SOURCE: "The Importance of Being Charlie Chan," in America Views China: American Images of China Then and Now, Jonathan Goldstein, Jerry Israel, Hilary Conroy, eds., Lehigh University Press, 1991, pp. 132-47.

[In the following essay, Hawley addresses Chinese stereotypes in American literature and how Biggers's character Charlie Chan figures into their history.]

In searching for the sources of American ideas about China and the Chinese, one of the important places to look is the mystery fiction of Earl Derr Biggers, starring Charlie Chan—detective extraordinaire, Honolulu resident, half-mocked, half-mocking descendant of Confucius.

Charlie Chan's durability and widespread popularity are unrivaled by other fictional Orientals. Although only six books featuring the Hawaiian-based detective were published from 1925 to 1932 (Biggers died in 1933), Charlie Chan's renown equals that of fictional detectives like Hercule Poirot and Nero Wolfe. The charlie Chan books were all serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, published in hardcover editions, and reissued in paperback in 1974-75. In addition, Charlie Chan was featured in a comic strip, a radio show, a Broadway play, and some forty-nine full-length films. Students of American popular culture have called him "a national institution" and "very much a part of American folklore" [Russell Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse and Harold R. Isaacs, Images of Asia]. This popularity and longevity indicate that the Chinese detective touched a chord in the American public. Half a century is a good run for any character.

More important than longevity is his effect on images of the Chinese in American fiction. The appearance of Charlie Chan was a turning point in American portraits of and attitudes toward the Chinese people, a perceptible shift in American stereotypes of the Chinese. The older "heathen Chinee" began to yield to a new, more favorable version of the Chinese: a portrait just as stereotyped and racist, but much more human and appealing. Charlie Chan was the key figure in this transformation: he embodied concepts that became widespread and influential.

Images and perceptions of other people and other cultures reach the American public in a variety of ways: scholarly studies, travelogues, news articles, films, fiction, and most recently television. From this flow of information, accurate and otherwise, people tend to select the images that best suit their own needs as well as their own understanding. In many instances—particularly in the case of modern European nations—the amount of information is so vast that enormous selectivity is required, and an image to fit every preconception can be developed. In many ways, the process of image formation follows what might be called a "percolator" process; ideas generated by specialists trickle down into the popular culture, often after being distilled through several filtering layers of high-school and college textbooks and classes.

In the case of China, however, this "percolator" mechanism tended to break down at the upper levels because of a limited flow of information; fictional images became much more important and influential. In American folklore and popular culture, China was long considered "inscrutable"; images of China have been wildly varied, almost schizophrenic in their content, in large part because of the extremely restricted flow of information through formal channels.

Given the lack of information generally available, Americans formed their ideas and images of Asia from any sources they could find, and in large part from the kaleidoscope of images available in fiction and film. The process of creating such images involved considerable feedback. Images too far out of line with what people believed or were willing to accept would not succeed. Thus anyone creating fictional characters had either to adopt prevailing stereotypes or to select a new image that was acceptable even if not widely used.

The popularity of Oriental characters in fiction during this period was probably to some degree the result of this desire for information about the mysterious East. The Saturday Evening Post, the most popular and widely read magazine of the period and the site of Charlie Chan's debut, responded to the demand for and appeal of stories with an Asian flavor. From 1920 to 1941 the Post published a short story with an Asian cast or setting at the rate of one every other month. The magazine serialized twenty-one novels with Asian characters or locale, approximately one a year. Only the perennial American favorite, the western, appeared with greater frequency and consistency.

In the 1920s, the dominant stereotype of the Chinese was a variation of the traditional "heathen Chinee" theme. Readers apparently still enjoyed a delicious thrill of horror at the idea of the truly diabolical Chinaman. Atrocities, mayhem, torture, and sadism were usually the result of the "warped" Oriental mind and culture and set the tone for these stories. In one Post, a Chinese merchant tried to smuggle a lovely young girl into the country as his bride. When his partner's wife betrayed the girl to immigration authorities, the merchant took his vengeance by pouring molten gold down the woman's throat. In another story, published in 1924, one Chinese family had already strangled three new-born daughters. When the wife of the eldest son gave birth to yet another useless girl, the youth strangled the baby and attempted to kill the wife guilty of bearing a girl. One of the most spectacularly villainous Chinese who appeared in the Post was Li Chang. He sought to avenge his father's death in a blaze of filial piety. Discovering that the entire crew of a ship was responsible for his father's death, Li Chang concocted a truly fiery revenge. First, he managed through devious and unscrupulous Oriental methods to infest the crew with lice. Then, playing the innocent and helpful friend, he gave the crew gasoline with which to douse and delouse themselves. When he was sure that ship and crew were thoroughly soaked, Li Chang set fire to them, eliminating lice, ship, and crew in a spectacular blaze.

