Recensioni
Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong's… di Yunte Huang
Yunte Huang is the latest writer to attempt a telling of Wong’s life. His book completes a trilogy on early Chinese-American popular culture, each of which bears the same subtitle, ‘Rendezvous with American History’. The first book, in 2011, examined the fictional Chinese ‘honorable detective’ Charlie Chan; the second in 2015 told the story of the ‘original’ Siamese twins, Chang and Eng. Both books were revelatory and succeeded in humanising figures often portrayed in (racist) stereotypes.
Anna May Wong presents her most recent biographer with different challenges. Hodges offered a complete narrative of Wong’s life in his 2004 book. Huang seeks to distinguish his biography with historical context. He covers Wong’s early life as a laundryman’s daughter with evocative descriptions of Los Angeles’ Chinese laundries and their ubiquity in silent-era films as a representation of ‘noisy operations and repetitious actions’. Wong endured troubled teenage years but made her film debut as an energetic extra in The Red Lantern (1919). From there, she made a rapid ascent to stardom in the early 1920s with roles in Toll of the Sea (a 1922 reworking of Madame Butterfly), The Thief of Bagdad (1924) and the first cinema adaptation of Peter Pan (1924) as Tiger Lily.
Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.
Gao Yunxiang is Professor of History at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is currently finishing a biography of Soo Yong.
Structurally, chapters are short and this was an easy read.
I hadn't read any Yunte Huang's books yet but was immediately impressed by how well this is written. I had recently read 2 other books about AMW (one nonfiction, one fiction) but didn't enjoy them even half as much as I am enjoying this one. The short chapters are packed with carefully researched details and are written in a way that gives the reader a real sense of the person as well as the time period she lived in. The many photos provided as illustration include film posters and stills, as well as other portraits and historical artifacts that complement the text well.
All the thumbs, all the way up -- highly recommended.
also recommended:
Lon Chaney speaks (graphic nonfiction about the child of Deaf adults actor)
Agent Josephine (biography of international star and spy Josephine Baker)
2 
reader1009 | 3 altre recensioni | Sep 7, 2023 |
reader1009 | 3 altre recensioni | Sep 7, 2023 | 
Yunte Huang's Charlie Chan — The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - October 6, 2019
For the complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1158289-charlie-biggers-huang?chapter=1
Almost 6 yrs ago now, I made a 30:05 movie called "CHAN(geling)" (on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/XMP8mU1OfSY ). It's a media analysis of yellowface in Warner Oland movies. I made the movie largely b/c I'd enjoyed the Charlie Chan movies when I'd watched them on TV as a kid & I wanted to revisit them as a more racism-aware adult. I didn't make the movie w/ any claim of being an expert on the subject & my main research for it consisted just of watching as many of the Oland Chan movies as I cd get free or cheap. This Huang bk had come out 4 yrs before but I didn't know about it yet. I like CHAN(geling)" as it is, despite at least one major mistake in it, & think it's probably for the best that I hadn't read Huang's bk at the time b/c I might've gotten bogged down in making the movie even more complex than it already is. At any rate, I'm delighted to have read this for the sake of a Chinese-American's take on the subject — one that more or less completely jibed w/ my own.
"So who is Charlie Chan?
"To most Caucasian Americans, he is a funny, beloved, albeit somewhat inscrutable—that last adjective already a bit loaded—character who talks wisely and acts even more wisely. But to many Asian Americans, he remains a pernicious example of a racist stereotype, a Yellow Uncle Tom, if you will; the type of Chinaman, passive and unsavory, who conveys himself in Broken English. In this book, however, I would like to propose a more complicated view. As a ubiquitous cultural icon, whose influence on the twentieth century remains virtually unexamined, Charlie Chan does not yield easily to ideological reduction. "Truth," to quote our honorable detective, "like football—receive many kicks before reaching goal.""
[..]
"It is no coincidence that Stepin Fetchit, the most celebrated black comic actor in the 1930s, and one of the most reviled since the civil rights movement, had also starred in Charlie Chan movies. Fetchit played a lazy, inarticulate, and easily frightened Negro." - p xvi
Ok, being the natural contrarian that I sometimes am, I immediately find myself in a bit of conflict w/ Huang's statement — even though I agree w/ most of it. Who is he, or anyone, to make the claim that "To most Caucasian Americans"? In other words, here we have a bk that's essentially an analysis of racism &, yet, he feels free to stereotype "Caucasian Americans": what's the data to back this claim?
