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The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History
W. W. Norton & Company
September 2010
On Sale: August 23, 2010
354 pages ISBN: 0393069621 EAN: 9780393069624 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
"An ingenious and absorbing book, that provides a convincing
new mode for examining the Chinese experience through both
Chinese and Western eyes. It will permanently change the way
we tell this troubled yet gripping story."—Jonathan Spence,
author of The Search for Modern China and Return to Dragon
Mountain On a balmy July night in 1904, a wiry figure
sauntered alone through the dim alleys of Honolulu’s
Chinatown. He strolled up a set of rickety steps and into a
smoky gambling den ringing with jeers of card sharks and
crapshooters. By the time anyone recognized the infamous
bullwhip dangling from his hand, it was too late.
Single-handedly, the feared, five-foot-tall Hawaiian cop,
Chang Apana, had lined up forty gamblers and marched them
down to the police station. So begins Charlie Chan, Yunte Huang’s absorbing history of
the legendary Cantonese detective, born in Hawaii around
1871, who inspired a series of fiction and movie doubles
that long defined America’s distorted perceptions of Asians
and Asian Americans. In chronicling the real-life story and
the fraught narrative of one of Hollywood’s most iconic
detectives, Huang has fashioned a historical drama where
none was known to exist, creating a work that will, in the
words of Jonathan Spence, “permanently change the way we
tell this troubled yet gripping story.” Himself a literary sleuth, Huang has traced Charlie Chan’s
evolution from island legend to pop culture icon to
vilified, postmodern symbol, ingeniously juxtaposing Apana’s
rough-and-tumble career against the larger backdrop of a
territorial Hawaii torn apart by virulent racism. Apana’s
bravado prompted not only Earl Derr Biggers, a Harvard
graduate turned author, to write six Charlie Chan mysteries
but also Hollywood to manufacture over forty movies starring
a grammatically challenged detective with a knack for
turning Oriental wisdom into singsong Chinatown blues. Examining hundreds of biographical, literary, and cinematic
sources, in English and in his native Chinese, Huang has
pursued the trail of Charlie Chan since the mid-1990s,
searching for clues in places as improbable as Harvard Yard,
an Ohio cornfield, a weathered Hawaiian cemetery, and the
Shanghai Bund. His efforts to refashion the Charlie Chan
legend became a personal mission, as if the answers he
sought would reshape his own identity—no longer a top
Chinese student but an immigrant American eager to absorb
the bewildering history of his adopted homeland. “With rare personal intensity and capacious intelligence,”
Huang has ascribed a starring role to “the honorable
detective,” one far more enduring than any of his
wisecracking movie parts. Huang presents American history in
a way that it has never been told before. 35 illustrations
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