The most thoroughly diabolical of Charlie Chan's predecessors was Fu Manchu, the brilliant but mad scientist and archvillain. Like Charlie Chan, Fu Manchu appealed to the American imagination: his literary life spanned thirty-five years, from the first Fu Manchu thriller in 1913 to the fortieth and last in 1948. Fu Manchu movies began appearing in 1929 and have been made as recently as 1981, while the Fu Manchu mustache became part of both folklore and football. Paperback reissues of the Fu Manchu novels appeared in 1984.

As a villain in popular fiction, Fu Manchu had no peer in malevolence or malignancy until James Bond began encountering some of his more bizarre foes. The Chinese scientist was tall, gaunt, with cat-green hypnotic eyes. He could read minds and control the aging process to the point that he enjoyed near-immortality. Opium addiction was almost his only human trait. Even his daughter, the irresistibly lovely Fah Lo Suee, was merely an adjunct to his schemes and was eventually consigned to a furnace in which Fu Manchu was casting gold according to an ancient Oriental formula.

However awesome Fu Manchu was in and of himself, he was even more terrifying because of the power he both wielded and represented. He was the leader of the Council of Seven, the dreaded and deadly Si Fan, which sought to rule the world in the name of the yellow race. Death by rare disease, mysterious poison, loathsome insect, or other vile means awaited the luckless soul who attempted to thwart Si Fan. I hold the key which unlocks the heart of the secret East, exulted Fu Manchu. "Holding that key, I command the obedience of an army greater than any ever controlled by one man. My power rests in the East, but my hand is stretched out to the West. I shall control the lost grandeur of China." In his campaign to vanquish the white race and rule the world for the Orient, Fu Manchu could call upon a spectacular assortment of traditional and exotic creatures of horror. Dacoits and other murder cults of Asia did his bidding, as did African zombies and a menagerie of ferocious and cunning beasts. In many ways, Fu Manchu was the embodiment of a white racist's nightmare.

Despite the dominance of this stereotype, there were some alterations in the image of unalloyed evil and malevolence even before the appearance of Charlie Chan. In 1922, The Saturday Evening Post published a short story, "Scout Wong," which presaged the coming shift of images. Young Wong, a resident of Chinatown, sees an American Boy Scout troop drilling and, enthralled by the spectacle, resolves to become a Scout himself. When he approaches the troop, the white Scouts mock him, calling him "Yellow Belly" and assuring him that no such inferior person could ever hope to become a Boy Scout. Undaunted, Wong discovers a discarded copy of the Boy Scout Handbook and teaches himself the code and rules. The climax of the story occurs as the Scout troop is dining in the banquet hall of the restaurant in which Wong works. Flames sweep up through an open air duct and threaten to trap the Scouts, but Wong blocks the opening of the duct with his "yellow belly" and permits the troop to escape. He thus becomes simultaneously a hero and a Boy Scout. The tone of "Scout Wong" is patronizing, but Wong does save the white Scouts. Most of his predecessors would rather have shoved them down the air duct directly into the flames.

The American reading public was thus somewhat prepared for the debut of Charlie Chan in The House Without a Key, serialized in the Post and then published in book form in 1925. Earl Derr Biggers based his fictional detective on an actual Chinese member of the Honolulu police force, one Chang Apana. Biggers was probably also responding to an American willingness to tolerate a more sympathetic portrayal of the Chinese. The Charlie Chan films were in fact deliberately designed to refute or at least challenge the Fu Manchu image, according to their original producer.