"But the core strength of Chan's character lies in his pseudo-Confucian, aphoristic wisdom. Unlike the Kung Fu movies, which showcase a Chinese penchant for ass-kicking and sword-brandishing, Chan reveals the Chinaman as a sage: a wise, calm, responsible, and commonsensical man who also happens to be a hilarious wisecracker." - p xix
"The Hawaiian Islands, also known as the Sandwich Islands" (p 9) So-called b/c imperialists gobbled them up (JK = Just Kidding).
"Unlike on the U.S. mainland, where the clamor of "The Chinese must go!" was a clarion call for almost all parties in the mid-nineteenth century (more on this point later), the general sentiment in Hawaii was "The Chinese must come!" Economy, as they say, is the king, and several economic factors joined forces to create increasing demands for labor in Hawaii; among them were whaling, the nascent sugar industry, and the ripple effects of the California gold rush." - p 17
Mark Twain, whose work I generally have deep respect for but whose depiction of Native Americans is utterly suspect, is quoted:
"The sugar product is rapidly augmenting every year, and day by day the Kanaka race is passing away. Cheap labor had to be procured by some means or other, and so the Government [of Hawaii] sends to China for coolies and farms them out to the planters at $5 a month for five years, the planter to feed them and furnish them with clothing. The Hawaiian agent fell into the hands of Chinese sharpers, who showed him some superb coolie samples and then loaded his ships with the scurviest lot of pirates that ever went unhung. Some of them were cripples, some were lunatics, some afflicted with incurable diseases, and nearly all were intractable, full of fight, and animated by the spirit of the very devil. However, the planters managed to tone them down and now they like them very well. Their former trade of cutting throats on the China seas has made them uncommonly handy at cutting cane. They are steady, industrious workers when properly watched." - p 19
What's wrong w/ this picture? Plenty. Who're the 'pirates'? The wage slaves or the people paying them?
"The secret, Twain concluded, lay not in the fertile soil or advantageous weather but also "in their cheap Chinese labor." When one company paid only $5 a month for labor that another company had to hire for $80 and $100, there was no question which business would fare better."" - p 20
Twain can be such a disappointment.. & yet..
"The publisher hired Twain, who had only recently lost his newspaper job in Nevada due to his sympathy for Chinese miners, to assess the lay of the land in Hawaii." - p 19
"Only four years after Twain penned these letters, his close friend and collaborator, Bret Harte, would publish "The Heathen Chinese," one of the most popular poems about Chinese to rear its racist head in the nineteenth century. In the poem, white miners lamented, "We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor."" - p 20
I never can understand these idiots!!: Why do they blame the victims instead of the exploiters?! Well, actually, I know why, it's the way of all cowards: side w/ power & hope to benefit.
"Ah Pung, in fact, never learned to read in either Chinese or English, even though later in life he taught himself to read Hawaiian. Toys were rare in a family like his.
"It is worth noting that even a full century later, little has changed. When I was growing up, for example, in a small village in the waning days of Mao's China, my "toys" were mud-pies, tadpoles, ants, fire-flies, grasshoppers, and whatever luckless insects fell into my hands." - p 25
Hence, earning the author the nickname of "Dragon Fly" in the insect underworld. (JK, OK?!, JK!!)
"In such a harsh environment, a child prone to accident and disease would be lucky to grow to maturity. Child kidnapping was a common, daily fear in Ah Pung's day. Occasionally, when a famine broke out, cannibalism might be the last resort for the families on the brink of starving to death; they were forced by necessity to make exchanges with other equally desperate families so they could at least avoid eating their own children or siblings." - p 26
'Do you like breast meat or wings from the little angel?'
That's why cultures all over the world don't want their children to be spoiled — who wants to eat rotten meat?
"In the hierarchical world of late nineteenth-century Hawaii, where the racial pyramid put white plantation owners and missionaries on top," [hence, the "Missionary Position"] "even above the indigenous chiefs and queens, an uneducated man like Chang Apana" [the model for Charlie Chan] "would not have stood a "Chinaman's chance" without luck or help.
