A Charlie Chan Pairup (#NonFicNov)

 

Week 3 (10-16 November) Book Pairings: This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. Maybe it’s a historical novel and the real history in a nonfiction version, or a memoir and a novel, or a fiction book you’ve read and you would like recommendations for background reading. Or maybe it’s just two books you feel have a link, whatever they might be. You can be as creative as you like! Hosted by Liz.

I reread the first Charlie Chan mystery The House Without a Key a couple of weeks ago for the #1925Club. It reminded me there was a book I had wanted to read since I first heard of it:

 

It was really good! 

Huang first tells the story of Chang Apana, the Honolulu detective, who inspired the character of Charlie Chan. Apana was born in Hawaii to Chinese immigrant parents who went back to China when he was young. But Apana returned to Hawaii with an uncle, and then stayed. He worked as a cowboy, a house servant, the enforcer for the newly enacted statute against animal cruelty; then when the Honolulu police force was officially constituted, he became the only Chinese detective on the force. He seemed to have been good at all his jobs.

Huang then tells the story of Earl Derr Biggers. Biggers had grown up in Ohio to a middle class family. He worked as a journalist and had already become a successful author. But when in 1925 he published the first Charlie Chan novel, those earlier successes could no longer compare. Biggers wrote six Charlie Chan mysteries but died young of a heart attack.

Then there were the movies: there were three early movies, which went nowhere. In all of them Chan was played by a Japanese actor; it was only when Warner Oland (a Swede!) took on the role, they became a success. That's his picture on the cover lower right. (And Chang Apana in the upper left.) Oland's Chan was a huge success even in China, where he was mobbed when he made a publicity trip. And the Chinese were perfectly capable of scorning series they didn't like, such as those around Fu Manchu.

And Huang goes on to talk about the reception of the Charlie Chan character, and that was in some ways the most fascinating. Biggers admired the actual Chang Apana; they met a few times and their respect was mutual, and he intended Charlie Chan to be an antidote to all the Yellow Peril arguments of the time. But Chan talks in that pidgin: how can he be an admirable figure? Well, Huang demonstrates how it could be a whole lot worse. And Chan in the novels is competent and willing to stand up to prejudice when he sees it. Still in the 80s and 90s Chan was viewed as a stereotyped Asian whiz kid, or worse a yellow Uncle Tom, and nothing but cultural appropriation to boot.

Is that all he is? Of course, he is, partly. But Huang reminds us that much of American art comes about from a collision with somebody else's half-understood culture. This is perhaps most obvious in music (though not Huang's topic) and he rightly notes we'd have to give up a lot to achieve that sort of purity of the past.

Huang's includes a little of his own biography, which is fascinating. He was a student, majoring in English, at Peking University in 1989, and went to camp out in Tiananmen Square. But before the tanks rolled in, his parents lured him home by sending a telegram that his mother was dying. (She wasn't.)  Nevertheless he decided to emigrate, worked in lowly jobs in the US, until he decided to go back to school where he got a Ph.D. in English. As of the writing of the book (2010), he was teaching at University of California, Santa Barbara.

Huang clearly enjoys the Chan mystery series himself; he ends the book with a two page list of Charlie Chan aphorisms. Can't resist a few:

Hasty deduction, like ancient egg, look good from the outside. 

Man who flirt with dynamite sometime fly with angels.

Murder like potato chip--cannot stop at just one.

Some heads, like hard nuts, much better if well cracked.

Mind, like parachute, only function when open. 

I felt like it really added something to my earlier reread of the first Charlie Chan mystery. Does that mean I'm about to go reread them all? Careful examination reveal clue: bookmark in second volume of series!

If you have access to the New York Review of Books, the original review which caught my attention is here. 

 

Ostend 1936

"Letting barbarism assume rule bore fruit. Do not deceive yourself. Hell reigns."

-Letter from Joseph Roth to Stefan Zweig

In 1936 several exiled writers and artists decided to summer in Ostend in Belgium. Not just Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth pictured on the cover, but also Irmgard Keun, Ernst Toller, and for a while Arthur Koestler (until he leaves for Spain to report on the Civil War).

Zweig and Roth are old friends and like to write in each other's company in order to bounce around ideas. Both are Jews born in the Austro-Hungarian empire, but unable to live in Austria any more. Zweig, the more financially successful of the two, is already in Ostend and he encourages his friend Roth to come. Ostend is a beach resort.

Roth is already suffering from the alcoholism that will kill him in 1939 at the age of 44 and Zweig also hopes to wean him off alcohol (or at least eat regular meals). Schnapps, Roth's preferred tipple, is illegal in Belgium, and then, as now, Belgian beers are an acquired taste, one which Roth has failed to acquire. It takes Roth longer to sort the necessary visa for Belgium, but he does get there.

