Call it the melting pot or the pu pu platter, but Brahmin Boston is where the chop suey of Charlie Chan was first stir-fried by the Harvard-educated Biggers, only to be recast later by wisecracking screenwriters and directors in bronzed and lacquered Hollywood.” Charlie Chan is as American as Jack Kerouac, that stalwart of the American hipster who was born French Canadian and spoke the dialect of joual as his first language. “Anyone who believes that Chan is Chinese would probably also believe that the fortune cookie is a Chinese invention.
“Make no mistake: Charlie Chan is an American stereotype of the Chinaman,” writes Yunte Huang in Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History.
Despite Biggers’s claim that Chan was created in reaction to anti-Chinese prejudice the author witnessed in California, the character is an amalgam of stereotypes-a portly and effeminate man who spews faux-Confucian aphorisms. The portrayal of Asian characters in those detective stories and the films inspired by them, which more often than not featured white actors in “yellowface” (Warner Oland and Sidney Toler cast as Chan or Peter Lorre as Moto, for example), continue to be a source of controversy today.
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