"Unlike earlier times, when hospitable Hawaiians would extend alohas and leis to people of all races arriving on their shores, racism became more visible as the haoles became more established in the islands. Steadily and persistently, an elite group of American businessmen and missionaries and their decendents had begun, since the midcentury, to consolidate power. The Provisional Government under their control, while severely corroding the role of native monarchy, had passed laws and implemented policies that all too often became carbon copies of what existed on the racist mainland." - p 38
"Ever since the annexation in 1898, the question of statehood had been in almost every Hawaiian's mind. Territorial status had huge disadvantages. The governor of Hawaii was appointed by the president of the United States. The people of Hawaii could not take part in presidential elections. They could elect a territorial delegate to Congress, but the delegate had no vote in the House of Representatives, Hawaii paid taxes as if it were a state, but it was not entitled to all the federal benefits enjoyed by the states." - p 178
In other words, once the big imperial power successfully invaded Hawaii the people there didn't stand a chance of not being railroaded & their resources exploited.
"They paved paradise and put up a parking lot" - Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi (1969) from "Ladies of the Canyon"
On the subject of haoles see this: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/tENTHonolulu.html .
"While The Chinese Parrot (1926), the second Charlie Chan novel but the first featuring Chan as the central character, is fictional, there is a striking resemblance between the early life of Chang Apana and the fictional Charlie Chan." - p 41
"Chan's resumé, as described in this novel, closely resembles Apana's career. "Detective-Sergeant Chan, of the Honolulu police," is the way Sally Phillimore introduces him to her friends in San Francisco. "Long ago, in the big house on the beach, he was our number one boy. . . . Charlie left us to join the police force, and he's made a fine record there."" - pp 41-42
"On February 27, 1897, Helen was deputized by the Marshal of the Republic of Hawaii to enforce animal cruelty laws. She now had the legal authority to stop horse owners from beating their animals. Her organization came to the aid of neglected cattle, and it rescued cats and dogs abused by their owners. Helen served without pay, but she and her friends pooled their resources to hire an animal case investigator. That new job went to Chang Apana, the charismatic stableman of Helen's parental home, a former pianola versatile in roping and riding. Thus, the future "Charlie Chan" debuted before the public as the first humane officer in Honolulu." - p 43
What?! Chan(g) was an animal rights terrorist?! No wonder that part didn't make it into the Charlie Chan character.
"The undersigned, sensible of the cruelties inflicted upon dumb animals by thoughtless and inhuman persons, and desirous of suppressing same—alike from considerations affecting the well-being of society as well as mercy to the brute creation—consent to become patrons of a Society having in view the realization of these objects. —Henry Burgh, drafting the first charter for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals" - p 44
My own modest contribution to this cause was the founding of the S.P.C.S.M.E.F. (the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Sea-Monkeys by Experimental Filmmakers): http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/spcsmef.html .
"There is no evidence to suggest that before he wrote the first three Chan novels, including The Chinese Parrot, Earl Biggers had known much about Apana's life. The two would not meet until 1928, but Biggers seemed to have an uncanny ability to imagine the complexity of being a Chinese law enforcer in a multiracial society like Honolulu around the turn of the century." - pp 46-47
I've yet to read one of Biggers' novels, including any of the Chan ones, but I keep looking for them in my favorite used bookstore. After reading Huang's Charlie Chan I'm anticipating liking them. I have read 2 knock-off novels: Michael Avallone's Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen (see my review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2921171508 ) & Robert Hart Davis's Charlie Chan in Walk Softly, Strangler (see my review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2921653576 )
"What if one day Hawaii became a state? "How can we endure our shame?," he asked, "when a Chinese Senator from Hawaii, with his pigtail hanging down his back, with his pagan joss in his hand, shall rise from his curule chair and in pidgin English proceed to chop logic with George Frisbie Hoar or Henry Cabot Lodge?"*"
[..]
"* Clark's hypothetical nightmare did, in fact, come true: When Hawaii became the fiftieth state in 1959, "a rabble" of predominantly brown and yellow voters in the islands sent the nation's first Chinese senator, Hiram Fong, to Washington. A self-made millionaire and son of a Chinese immigrant, Senator Fong would take his seat in the Congressional chamber across from Strom Thurmond and James Eastland, two staunch segregationist Dixiecrats." - p 50
On the subject of Strom Thurmond, see my movie entitled "Filibuster" ( https://youtu.be/7iU87E_2Y2s ). Here's a relevant excerpt from the text:
"The following is mostly culled from online sources: Filibusters are interesting. In a filibuster, a senator may continue to speak indefinitely to prevent a final vote on a bill. The longest such filibuster on record is that of Strom Thurmond's. He spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes to try to prevent the Civil Rights Act of 1957 from passing. It passed anyway.