Physically Charlie Chan was a great deal less prepossessing than Fu Manchu, and probably therefore a great deal easier to accept as a nonvillain. "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." Not only unprepossessing, but downright disarming, Charlie Chan was "an undistinguished figure in his Western clothes." The expression in his eyes was "a look of keen brightness that made the pupils gleam like black buttons in the yellow light." Size and the suggestion of softness were important in the description of Charlie Chan. Earl Derr Biggers deliberately eschewed the traditional lean and hungry look for detectives to present his Oriental hero as a portly if graceful figure. The heavy-set individual is by tradition kindly, jolly, friendly, neither a threat nor a menace. Chan's size also enables the author to emphasize other characteristics commonly attributed to Asians, especially impassivity and stoicism. After all, who ever heard of a fat detective with the bursting nervous energy of a Holmes? In addition, his size also made Chan the ideal candidate for comparison with the Buddha, a relatively harmless touch of Orientalia. At various times Charlie Chan is described as a plain Buddha, an impassive Buddha, a serene Buddha, as immobile as a stone Buddha, and, with magnificent disregard for historical accuracy a grim and relentless Buddha.

The pleasingly plump detective's English is rather peculiar, a mixture of adroitly-used polysyllables and mangled syntax, several steps above pidgin but still exotic. A typical statement might be: "That are wrong attitude completely. Detective business made up of insignificant trifles." One verb is missing completely, the other the wrong number and person, yet the vocabulary is accurate! In Chan's dialect there is an element of condescension as well as the need to portray Charlie Chan as unusual and Oriental. Biggers carefully points out that Charlie Chan's English is different from and better than that of most other Chinese, just as Chan himself is superior to many of the Chinese portrayed in the novels. When Charlie Chan must play the role of a servant to solve a crime, he reluctantly but ostentatiously adopts a vulgar pidgin: "Maybe you wantee catch 'um moah fish, boss?" He bemoans the necessity of doing this: "All my life I study to speak fine English words. Now must strangle all such in my throat, lest suspicion rouse up. Not a happy situation for me." To sharpen the language distinctions, Chan's wife speaks broken pidgin, while his children show off their Western-style slang, often to his disgust. However, the gum-chewing, wise-cracking Number One and Number Two Sons of the movies do not appear in any of the novels.

Biographical information on Charlie Chan is scant. He is almost totally a creature of the Hawaiian and American present, with little of the Chinese past about him. He was born in China, apparently in a small village, and lived in a "thatched hut by side of muddy river." At an unspecified age he migrated from China to Hawaii, where he worked as a house-boy for a rich white family before joining the Honolulu police force. Of his personal life we know equally little; he has a wife, whose name is never mentioned, and by the midpoint of the third book eleven children, eight of them sons. "Good luck dogs me in such matters," he modestly says; "of eleven opportunities, I am disappointed but three times." Beyond this, there is no attempt to show family life in the novels, no portrait of Charlie Chan as the Chinese patriarch. The family provides a convenient prop, an occasional reminder of Charlie Chan's Chineseness, and a touch of humanity. The number of children seems less a sign of any particular sexual prowess than a shadow of the idea of the prolific Chinese hordes and perhaps even the fear prevalent in the United States in the twenties that Orientals would take over the world simply through outbreeding the whites.

There is little of China itself in any of the books. Other than casual discussions in which his early life history unfolds, Chan mentions China only twice. At one point, trying to persuade an aged servant to give evidence so that he can "see again the village where you were born—walk again the soil where your bones are to rest," he speaks fondly but briefly of China. At another point, recalling the peaceful land of his youth (which would make him over a hundred years old if Biggers adhered strictly to Chinese history), Charlie Chan remarks: "China is sick now. But as some one has so well said, many of those who send sympathy to the sick man die before him. That has happened in China's past—it will happen again." Far removed from China itself, Charlie Chan can be Chinese without being overpoweringly alien.

A somewhat warped element of Chinese culture is present in Charlie Chan's frequent resort to proverbs. Although the "Confucius says" tag of the movies is mercifully absent in the books, and Confucius himself is mentioned only three times in total, counterfeit proverbs abound. "As all those who know me have learned to their distress, Chinese have proverbs to fit every possible situation," Chan rather deprecatingly remarks. There is no attempt to present or explore Confucian philosophy or Chinese culture beyond the counterfeit proverbs. In some ways Charlie Chan's being Chinese seems little more than a convenient if somewhat exotic gimmick. Superficially Charlie Chan may appear Chinese, but he is fundamentally stripped of any genuine Chinese culture.

