¹

Biggers arrived in Honolulu just in time for the Independence Day fireworks, a long tradition started by American settlers in the early days of Kamehameha the Great. He was given a celebrity’s welcome by local residents and organizations. Hawaii newspapers reported his arrival on their front pages, as they did with other famous visitors: “After an absence of eight years, Earl Derr Biggers, famous author of The House Without a Key, The Chinese Parrot, Behind That Curtain, in which the now equally famous Chinese detective Charlie Chang [sic] solves deep mysteries, returned to Honolulu yesterday.” The city did have reason for gratitude, for, as the article continues, “Through Biggers’ popular mystery novels, Honolulu has received invaluable publicity all over the world, as Biggers reported that his books have been translated into leading languages of Europe and Chang is now known as well in Moscow as he is in Honolulu or San Francisco.”²

Biggers stayed at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel (also known as the “Pink Palace of the Pacific”), which had just opened its doors to guests the previous year. With a bright-pink Moorish-style stucco façade, the Royal Hawaiian owed its architectural influence to Hollywood, especially Rudolph Valentino and his Arabian movies, which had inspired a fad for all things Spanish and Moorish in the 1920s. It boasted four hundred large, luxurious rooms and suites. Adding to its exotic charm, the hotel’s bellhops all wore pseudo-Chinese costumes. The spectacle that accompanied the opening of the hotel in February 1927 was like a performance at the old Metropolitan Opera House, with a tropical twist. “A huge pageant featured a fleet of Hawaiian outrigger canoes, each of them carrying torch- and spear-bearing warriors in full regalia who were greeted on shore by lei-bedecked native princesses.” Turandot, completed by Giacomo Puccini that year, could never be so grand. At the black-tie gala inside the lush hotel, all of the twelve hundred guests were haoles except for Princess Abigail Kawananakoa, the last link to the Hawaiian monarchy. On an island where four out of five people were nonwhite at the time, the Royal Hawaiian Hotel was as much a symbol of racial hierarchy as an icon of Hawaiian tourism.³

After his arrival, Biggers regularly granted interviews to reporters and toured around the island, sightseeing and lecturing. The Honolulu Advertiser’s Club billed Biggers and Miss Jessie de Both, the new director of the club’s cooking and homemaking school, as speakers for its monthly meeting in July. Not to be outdone by the ladies, gentlemen at the exclusive Oahu Country Club, gratified by the free publicity Biggers had given their organization in his work, invited him to lunch and a few rounds of golf. The Hawaii Tourist Bureau, as usual, was busy orchestrating all sorts of promotional events, including a quixotic photo-op with a stand-in Charlie Chan.

Set on the airy terrace of the Royal Hawaiian, the picture shows Biggers sitting with a Chinese man dressed in a traditional robe. Between them and their tiger-skin–lined wicker chairs stands a small table on which rests an empty birdcage—suggesting “the Chinese parrot”? Under the tropical sun, Biggers looks immaculately well groomed in his light-toned pongee suit and white leather shoes, beaming with creative energy as he holds a pen and puts both hands on the table, as if in the midst of conjuring up the character sitting right in front of him. The anonymous Chinese man—perhaps one of the hotel’s bellhops—dressed in faux Charlie Chan threads, tucks his hands inside the long sleeves of his robe and holds them together over his lap as if doing a curtsy. With close-cropped hair and a Mongolian face, he looks unmistakably Chinese. A marbled terrace, royal palms, flaming flora in the background, and an author and his literary creation meeting over a writing table and a birdcage—the staged picture is fantastically rich in local color and international flavor. The scene easily portrays the fantasy of “East meeting West,” much more so than if Chang Apana had been sitting opposite Biggers on the terrace, dispelling the magic with realism.

Beyond the contrived photo-op, however, a real meeting between East and West did occur. On July 5, the second day of his visit, Biggers met up with Chang Apana. In the plush lounge of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, Biggers graciously received Apana, who had arrived in his usual spick-and-span suit and tie. Chang Joe, Apana’s restaurateur nephew, was the interpreter.

By this time, Apana had become a celebrated citizen of Honolulu not only for his guts as a legendary cop but also for his inspiration for the Charlie Chan character. “He was a marked man among tourists,” Biggers wrote, as if describing an elephant on an African safari. “He was autographing my books with a flourish. When, at ball games, he walked proudly up and down before the crowds, swinging his famous rawhide whip, hundreds of little Oriental kids shouted in chorus: ‘Charlie Chan! Charlie Chan!’”⁴

Biggers was singularly impressed by the man who had inspired his best-selling novels and made him a celebrity author, even though he had always denied publicly that Charlie Chan was based on any real person. “If Charlie Chan must have an original, he could not have a better one,” Biggers acknowledged. “For the record of Chang Apana, after nearly forty years on the force, is a record of honesty, faithfulness and courage that Chan himself could well be proud of. He is one public servant who is honored and respected by the entire town.”

During their meeting, Apana held out his worn old hands and said, “No money ever stuck to them.” The veteran detective rolled up his trousers and revealed deep gashes, long since healed. He also indicated other wounds by pointing to various portions of his body. “Yes, they had tried to do him in—some of them,” Biggers wrote. “But most of them feared him mightily; once they saw his hand moving towards the whip at his waist, they fled in droves before him.”

Despite the language barrier, which could never be fully overcome by translation (Chang Joe was also illiterate but spoke a little English), Biggers was delighted to see the twinkle of authentic humor in Apana’s eyes. “An amiable man,” Biggers later recalled, “a man who can laugh even as he reaches for the whip.”⁵

The meeting had such an evident effect on Biggers that in the next Chan novel, The Black Camel, published a year later, the detective makes his entrance in no other place than the lobby of the Pink Palace. Posing as a Chinese merchant—Apana as a See Yup Man, but in a more respectable costume—Charlie Chan approaches Tarneverro, a fortune-teller who is also wearing a disguise. After a few rounds of brain wrestling, they draw to a tie, with Chan in his usual politeness complimenting the slippery veil-lifter: “Memory of your cleverness will linger in my poor mind for long time to come.”⁶ In the 1931 film version, the detective’s punch line is a Chanish reminder: “Always harder to keep murder secret than for egg to bounce on sidewalk.”

EARL DERR BIGGERS AND CHANG APANA, JULY 5, 1928 (Courtesy of Honolulu Star-Bulletin )

The meeting between the real Charlie Chan and the author culminated in the two men posing for the camera. As seen in the only surviving copy of the photo, they look into each other’s eyes rather than at the camera lens. Apana smiles with his sharp, deep-set eyes and heavily etched cheeks. Biggers looks demure, as if a little taken aback by the searching gaze of the man who has made his career. “I shall go on being grateful to him,” Biggers said. “He has turned out to be the ideal ‘original’ for Charlie Chan.”⁷

In the end, it was the staged photo, orchestrated by the Hawaii Tourist Bureau, that was later released and distributed to about fifty newspapers. Perhaps the ideal original did not, after all, look too ideal in the picture. A man dressed in a long silk robe would certainly appear to be more “authentically” Chinese, or more stereotypically Asian and exotic, than a wizened old man in a Western suit and tie. Charlie Chan, as we know, is an exotic Chinaman. Sometimes fiction can make a stronger claim on reality, and for that, nothing can outdo film, which in the late 1920s had just begun to occupy a central position in American cultural life. And it was on the silver screen that the wisecracking fictional Chinese detective would have a most spectacular career.