"After Thurmond's death, it was discovered that he had an unacknowledged mixed-race daughter named Essie May Washington-Williams whose black mother Carrie Butler had been working as Thurmond's family's maid. Butler was either 15 or 16 years old when a 22-year-old Thurmond impregnated her in early 1925. (Butler's birth date is unknown, and the age of consent was 16, leaving only a short window for the possibility that Thurmond might not have committed statuatory rape.) For some 'Good Ole Boys' the times of slavery just never ended." - http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/MereOutline2018.html
For the complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1158289-charlie-biggers-huang?chapter=1
As a disabled person, I was naturally most interested in Chang and Eng as people with physical differences who became celebrities as so-called "freaks." Huang certainly spends time on that subject, but the book has a much stronger through-line of how Chang and Eng's Siamese origins impacted their lives in America. (That's unsurprising, knowing that Huang's other biographical work also focuses on intersections of Asian and American culture.) There is a particular focus on Chang and Eng's subtle shift from (public interpretation as) almost bestial, foreign figures to attaining wealth as "white" landed gentry - and back again. To explain this, Huang dips his readers head-first into a rich morass of nineteenth century American culture, with little sojourns into the worlds of P.T. Barnum, Mark Twain, Nat Turner, General Stoneman, and more. We learn about the various figures who "owned" and managed Chang and Eng as young men, the community of Mount Airy, NC, where they bought land, the families of their wives, and so on. There's even an epilogue where Huang stays the night in modern-day Mount Airy, inspiration for the fictional "Mayberry," to draw a contrast with The Andy Griffith Show, which is openly celebrated there, and the Siamese Twins, who are relegated to a room in the basement of the museum.
Of course, I have read criticisms that Huang's style buries Chang and Eng's own story under a mountain of unnecessary additional material. That's not entirely unfair; Huang's literary style is more than a little lofty, and he sometimes makes far-reaching comparisons to justify throwing the spotlight on another famous American, or another significant cultural event, for a few pages. (He even has a slightly odd habit of repetition, or at least a lax editor; I caught half a dozen moments where he offhandedly repeated a small anecdote from earlier in the book). Overall, though, the book adds up to a rich cultural experience precisely because Huang veers around a bit. Chang and Eng's own life story is not overly remarkable - or at least, what can be ascertained by the few documents and artifacts left behind doesn't add up to much. Between the major beats of their narrative is a lot that can only be assumed. By providing us with so much background, Huang allows us to understand the world they lived and operated in, and to speculate for ourselves how they felt, reacted, loved, and lived. In so doing, we might think about how we are shaped by our present culture, too. As readers, we finish Huang's book a little more familiar with two men who, perhaps, still seem very unlike us - and who made their way in an overbearing, adversarial world startlingly similar to our own.
They themselves were “harvested” by a man who traveled the world in search of oddities. He promised their mother he’d bring them back in 5 years; that never happened. They eventually gained their freedom from this bondage and established themselves in America. They lived their lives as normal men – having separate homes and families, fathering 21 children, owning their own land and slaves, establishing themselves within community – while at the same time plying the trade of their abnormality. Living as both freaks and humans at one in the same time, and causing others to deal with this reality.
The narrative exposes society’s need to categorize humanity and exclude some from full membership, the role of domination (including that those in slavery become slave owners), and the role of the trickster in America.
Page 266
Trickster “as a covert but quintessential American hero. …Anthropologists who study the myriad manifestations of the trickster in diverse cultures have all recognized the figure as one of the most archaic of mythical generators. In the words of Paul Radin, ‘Trickster is at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself…He knows neither good nor evil yet he is responsible for both. He possess no values, moral or social…yet through his actions all values come into being.”
In the American context, some have argued that the confidence man as a trickster is ‘one of America’s unacknowledged founding fathers.’
…Americans are ‘peddlers of assurance.”