The reader remains highly conscious, however, of the fact that Charlie Chan is Chinese. There are frequent references to the detective's being typical of what is expected of the Chinese, whether it be psychic powers, inscrutability, or diligence. At several points, Biggers takes care to present Chan in a mild, almost gift-shop Chinese setting. For example, the Chan family home on Punchbowl Hill is furnished with Chinese objects: carved teakwood tables, elegant porcelain vases, crimson and gold Chinese lanterns, silk paintings, and a dwarf tree. In this setting Chan greets his visitor, wearing a long scholar's robe, trousers, and felt slippers; he is "all Oriental now, suave and ingratiating but somewhat remote." However, this is the only time the detective appears in traditional Chinese costume and he is seen in his own home only twice. Otherwise his dress and milieu are Western.

Bits of Chinese and quasi-Chinese philosophy worked into the books are often presented as antithetical to, and better than, Western ideas and values. One consistently recurring theme is the virtue of patience and the idea that the Chinese more than any other race, especially the American race, recognize and esteem the virtue of patience. In a typical situation, an American girl urges Charlie Chan to move quickly to close a case. He demurs: "Patience… always brightest plan in these matters. Acting as champion of that lovely virtue, I have fought many fierce battles. American has always the urge to leap too quick. How well it was said, retire a step and you have the advantage." According to Chan, this attitude toward patience springs from a deeper Chinese philosophy about life and man's place in the universe:

"Chinese knows he is one minute grain of sand on seashore of eternity. With what result? He is calm and quiet and humble. No nerves, like hopping, skipping Caucasian. Life for him not so much ordeal."

Charlie Chan also expresses a complimentary "Chinese" view of life: "Coarse food to eat, water to drink, and the bended arm for a pillow—that is an old definition of happiness in my country." It is, in fact, a statement made by Yen Hui, Confucius's disciple. The westerner's ambition and impatience have no place in the real scheme of things: "Man—what is he? Merely one link in a great chain binding the past with the future. All times I remember I am link. Unsignificant link joining those ancestors whose bones repose on far distant hillsides with the ten children—it may now be eleven—in my house on Punchbowl Hill."

Biggers tended to use such comments less as statements in their own right or as expositions of Chinese philosophy—to which they are only tenuously related—than as foils for contrast to the usually less worthy Western customs and ideas. Sometimes, Chinese and American culture are directly compared—by Americans—and Chinese culture is usually judged superior. For instance, a very proper lady and former Bostonian comments, with no more than the expected amount of condescension: "The Chinese are my favorite race. The Chinese are the aristocrats of the East. So clever and competent and honest, carrying on among the lazy riff-raff of the Orient. A grand people, Mr. Chan." Biggers doesn't let this opportunity pass. Chan replies: "Appreciation such as yours makes music to my ears. We are not highly valued in the United States, where we are appraised as laundrymen, or maybe villains in the literature of talkative films. You have great country, rich and proud, and sure of itself. About rest of world it knows little, and cares extremely less." This awareness of two different worlds is very much present in all six of the Charlie Chan books and betrays Chan into his only expression of arrogance, personal or cultural, as he greets a young and rather haughty New Englander: "Mere words cannot express my unlimited delight at meeting a representative of the ancient civilization of Boston."

Tied in with but not always directed at Charlie Chan are comments on the basic characteristics of the Chinese people. Some are banal, some condescending and some outright racist. For example, the reader is told that Chinese are night-owls, at their best after the sun sets. Chinese are also assumed to be particularly suited to be detectives. A Scotland Yard man praises Chan for unraveling an especially intricate mystery: "Sergeant, my hearty congratulations. But I know your people, and I am not surprised." In another situation, after Charlie Chan has again solved an enticing mystery, his superior pats him on the back—literally—and remarks, "A great idea, Charlie.… The Oriental mind … Rather subtle, isn't it?"

