Race in Bigger Charlie Chan Mystery Essay Paper 4 instruction and prompts on Earl Derr Biggers’s The Keeper of the Keys and Hollywood’s The Black Camel (~6

Race in Bigger Charlie Chan Mystery Essay Paper 4 instruction and prompts on Earl Derr Biggers’s The Keeper of the Keys and Hollywood’s The Black Camel (~600 words, carefully edited Standard English. Remember to have a parenthesis at the end for your word count. Also, put the prompt number in front of the paper’s title):

Choose from one of the following prompts, then create your own title, hone your own insight, and compose a well-argued analysis. Remember critical analysis thrives on individual insights rather than parroting, regurgitating what has already been said, let alone plot summary. Put the prompt number you have chosen to analyze in front of your title.

Prompts from A to F:

A. The issue of race is paramount in Biggers’s Charlie Chan mystery. Explore race by finding your own specific angle.

B. Analyze the duality of Ah Sin and Ah Sing, Sinophobia of Bret Harte and Sinophilia of Biggers, both of the West’s own making!

C. Analyze the intersection of race and gender, such as “C. Bipolarization of Orientals and Women in Biggers’ White Discourse: Fairy Race and Fairer Sex.” Whereas the fairer sex alludes to women, “fairy” implies gay, as white racism deems Asian men as less masculine and manly, more feminine, in comparison to white males.

D. Chanspeak lies at the heart of my analysis. Explore the use of language in The Keeper of the Keys.

E. Given Charlie Chan’s longevity by means of Hollywood films, analyze The Black Camel in conjunction with The Keeper of the Keys.”