In the Jacksonian Age, democracy also became a game of confidence, in the double sense of the word: political representatives gain the trust of the common men and pull a con on them. The most successful politicians…are those who show an extraordinary capacity for identifying the needs of others and playing them for suckers, as a shrewd confidence man would.”
narrative includes description of P.T. Barnum as an ultimate trickster
Page 297
“The Civil War and Reconstruction represent in their primary aspect an attempt on the part of the Yankee to achieve by force what he had failed to achieve y political means…to make over the South in the prevailing American image and to sweep it into the main current of the nation.” ~W.J. Cash, “The Mind of the South” (1941)
The war decimated Chang and Eng’s major asset – the 32 slaves they owned.
It was after the Civil War that they had to go back on the road again, selling their freakishness in order to survive financially.
Page 332
The twins lived in Mount Airy, NC, which is also the hometown of Andy Griffith.
The Andy Griffith Show
Father Knows Best
Leave It to Beaver
“classic depictions of 1950s and 1960s American ‘normalcy’… In contrast, the story of Chang and Eng, with their physical abnormalities, double matrimony, miscegenation, and slaveholding, was anything but normal. They were regarded as carnival freaks…, ‘an almost.’
To open the door to the twins’ show in the basement of the Andy Griffith Museum is in some sense to reveal the ‘underbelly’ of America, to see how the normal is built on top of the abnormal…
Preface
“To then, being human meant being more than one… They defy what Leslie Fiedler once called ‘the tyranny of the normal’…
…when we see, once again, a rising tide of human disqualification, of looking at others as less than human or normal…when everyone feels entitled to an opinion but cannot, by virtue of ignorance or innocence, tell the difference between a gag and a gem, between what show biz calls ‘gaffed freaks’ and ‘born freaks,’ the confidence man swoops in to make you feel better while he takes your money, or outright steals your soul. In this sense, the freak show, which lies at the heart of Chang and Eng’s story, is not just about looking at others as less human. To borrow a concept from the eminent anthropologist Clifford Geertz, a freak show is a 'deep play.’ Or, in the streetwise lingo of a humbug, it is ‘the long game.’”
“Regarded as freaks, the twins would always have to fight to be treated as humans,” Yunte Huang writes in “Inseparable,” his new history of the brothers. That they would eventually identify as part of the white oppressor class that dehumanized others is one of many paradoxes explored by Huang — a professor of English and the author of a book about Charlie Chan — in this contemplative yet engrossing volume.
Born in 1811 in a Siamese fishing village to an ethnically Chinese family, Chang and Eng turned 18 about a month into a 138-day journey to Boston Harbor. They had been contracted into service by a Scottish businessman and an American captain, who promised the twins’ mother they would bring her sons back in five years. Chang and Eng would never see Siam or their family again.
What followed their arrival was a decade of touring the United States and England as “monstrosities” to be gawked at by paying crowds. But showbiz was only part of the attraction.
As Huang explains, the twins were also served up as scientific specimens “to be inspected, poked, tested and, most important of all, verified” by esteemed members of the medical establishment. Examining the twins, the Boston doctor John Collins Warren — who publicly staged the first surgical use of anesthesia (“like a peep show,” Huang wryly notes) — jabbed their connecting band with a pin, recording the central point at which “both said it hurt.”
Yunte Huang Miriam Berkley
Chang and Eng became an immediate national sensation, giving Huang a bounty of sources from which to choose when tracing the contours of their story. Modern writers like Mark Slouka and Darin Strauss have written novels based on the twins’ lives. A popular biography by Irving and Amy Wallace was published in the 1970s; more scholarly monographs have been published since.
But it’s the contemporaneous accounts that give an unvarnished look at the degradation and disparagement the brothers had to endure. A British visitor recalled grabbing their connecting band, only to have one of the twins say (with what one imagines was barely concealed displeasure), “Your hand is cold, sir.” Philip Hone, the ex-mayor of New York City and an inveterate diarist, recorded his impressions in his journal: “Their faces are devoid of intelligence, and have that stupid expression which is characteristic of the natives of the East.”
As common as such racism was, Chang and Eng happened to arrive in the United States well before the 1849 gold rush, when the number of Chinese living in the country was still negligible, and before Chinese labor was considered a threat to working-class whites. As a result, the official government census didn’t even have a category for Asians until 1870 (when a “C” for Chinese would stand in for all of them). “Before that,” Huang writes, “the Chinese were considered white for census purposes.”