Biggers' racially tinged comments are few and mild considering American racist attitudes during the 1920s; he seems deliberately to act as a missionary for a more enlightened view of other races. When open racial prejudice does occur, it is put down immediately, and with such finality that Biggers is obviously using it as a set-piece situation. Furthermore, racial prejudice is generally the property of the more unsavory characters in the books, either the villains or the uncouth and uneducated. For example, a generally boorish Englishman, and a murderer to boot, berates his Chinese cook for exhibiting "all the worst qualities of a heathen race." Charlie responds, "A heathen race that was busy inventing the art of printing when gentlemen in Great Britain were still beating one another over head with spiked clubs." In fact, virtually the only times Charlie Chan expresses anger occur when racial slurs of this sort are expressed. Yet another supercilious Englishman, seeing the Chinese detective arrive to investigate a murder, exclaims, "Good Lord! What kind of place is this? Why don't they send a white man out here?" At this, "a rare light flared suddenly in Charlie's eyes" and he replied "in icy tones" that "the man who is about to cross a stream should not revile the crocodile's mother." Despite the somewhat Delphic quality of the instant proverb, it is clear that neither author nor character regard race as a hinderance to intelligence.

Hawaii, the setting for the first novel and for Chan's permanent home, was simultaneously remote and friendly, exotic and familiar, Asian and Western—an ideal locale for a westernized Chinese detective. The Hawaii of Earl Derr Biggers and Charlie Chan is somehow dangerous to traditional European values, a place in which the white man must work consciously and strenuously to maintain traditional morality. It enjoys the "semi-barbaric beauty of a Pacific island" and is "too lurid to be quite respectable." Hawaii is "too sweet" according to one Bostonian who spent thirty years in the islands, "a little too much like Heaven to be altogether safe."

But this essentially alien, deceptively dangerous quality makes Hawaii the ideal setting for Charlie Chan. Like the islands, he is basically different, alien, perhaps even dangerous, but like the islands he is so pleasant that he cannot be seen as a threat. The islands are the crossroads of the Pacific, where Asian and European races, customs, and cultures meet, compete, and mingle. Charlie Chan is likewise a mixture of cultures, ideas, and values. As Hawaii is neither completely Oriental nor completely American, so too Charlie Chan is caught between the two cultures and tries to find his way through them. He is deeply troubled about becoming too American. The difficulty of remaining Chinese in a non-Chinese and pervasively American setting such as Hawaii is particularly vivid to Chan as he looks at the younger generation of his family, either his younger cousin or his own children. When he uses a particularly reprehensible bit of slang, he apologizes: "Pardon vile slang, which I acquire from my children, now being beautifully educated in American schools." Charlie Chan is both pleased and embarrassed by his cousin Willie Chan who was "attired in the extreme of college-cut clothes [and who] was an American and emphasized the fact." Willie Chan is one of the chief suppliers of slang in Charlie Chan's life and also "captain All Chinese baseball team and demon back-stopper of the Pacific." His customary greeting is a breezy "pleased to meetchu."

There is considerable ambivalence in Charlie Chan's attitude toward the Americanization of younger Chinese. He is pleased that his eleventh child will have American citizenship; "An American citizen, a future boy scout under the American flag, he should have an American name." Charlie Chan's full Chinese name is never mentioned. Yet the Americanization of his older children is a source of perplexity and even annoyance. The oldest are depicted as problems. Henry, smoking cigarettes, wearing college-cut clothes, using slang, "had been Americanized to a rather painful extent." Rose has deviated so far from Chinese tradition that she openly questions her father's judgment. Making the final transition between China and America, she plans to leave Hawaii to attend college stateside. Charlie Chan "had always been proud of the fact that they were all American citizens. But, perhaps because of this very fact, they seemed to be growing away from him. The gulf widened daily. They made no effort to remember the [Confucian] precepts and odes; they spoke the English language in a way that grated on Charlie's sensitive ear." Strongly conscious of his family and his traditions, Chan tries to envision his mother's reaction to these Americanized children. "His mother would not have approved, Charlie knew. She would have mourned for the old ways, the old customs. He mourned for them himself—but there was nothing he could do about it."

Part of Charlie Chan's ambivalence toward the Americanization of his children derives from the fact that he himself is part of the process of Americanization. He constantly tests himself to see how much he has become American and how much that has changed him. This kind of probing makes him more acceptable to American readers for two reasons. First, it implies that the American culture is innately so good and so all-pervasive that it can envelop even a tradition-minded Chinese. Second, Charlie Chan with his partially alien children and his own sense of changing values and identity was also a figure with whom Americans could sympathize, especially during the pervasive identity crisis brought on by the changing styles and values of the twenties.