F. Construct a title of your own choosing. Write an analysis springing from your title. Private Slant Eye Getting Bigger, Faster, even Beijinger
The eight-word tongue-in-cheek title offers at least eight clues to the puzzle of a title,
self-referentially. Let us read them backwards, similar to police procedurals from effect to cause,
from victims’ bodies to whodunit. “Bigger” refers to Earl Derr Biggers (1884-1933), whose six
Charlie Chan mysteries from 1925 to 1932 create an investigator from Hawaii and, originally,
from Canton, China, so “psychic,” as Chan himself puts it repeatedly, yet so comic that
Hollywood never tires of casting him through Warner Oland, Sydney Toler, and other
yellowfaces. “Faster” alludes to Howard Fast (1914-2003), a Jewish Manhattanite who authors
seven Masao Masuto mysteries under the pseudonym of E. V. Cunningham between 1967 and
1984.1 “Beijinger” signals one of many millennial Beijing directors Sicheng Chen and his 20152020 franchise of three Detective Chinatown films, plus one 12-episode television series, of
which Chen is the producer. The three end rhymes of “er” denote, customarily in English,
“personhood” at the heart of this conundrum: “Bigger” Chan, “Faster” Masuto, and “Beijinger”
Qin Feng (Chin Fong) in films or Lin Mo on TV. In addition, the Beijing dialect favors the suffix
“er” at the end of sentences and even single words. Along with the prominence of other
retroflexes from a curled tongue, such sounds as “zh,” “ch,” “sh,” and “r” in pinyin, the Beijing
accent appears to be perpetually slurring—a smooth, suave, and slick flow. The three “er-s” do
denote personhood in English, culminating in a particular kind of person, a Beijinger private eye
playing with words, not to mention with the world of Chinatowns across the globe.
The three adjectives with “er” double as nouns or proper names, linked not by “and” but
by “even” to signify a twist that points less to an addition of similar item than a moment of
tables-turning when American gumshoes are superseded by Chinese counterparts. “Even”
suggests an Oedipal revenge as the Beijingnese-speaking Qin Feng thrives on sinologizing
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Anglo-American detective tropes, particularly the BBC’s Sherlock (2010-2017), Sherlock “with
Chinese characteristics,” if you will. Yet “even” the shift, the watershed juncture, has to be
balanced by its predecessor “getting,” which stresses an incremental, serialized metamorphosis
not only from West to East, but also within each series produced by Biggers, Fast, and Chen,
respectively. “Getting” implies a chain reaction whereby each private eye is derivative, standing
on the shoulders of the giant before him, but he is also innovative, solving cases in his own
ingenious, if fetishized and Orientalized, way: Chan’s “psychic” power; Masuto’s Zen
meditation; and detectives touring Chinatowns in Bangkok, New York, Tokyo, and possibly
beyond. The white privilege of Biggers the Ohioan from America’s heartland manifests itself in
the whimsical shaping of Chan the detective-cum-clown. Fast, a working-class Jew from the
slums of New York, projects a romanticized, yet Orientalized, alter ego onto Masuto in
America’s tinsel town of Beverly Hills. To punctuate the millennial rise of China, Sicheng Chen
refills the old Hollywood bottle of road movies and buddy films with the new wine of a pair of
Chinese private eye for one billion pairs of Chinese eyes. This probe into private slant eye spans
over a century, eyeballing, above all, Biggers’ last work on Chan, with a nod to the first and the
penultimate novel; Fast’s antepenultimate novel on Masuto, with a nod to the whole series, plus
The Immigrants (1977); and Chen’s films and TV series, with a nod to the Chinese Century.
In lieu of the police or, in the Chinese lingo, Public Security (Gongan), both being the
long arms of the government, a private eye operates alone, devoid of the official network of
support, hence more conducive to hero-worship. Arguably, even Chan of Honolulu Police and
Masuto of Beverly Hills Police are private eyes of sorts. Charlie Chan investigates at full
capacity on his home turf of Hawaii but once, in The Black Camel (1929). Otherwise, he is on
loan or on vacation elsewhere, assisting the local authority, no different from Sherlock the
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consulting detective to Scotland Yard. Although Chan did debut in Hawaii in House Without a
Key (1925), he was tantamount to a comic relief, or in Yunte Huang’s term, “a mere bit of local
color” (Charlie Chan [2010] 119). Indubitably, Masao Masuto is in charge of homicide cases,
but his ability and his very presence are constantly questioned on grounds of his race,
reminiscent of Chan the pidgin-spewing clown with “the light dainty step of a woman” (37).
Moreover, Fast characterizes Masuto as a “Zen Buddhist detective.” His personal faith interlaces
public persona like the double helix within the DNA of all the detectives from China and