The writing is working for both of them. Zweig helps Roth edit his new novel Confessions of a Murderer, though neither can publish in Germany or Austria by then--their books will come out with German exile presses. Romance is also in the air: Zweig has separated from his first wife, and is travelling with his secretary, then his mistress, but later his second wife. Roth and Irmgard Keun become a couple; she's banned from Germany for her communist politics; the books of all three were burned by Nazi authorities. Unfortunately for Zweig's efforts at reform, it's mostly drinking that Keun and Roth have bonded over, and they've discovered an illegal source of schnapps.

This short book featuring a moment in the precarious lives of German-language writers in 1936 is both touching and alarming. The book came out in 2014--Weidermann is a German cultural journalist--and was translated into English in 2016 by Carol Brown Janeway.

Zweig (on left) and Roth in Ostend in 1936

 

Anabel Loyd's The Dervish Bowl

"The wandering Jew is a very real character in the great drama of history."

-Sir Edward Denison Ross, Jewish Travellers, 1930

"Arminius Vambéry's father had been a Talmudic scholar and failed businessman in the small town of St Georghen near Pressburg in Austria-Hungary." Pressburg is now Bratislava in modern Slovakia, but Vambéry thought of himself as Hungarian. He was born Hermann Wamburger in 1832--probably. He was never certain. His father died when he was less than a year old and his mother remarried so he had a number of half-siblings, but his stepfather was no more financially successful than his birth father and Vambéry grew up in poverty. He was deeply affected by Lajos Kossuth and the revolt of the Hungarians in 1848 and as a consequence he Magyarized his name to Armin Vambéry. Because of the Russian assistance in putting down the Hungarians at that time, Vambéry became a lifelong Russophobe.

Because of his poverty, his education was spotty. His family was so poor, he said, he was cast adrift at age twelve. But he was very good at languages. At age sixteen he knew Hungarian, Hebrew, Yiddish, Latin, French and German. There was great interest in the relation between Hungarian and Turkic languages at that time and he was able to convince the Academy of Sciences in Budapest he should travel to the East to study that relationship and was awarded a stipend. So, in his twenties, he was in Constantinople, learning Turkish--and teaching Danish to the Danish consul. (Who was actually a Turkish native of German ancestry named von Hübsch.) He also tutored the sister of the future Sultan Abdul Hamid II. He writes a German-Turkish dictionary that becomes popular.

Nor did his Russophobia stop him from learning Russian along the way.

He's made good contacts in Constantinople and could have made a successful career there, but he's young and still imagines greater successes, greater adventures. His stipend was meant to take him further east. He's given the Sultan's tugra, an ornate calligraphic emblem that serves as a sort of diplomatic passport and with that in hand, he travels to Persia. He learns Persian. But where he really wants to go are the Khanates of Khiva and Bokhara, the capital cities of which are both now in Uzbekistan, but were independent countries until they fell to Russian imperialism.

He stays in Tehran for a while because a war in the Central Asian plains makes travel further east unsafe, but eventually he disguises himself as a dervish, a Muslim pilgrim and holy man, purportedly returning from a Hajj to Mecca, and sets off in the company of real dervishes. The year is 1863. 

Crossing the Caspian sea he reaches both Khiva and Bokhara. Muzaffar, the emir of Bokhara, is slightly more moderate than his father Nasrullah, who was famed for simply killing anyone from other countries who might look at him cross-eyed. Vambéry is the rare Westerner who visits and lives to tell the tale.

On his return to Europe he hopes to become a professor of Turkic and Iranian languages, but at first anti-Semitism and his lack of formal academic credentials prevent this. It's suggested he write a book about his travels and get it published in England, which he does; both the book (Travels in Central Asia, available at Project Gutenberg) and Vambéry himself become great successes in England. He's a famous man. 

With this under his belt, he returns to Austria-Hungary and petitions the Emperor Franz Josef to make him a professor, which Franz Josef does, while telling him he won't have any students. Vambéry settles down to life as a professor in Budapest with a few--but at least not no--students. He's on visiting terms with the Sultan Abdul Hamid II and with future Edward VII of England. He meets Queen Victoria several times and travels back and forth between England, his home in Budapest, and Constantinople. He wrote a bunch of books, mostly in German, but also others in English and in Hungarian as well.

He's also a spy, at least so-called, though I'd instead label him a paid intelligence analyst. He writes reports for the English government on the state of affairs in the East, and does what he can to promote friendship between the Ottomans and England. This is popular enough until it isn't, when English policy begins to shift from support of Turkey to accommodation with Russia in the years before World War I. By then the English foreign office is beginning to see him as a bit of a pest (despite his friendship with Edward VII) and amusingly enough Anabel Loyd the biographer kind of does, too.

He dies in 1913.

All in all, a pretty fascinating life, with the one (albeit only the one) great adventure. The book came out last year from Haus Publishing in the U.K.