Charlie Chan is keenly aware of what he considers dangerous signs of this Americanization in himself: "I will confess my shame. It seems I have circulated too long with mainland Americans. I have now, by contagion, acquired one of their worst faults. I too suffer curiosity." Interestingly, Charlie Chan views as faults characteristics that Americans tend to value such as curiosity and ambition. If not tragic flaws, they are at least devastatingly non-Chinese characteristics. Trying to explain his inability to interrogate an elderly Chinese servant, Chan admits that "a gulf like the heaving Pacific lies between us. Because he, although among Caucasians for many more years than I, still remains Chinese. As Chinese today as in the first moon of his existence. While I—I bear the brand—the label—Americanized." Chan is suddenly, acutely aware of his own dilemma, and of its cause: "I traveled with the current. I was ambitious. I sought success. For what I have won, I have paid the price. Am I an American? No. Am I then a Chinese? Not in the eyes of Ah Sing." At one point, discontent because of inaction, the Chinese detective muses to himself, "Can it be that Oriental character is slipping from me owing to fact I live so many years among restless Americans?" He concludes that "cool, calm Oriental gets too much like mainland Americans from circling in such towering society." In fact, it appears that even some of his eating habits have become Americanized. Charlie Chan orders tea with "three lumps of sugar and the breath of the lemon in passing"! These American characteristics are not necessarily happy ones for Charlie Chan, or for anyone else in his opinion. Impatience is particularly insidious in its effects upon the American: "His temples throb. His heart pounds. The fibers of his body vibrate. With what result? A year subtracted from his life."

In the last Charlie Chan novel, Keeper of the Keys, Biggers sets up a deliberate contrast between the Americanized detective and an old Chinese servant who has resisted Americanization and who clings to his old ways and pidgin English. In comparison to Ah Sing, Charlie Chan appears more American than the stereotyped servant. However, Charlie Chan is rarely seen with other Chinese. They are either servants in the stereotype of Ah Sing or else residents of Chinatown. Even more rarely does Charlie Chan speak Chinese. In the first of the six novels, he speaks his native language only once. Despite Biggers's references to such "Chinese characteristics" as imperturbability and psychic powers, Charlie Chan is not really very Chinese.

Unlike Fu Manchu, a mysterious and exotic Oriental, Charlie Chan is purely American in his work. He is a detective who could as easily be a resident of New York or Cleveland as of Honolulu. Hercule Poirot, Nero Wolfe, and Gideon Fell (a Belgian, a Montenegran, and an Englishman) are detectives in the same style as Charlie Chan. All employ classical methods of reasoning and logic to solve crimes. As Russell Nye points out in his discussion of American popular culture, Charlie Chan and these other detectives lived and worked in "an essentially rational world in which crime could be solved by the man of logic." As a detective—and it is important to remember that the Charlie Chan books are primarily detective fiction, not social tracts—Charlie Chan operates in a Western world of reason. He does not resort to Chinese jiggery-pokery or sleight of hand; he does not have to. Nye also points out that Charlie Chan is the first fictional detective who is in fact a professional policeman rather than a talented amateur. Disguises and amazing feats of physical prowess have almost no place in the world of Detective Sergeant Charlie Chan. Chan does go undercover once to gather evidence—he is masquerading as a Chinese cook—and resorts to an occasional wristlock on a subject, but his methods are generally nonviolent and almost totally intellectual. Furthermore, the crimes in which he becomes involved are not mysterious murders in the depths of Chinatown. They are murders in the midst of quite respectable white society.

This question of Chinese identity is one to which Biggers returns again and again, worrying it this way and that. In one novel he transports Charlie Chan from Hawaii to the mainland, but then continually sends him into Chinatown on the mainland. It is as if the author does not want to forget, and does not want his readers to forget, that Charlie Chan is Chinese—but that he also does not want this to get in the way of telling the story. Interestingly, the other major Oriental character in the series, a Japanese assistant detective named Kashimo, is the butt of racial and slapstick humor as none of the Chinese characters ever is. Kashimo's specialties seem to be hissing, fouling up evidence, and generally making life difficult for Charlie Chan and the Honolulu Police Department. The Chinese detective is even permitted an occasional jab at the Japanese. At one point, Charlie Chan observes that "cooking business begins to get tiresome like the company of a Japanese" and at another states that a twist of the wrist to disarm a suspect is "one thing I am ever able to learn from Japanese."