Chinatown, from Hollywood and Huallywood.
The italicizing of “slant” gestures to what the detective’s Oriental face faces from the
outset. In The House Without a Key (1925), Charlie Chan’s debut in a string of stereotypical
images concludes with “his amber eyes slanting” (37), a facial feature Hollywood yellowfaces
see fit to replicate through makeup and prosthetics. Even the Oriental detective’s doppelganger,
Dr. Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer, first appears in 1913 with eyes “narrow and long, very slightly
oblique” (The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu 58), a racial marker to be inherited by Boris Karloff and
others in this role of the heathen anti-Christ. Arthur Conan Doyle in “The Man with the Twisted
Lip” (1891) also presents a Chinese addict at the opium den as having “small, oblique eyes” (55).
Nearly a century later, in Howard Fast’s The Case of the Poisoned Eclairs (1979), this racist
trope still infects the police chief Wainwright who curses at his subordinate Masuto: “You
miserable slant-eyed pain in the ass” (94). Meaning to tilt, “oblique,” with its accent on the
second syllable, intimates the rising slope of the eye. Meaning not straight, oblique implies
Oriental deviousness, underhandedness. The external facial feature betrays, so the logic—illogic,
really—goes, internal duplicity.
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Slant is but one of many racial slurs, America’s tongue-lashing against Asians as well as
Americans of Asian descent. The term is doubly removed from Asians: not all Asians have slant
eyes; not all eyes that slant flow from Asian bloodlines. Slant exposes the crookedness deep
within the heart of America rather than on the face of those from Asia. Akin to the N-word in
gangsta rap, millennial Asian American culture resuscitates racial slurs as a badge of honor,
repeating them to own them, theoretically. The minority wound hypothetically bleeds into red
pearls of passion. Justin Chon’s Gook (2017) and Stanley Yung’s Chink (2013), later renamed #1
Serial Killer, exemplify this trend of ethnic identity forged out of a contestation against majority
discrimination. On the cover to the graphic novel The Shadow Hero (2014), MacArthur Genius
grantee Gene Luen Yang draws the green-caped Chinese American superhero, masked with slant
eyes. A group of Asian American agent provocateur even names itself after slant: “Slant’d is our
activism: we are a collective built from the ground up by Asian Americans, for Asian Americans,
rooted in the causes and values that matter to us, and fueled by creativity in every form”
(https://slantd.com/).
This ethnic reaction may well be reactionary, though, as it seeks sublimation of pain
while recycling metastasized Sinophobic stereotypes. This duality informs the “gesture of
political defiance” Anne Anlin Cheng bestows on her deployment of “yellowness” in the figure
of “yellow women,” which runs the risk of just that—a mere gesture (Ornamentalism 2019, ixx). Thus, in the good company of gook and chink and yellow, the pedigree of the derogatory
“slant” hails from the misrepresentation of Asian eyes angling upward, an age-long synecdoche
for Asians. Instead of Emily Dickinson’s “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” these Asian
Americans feel compelled to tattle the truth that is a slant, the slanted truth apropos the racist
America.
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Biggers Learns Chanspeak
Flanked by the coming-outs of Rohmer’s evil Fu Manchu in 1913 and of John P.
Marquand’s good Mr. Moto in 1937, Biggers of the interwar period chanced upon Charlie Chan
in The House Without a Key, a typical locked-room mystery. A minor character, Charlie Chan
assists white police investigator and prosecutor, providing such comic elements as his very first
line: “No knife in neighborhood of crime” (40). Like a newborn’s first wail upon birth,
nonsensical other than announcing his/her arrival, Chan’s grating gibberish introduces an alien
with alien speech. His maker Biggers has begun to learn the craft of dubbing Chanspeak,
knocking English off-kilter, omitting articles and subjects, transposing “r” and “l,” coining
pseudo-Chinese aphorisms, marbling infelicities throughout, disorienting just so but never
overmuch.2 Thus commences as well the reader’s mental, subconscious correction and
standardization of Chanspeak for six novels over the next decade, if not to the present moment
through other Chan reincarnations. The first order of business: amending Chan’s mistake to the
idiomatic “No knife at the crime scene.”
This (mis)representation serves multiple functions. First of all, it succeeds in
characterization by pairing substandard English with an alien. Secondly, it grabs attention
because Chanspeak presents a verbal puzzle on top of the puzzle of whodunit.3 Nonstandard
pidgin, like any exception to the rule, deviates from English, requiring heightened alert and
piquing reader interest. Thirdly, it furnishes the reader with a sense of control, even superiority,
