Analyzing Textbook Titles: Chalie Chan Is Dead

After class yesterday, I was at home, drinking coffee and catching up on my New Yorker reading, when I saw this article about Charlie Chan by Jill Lepore: Chan, the Man. (Accompanying video of Chan on screen here. The article is actually a long book review of this book, which I've just purchased and will read soon.)

If you're unsure who Charlie Chan is, or why Jessica Hagedorn effectively killed him in her anthology title, Charlie Chan is Dead, read the article. It's a fascinating "biography" of a fictional character who was equally admired and hated. Chan, a shrewd Honolulu-based detective, was created in print in 1925 by Ohio-born author Earl Derr Biggers. A wildly successful Hollywood and television career followed.

But the fictional detective was based on a real person. Lepore writes:

It turns out that Chan was an actual detective with the Honolulu Police Department; Biggers read about him in the newspaper. His real name was Chang Apana.

Biggers created the racialized details of Chan's character--including his intuition, his effeminacy, and his "broken" English--out of widely held stereotypes of "Orientals," not out of any firsthand knowledge of Chinese American or Hawai'ian culture. (From the article: “How can I write of Chinese?” [Biggers] asked Chan, in [a] fictional conversation with his fictional detective. “I could not distinguish Chinese man from Wall Street broker.”) Biggers was a fan of using his character's voice when talking or writing about him--an arguably offensive habit.

Chan was a huge hit with white American audiences precisely because he fulfilled their expectations of what a Chinese detective must be like. He posed no challenge to their already-established worldview.

Meanwhile, Asian American writers, artists, and activists--including our own Gish Jen, who we'll be reading this week--have found the fictional Chan to be...um...distasteful. In the article, Lepore actually references our textbook!:

Charlie Chan is [...] one of the most hated characters in American popular culture. In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, distinguished American writers, including Frank Chin and Gish Jen, argued for laying Chan to rest, a yellow Uncle Tom, best buried. In trenchant essays, Chin condemned the Warner Oland movies as “parables of racial order”; Jen called Chan “the original Asian whiz kid.” In 1993, the literary scholar Elaine Kim bid Chan good riddance—“Gone for good his yellowface asexual bulk, his fortune-cookie English”—in an anthology of contemporary Asian-American fiction titled “Charlie Chan Is Dead,” which is not to be confused with the beautiful and fantastically clever 1982 Wayne Wang film, “Chan Is Missing,” and in which traces of a man named Chan are all over the place, it’s just that no one can find him anymore. (my purple emphasis)

If you're interested in hearing more from Gish Jen about Charlie Chan and Asian American stereotypes, the quote above comes from a New York Times article called "Challenging the Asian Illusion."

So when Jessica Hagedorn says that "Charlie Chan is Dead," she's not just being flip. She's also "killing" a pernicious stereotype created by a white author, in order to make room for Asian Americans to represent themselves more accurately--even in fiction.

Enjoy your reading this week! :)
Dr. Kulbaga