The brothers, then, may have been subject to the prejudice of individual bigots, but when it came to American law, they were able to use loopholes — their ability to blend in, legally speaking — to their benefit. In 1832, the year they turned 21, they claimed their freedom from the captain and his wife, using the money they had saved up to declare a very American independence, going boating at Niagara Falls and buying a horse named Bob. (Chang and Eng kept meticulous ledgers, and Huang deduces quite a bit from their purchases.) They became citizens in 1839, even though the 1790 Naturalization Act — which wouldn’t be repealed until 1952 — was supposed to apply to “free white persons” only.
They were even able to marry white women, despite Americans’ panic at the time over “racial mixing.” In 1843, having retired from touring a few years before, Chang and Eng married Adelaide and Sarah Yates, two sisters from Wilkes County, a rural corner of North Carolina. The couples settled down just outside Mount Airy, N.C. — later the inspiration for the town of Mayberry in “The Andy Griffith Show” — to make room for their sizable families.
Huang devotes a short chapter titled “Foursome” to the question of sex. The couples had to deal with considerable physical and logistical challenges. (According to interviews with their widows, Chang and Eng would alternate weeks as the “complete master” who dictated how he wanted to go about business, with the other brother “blanking out.”) But the widespread social disapprobation that greeted their arrangement was beyond their control. The most vociferous indictments came from the abolitionist papers in the North, which declared “so bestial a union as this” yet another sign of how slavery had corrupted the Southern soul.
And the twins did seem determined to be identified as Southern gentry. In addition to owning slaves, they supported the Whigs and became ardent supporters of the Confederacy, sending two of their sons to fight in the Civil War.
Huang is right to point out the cruel irony in all of this, but when he characterizes his subjects as “two brothers formerly sold into indentured servitude and treated no better than slaves,” he inadvertently downplays the incomparable brutality of the slaveholding system in order to heighten the contradictions.
As Huang shows elsewhere, Chang and Eng were treated better than slaves; if anything, what really rankled them were instances when they compared themselves to white men and felt they weren’t given the respect they were due — such as their first trans-Atlantic journey, when they were booked in steerage rather than first class. In the excellent 2014 study “The Lives of Chang and Eng,” Joseph Andrew Orser argues that the twins deliberately “made claims to whiteness.”
But their intentions were one thing and public perception another. They would always be known as the conjoined brothers from Siam, and after the Civil War rendered their slaveholding assets worthless, they went on tour again, this time with their children, to show the world that their union with two women “was able to produce normal offspring.”
Huang writes movingly about the twins’ painful end in 1874, when Chang, a heavy drinker, died and the teetotaling Eng perished soon after. But it’s in the epilogue that Huang unveils one of his most surprising turns.
When Huang visited Mount Airy, or Mayberry U.S.A., he learned of a Chang and Eng exhibit kept in the basement of the Andy Griffith Museum. In other words, a shrine to an American myth of old-timey homogeneity was literally built on the more convoluted reality. Huang knew that the symbolism was almost too much to bear: “As Sheriff Andy says, ‘If you wrote this into a play, nobody’d believe it.’”
1 sfcityguide | 4 altre recensioni | Apr 5, 2018 |
sfcityguide | 4 altre recensioni | Apr 5, 2018 | As for being "Charlie Chan", Earl Dere Biggers had already been writing about the fictitious Chan before ever hearing about or meeting Chang Apana. Their coming together was merely a fluke of fate.
I was very disappointed in this book, there was actually very little about Chang Apana, but more about Biggers, Chan and the rampant abuse of non-white people & racism that was allowed to run amok throughout Hawaii. There was also a lot of side information about Hollywood & the Charlie Chan movies which came to be after Biggers died.
I really did not like this book..... I wanted to know more about the "Real Life Charlie Chan".
It was still well worth reading and showed how so many different factors influence our popular culture and how we in turn are influenced back and reflected back by our popular culture. Many times in unpleasant ways.
The author has a very accessible style and never stayed on one subject thread long enough to make you loose interest or long enough to loose the thread he was weaving between the different though connected stories.
I learned many things I never knew before, was influenced to watch my first Charlie Chan movie based on this book and will soon try reading Earl Derr Biggers books as well and now at least I have a much better understanding of the character and peoples various reactions to him.
Although all the pieces were engagingly written, the book as a whole failed to hold my attention.
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