in having to translate atrocious Chanspeak back to good English. Finally, it intimates Orientalist
wisdom and sagacity in the onslaught of well-nigh non sequiturs that foreshadow higher truth
beyond human comprehension. Chan’s clipped, telegraphic language comes to hint at telepathic
insight. In keeping with George Orwell’s “doublethink” in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and the
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resultant doublespeak, Chanspeak satisfies the paradoxical desire of having the cake and eating
it, too. On the one hand, Americans feel superior to an Oriental physically and linguistically
challenged. On the other, Americans feel awed by an Oriental savant with a dash of the exotic
and arcane. Chan’s broken English brooks an enigmatic Chineseness, as if one must take leave of
the rules of English to levitate above and rule over evil. Truly an Orwellian doublethink, for
Chanspeak always returns to passable English, its poor start of a whimper notwithstanding, to
deliver the formulaic bang in detective mysteries of recapping the case for closure. An idiot’s
mangled words enlighten like a Zen master’s riddle of koan (public case).
The House Without a Key serendipitously provided Biggers with the key to literary
success. Chan, a secondary character bordering on the buffoon, aroused public interest and the
torrent of readers’ letters, so much so that Biggers turned the authorial gaze on him, promoting
him from a comic sidekick to a consulting detective and eventually to the primary investigator in
subsequent novels. Meanwhile, Biggers “learns” Chanspeak: he perfects the unmaking of the
English language to make Chan. Simultaneously, in the regional, nonstandard dialect practiced
by Huckleberry Finn, such as in “Why, she [Miss Watson] tried to learn you your book, she tried
to learn you your manners” (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn [1884] Ch. 16), Biggers also
“teaches” Chanspeak in the time-honored tradition of stereotypical Chinese pidgin to American
readers. Learning to do Chanspeak while teaching the masses, Biggers was compelled to mitigate
the investigator’s “speech defect,” lest Chan be hard pressed to conduct interrogation of suspects
throughout and summarize the crime at the end, both duties falling on his white, native speaking
colleagues in House.
The last of the series on account of Biggers’ early death, Keeper of the Keys (1932) offers
a complete tableau of Chanspeak. The genre of locked-room mystery evolves into this locked-
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house murder. To unlock the mystery, the key figure turns out to be Charlie Chan, who is
elevated from an extra in House to the lead investigator in Keeper. The Oriental has long been
the key to Western thrillers and the West’s thrills, not only ratcheting up anxiety over Dr. Fu
Manchu and the eponymous key keeper Ah Sing, but also restoring peace as do Charlie Chan
and the Keymaker in The Matrix (1999). Keys, like passwords, are essential but easily misplaced
and forgotten. Who would remember the Keymaker and Ah Sing, integral to the plot yet
designed to fade out in Neo’s halo and Chan’s shadow? Chan himself is such an Oriental key,
crime-buster at the end of his career who remains, nonetheless, risible.
In Keeper, the crime scene of a house is the well-endowed Dudley Ward’s Pineview, a
remote estate near Lake Tahoe in the American West. Chan is summoned from Hawaii in his
capacity as a detective as well as witness to Ward’s imminent confrontation with his ex-wife, the
prima donna Ellen Landini, who is believed to have hidden the fact that she gave birth to their
son seven months after their divorce. In addition, Ward invited Landini’s two ex-husbands—
racist Westerner John Reed, Ward’s confidante since childhood; Dr. Swan who turned out to
have blackmailed Landini over the years—and her current husband, a self-proclaimed Italian
impresario Romano who leeches off Landini through his “alimony.” The guest list includes Hugh
Beaton, a gifted, though gullible, singer under Landini’s thrall about to be coerced into unseating
Romano as her fifth husband. Leslie Beaton is Hugh’s beautiful and fiercely protective sister.
Michael Ireland, Landini’s pilot, with whom she had a fling, soon descends on the scene with the
plane that is supposed to take Landini away. The pilot’s jealous wife Cecile is Landini’s maid.
Landini’s murder by her own pistol arouses Chan and the sheriff Don Holt’s suspicion of every
character since they all have the motive to kill Landini cast in the image of film noir’s femme
fatale. The urbane, gentlemanly host Ward turns out to be—Spoiler Alert!—the deceitful killer,
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so stricken by the revelation of not only his son’s existence but also his recent death that he shot
Landini. The mean, violent streak in Ward had been well camouflaged by the host of Pineview
until rage took over.