Charlie Chan is thus an intelligent and likeable individual who is superficially Chinese but could just as easily be American in many of his most basic traits. Sometimes the Chinese veneer is little more than a facade to create an exotic atmosphere, while at other times it is used to convey information or pseudoinformation about Chinese attitudes and to contrast them to American ideas, usually to the detriment of the American ways. There is thus a tremendous paradox in the Charlie Chan books. Charlie Chan himself is Chinese, but his methods and his milieu are American. The Chinese characteristics make him more interesting, but they are not the dominant factor in the life or being of Charlie Chan. They are more than window dressing but considerably less than the whole person. There are enough Chinese characteristics to provide color, but not so many that they overwhelm the reader or remove Charlie Chan from the reader's experience or comprehension. When American and Chinese characteristics are compared, it is usually the American rush against the Chinese calm, American ambition against Chinese acceptance and serenity. These comparisons made Charlie Chan and his culture more appealing to the individual reading the novels for relaxation and enjoyment. Earl Derr Biggers was a careful and cautious craftsman. The Charlie Chan books are vehicles for Biggers's messages, but they are small messages much more concerned with the American condition than with the Chinese. Proper Bostonians, improper Bostonians, and Englishmen of several degrees of propriety mingle with Americans in Charlie Chan's life, but there is not a single rapacious warlord or treacherous spy or even lovely sloe-eyed, boundfoot femme fatale in this essentially Western world.

Charlie Chan's outstanding characteristics—intelligence, good humor, diligence, loyalty—are valued in both Chinese and American cultures. He is Chinese only to the point to which it begins to hinder the plot or force the reader to stretch his mind, and then he becomes very much Americanized. The qualms about Americanization are interesting and express a valid point of view widely shared by the older generation of Chinese in America, but the main point seems to be that Americanization is impossible for the oldest generation of Chinese, incomplete for the generation of Charlie Chan, and inevitable for the youngest generation—not only inevitable, but also eagerly and profitably seized by the children themselves. In many ways Charlie Chan, as he realizes, is himself American.

Stereotyping and unconscious assumptions about race unquestionably appear in the Charlie Chan books. Many of the ideas about Chinese culture are skewed more or less violently, and even the admiration expressed for certain "Chinese" characteristics is often tinged with a patronizing or condescending attitude. One could argue endlessly whether a somewhat favorable stereotype is in the long run more or less harmful than a totally negative stereotype, but the argument is pointless. Both stereotypes are dangerous because they distract from reality, substitute slogans of understanding, furnish a comfortable illusion of knowledge when ignorance is the case, and mitigate against efforts at genuine understanding.

Nonetheless, stereotyped or not, the introduction of Charlie Chan marks a very real change in American images of the Chinese. Neither so villainous as Fu Manchu nor so condescendingly drawn as Scout Wong, Charlie Chan is a human being, with a family of whom he is proud (even if they occasionally dismay him), two cultures which he cannot completely reconcile within himself, a job that he performs superbly, and a set of problems and dilemmas that make him an appealing and sympathetic figure. It is only a few years from the publication of the first Charlie Chan serial to the publication of Pearl Buck's intensely sympathetic and astonishingly successful The Good Earth. The Good Earth, with its heroes gallantly struggling and ultimately succeeding against overwhelming odds, might not have been readily accepted by a reading public whose primary image of the Chinese to that time had been the barbarous though fascinating Fu Manchu. Chan was the necessary bridge.

In many ways, the portraits of China and the Chinese in American fiction resemble a stratified cross section of the earth; layer rests upon layer, image succeeds image. But in a strange way, just as the archeologist or geologist can view many strata simultaneously, so the student of images of China can see the overlapping and sometimes intertwined stereotypes, one dominating a particular period but none totally erased, neither the malignancy of Fu Manchu nor the dauntless and occasionally tiresome patience of Pearl Buck's peasants. Charlie Chan occupies a vital place in this layering of images. He himself is a transitional figure, but there is a very clear demarcation between the image he presents and the images before and after him.

Charlie Chan is the most significant Chinese character in American fiction of the twenties. His success ultimately came less from his Chinese nature than from his essentially American attributes. Ironically, the most sympathetic Chinese of the period—and one of the most successful ever created—is sympathetic and successful largely because he is no longer very Chinese.