Only in the final pages of this whodunit does Charlie Chan enlighten the sheriff and Sam
Holt, Don’s blind father and ex-sheriff of the mining camps, on his covert investigation,
seemingly so immaterial and off-color that it contributes to Chan’s farcical performance. Not
until the closing moment does one realize the logic behind Chan’s absurd interest, in the face of a
murder, in West Coast pines, Landini’s pet dog Trouble on Ireland’s plane, and Ward’s lifelong
and loyal Chinese servant Ah Sing’s glasses. Whereas every character harbors secrets,
particularly Ward’s darker self that inflicted physical violence on Landini before and on Ah Sing
now, this motif of doubleness materializes literally in the Sino-ese rather than Siamese twins: the
Chinese private slant eye Charlie Chan assisting the investigation and Ah Sing whose Sin against
the sixth of Ten Commandments yet to be uncovered.
Indeed, Ah Sing keeps returning as the prime suspect, no matter how hard Charlie Chan
and Sam Holt try to wish away the selfless, pitiable servant. Ah Sing’s guilt seems a fait
accompli, as the very name Ah Sing conjures up his doppelganger, Ah Sin in Bret Harte’s “The
Heathen Chinee” (1870). Indeed, Keeper was originally entitled “Ways That Are Dark” à la
Harte’s poem, as reported by Yunte Huang (Charlie Chan 131), dropped later because “it would
shove Ah Sing into too much prominence. I don’t want him to overshadow Chan” (132). Yet Ah
Sing is Charlie Chan’s shadow, just as Ah Sin is Ah Sing’s. The racist notion of “perennial
alien” posits that behind each American of Asian descent lurks an Asian alien. Their
inextricability is attributed to Asians themselves, as Chan reflects on suspects: “First of all he
thought of people: of Sing, whose beady little eyes even Chan could not read” (678), too small to
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live up to the reputation of slant eye. Chan the private slant eye, muses the big-eyed Biggers,
meets Ah Sing with eyes too minimal to slant, as if closed, impenetrable. Sam Holt likewise
bemoans in his Western regional dialect: “Funny . . . the way you an’ me—we always come back
to Sing” (669). Ah Sing’s candidacy rests on his willingness to be the scapegoat. The servant
walked into Ward’s crime in progress and orchestrated his master’s getaway, at the cost of
diverting attention to himself, but for Chan’s keen discernment.
To let Ah Sing go, the reasonings by the sheriff’s two nominal deputies differ. Sam
patronizes the last of his kind—old-time Chinese domestics from California’s golden era,
whereas Chan, despite his “Americanization,” fraternizes with someone of his own “blood,” to
borrow from the essentialist rhetoric of race. Attributing a motive to Landini’s murder, Sam
justifies Ah Sing’s action in his regional accent: “Year after year I seen old Sing cookin’ an’
slavin’ fer Dudley Ward an’ his brother—takin’ care of ‘em since they left the cradle—lovin’ an’
scoldin’ ‘em an’ treatin’ ‘em always like babies. An’ I knew what it must have meant to Sing
that they was no little boys in this house . . . Jes’ loneliness in the kitchen, no kids beggin’ fer
rice an’ gravy. An’ then he hears that there was a kid—only Landini kept it dark—never lets its
father know” (635). This lengthy description in “authentic,” apostrophe-riddled regionalism
purportedly chronicles faithfully the happy “slavin’” of the colonized. It betrays that in the
homosocial West divorced of women, Ah Sing multitasks as the cook, the maid, the companion
to the master, and, furthermore, as the mother to young masters. The children under Ah Sing’s
care includes Ward’s confidante John Reed. Such racial and symbolic castration afflicts not only
Ah Sing but also Charlie Chan, the only one in the literary history of Western detectives with
absolutely zilch sex appeal.4 All the romancing is relegated to young men and women in the
Chan series. In Keeper, young sheriff Don Holt and Leslie Beaton fit the bill. Deprived by the
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femme fatale Landini of an extension of surrogate motherhood/wifehood, Ah Sing avenges,
believes Sam Holt, his master as well as himself. Preempting any objection to Ah Sing’s release,
Sam Holt impresses upon Chan that he “ain’t got no real authority here,” reaffirming Chan’s role
as a private slant eye rather than an official lawman (696).
Sam’s paternal feelings toward Ah Sing are well reciprocated. Reminded by Sam that “I
ain’t sheriff no more. Things change, boy,” Ah Sing quips: “Always shef fo’ me’” (632). While
Sam’s “ain’t” and other regional usages resonate with Ah Sing’s pidgin, the refrain of “boy”
charts the hierarchy, albeit the blind ex-lawman is the one who now gropes along like a toddler.
Despite their differences, Chan idolizes the ex-sheriff as much as Ah Sing does. Chan finds Sam
“a figure of distinction in any company, tall, erect, with snow-white hair. Chan’s heart was
touched as he noted the sightless eyes.” Shaking hands, Chan betrays what is argu…
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