The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 15 | Issue 4 | Number 5 | Article ID 5014 | Feb 15, 2017

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Charlie Chan and the Orientalist Exception

Haiyan Lee

In the pursuit of wrongdoing, one steps awayfrom God.

Sister Aloysius Beauvier in Doubt (2008)

Abstract: This article seeks to make sense ofthe enigma of Charlie Chan by situating him atthe intersection of critical legal studies, genrestudies, cognitive psychology, and postcolonialcritique. It contends that Chan is more than ashameful chapter in the history of Americanracism and Orientalism, rather a product of thelegal Orientalist imagination’s exploitation of apeculiar genre schema of detective fiction. Assuch, he i s a f igure o f ambiva lence,equivocation, and exception. On the one hand,Chan fits the stereotype of the maverickdetective who must operate within thepenumbra of formal judicial apparatuses—inthe zone of the exception—in order to matchwits with the master criminal. On the otherhand, it is his “race” that reifies the power ofthe exception, making him the unctuous alterego of the insidious criminal mastermind Dr. FuManchu.

Of the dozens of Charlie Chan films made in theU.S., only one is set in the fictional detective’sputative homeland. Released in 1935, CharlieChan in Shanghai makes much of the“homecoming” aspect of Chan’s arrival on thescene, beginning with a characteristically sing-song remark by the grammatically challengeddetec t i ve : “Mos t anx ious to renewacquaintance with land of honorableancestors.” The plot, however, unfolds in afashion typical to the series, which features the

peripatetic detective solving criminal cases in asmorgasbord of familiar and exotic locations.Nonetheless, this film casts into relief acontradiction underlying the entire CharlieChan franchise: Here, a soft-spoken, diffident,and roly-poly “Chinaman” is cast in the role ofthe classic detective hero in pursuit of a bandof white miscreants in the notorious Shanghaibadlands. He accomplishes the mission with aminimum of gumshoeing, but evidently a greatdeal of ratiocination and cunning, all the whiledisarming and mystifying those around himwith his aphoristic circumlocutions.

This article seeks to make sense of the enigmaof Charlie Chan by situating him at theintersection of critical legal studies, genrestudies, cognitive psychology, and postcolonialcritique. It contends that Chan is more than ashameful chapter in the history of Americanracism and Orientalism, rather a product of thelegal Orientalist imagination’s exploitation of apeculiar genre schema of detective fiction. Assuch, he i s a f igure o f ambiva lence,equivocation, and exception. On the one hand,Chan fits the stereotype of the maverickdetective who must operate within thepenumbra of formal judicial apparatuses—inthe zone of the exception—in order to matchwits with the master criminal. On the otherhand, it is his “race” that reifies the power ofthe exception, making him the unctuous alterego of the insidious criminal mastermind Dr. FuManchu. Building on the works of LucBoltanski, Judith Shklar, Teemu Ruskola, andothers, I propose to see Chan as an auraticfigure that feeds on the anxiety engendered bylaw’s inevitable intercourse with the extra-legaland its inadequacy in relation to or non-identitywith justice. I invoke two examples from the

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Chan repertoire, one novel and one film,primarily for the purpose of illustrating myarguments rather than offering new readings ofthem: The House without a Key (1925)and Charlie Chan in Shanghai.

The Exception in Detective Fiction

In his historical-sociological study of Englishand French crime fiction, Luc Boltanski (2014)links the genre’s birth and boom to theemergence of a liberal-capitalist political orderthat he calls “the state of law.” The state of lawpresupposes an objectively and empiricallyknowable reality that is nonetheless vulnerableto subversion. The mystery and suspense thatlie at the heart of the genre are anchored in anorderly reality that is guaranteed by the stateof law and eventually restored after beingcalled into question, not so much by pettycriminals as by an elite that is never whollysold on the universalist pretentions of the ruleof law. The whole point of crime stories is todramat i ze the s t a te o f l aw and the

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contradiction that it encounters when it issuperimposed on a class-based society (2014,71). He points to these stories’ near exclusivepreoccupation with elite crime and offers aclass analysis of “the regime of the exception”in which the genre operates. The maintenanceof order necessarily takes the agents of thestate beyond the realm of legality, therebysidestepping or suspending the law, in doing soexposing the inherent instability, fragility, andlimitation of the state of law itself.

Boltanski begins by asking why, in classicdetective fiction, the policeman is never thesole or chief investigator, instead alwaysplaying second fiddle to the detective hero, whois typically not an agent of the state (or, if so, isacting in an ad hoc capacity in relation to agiven case) and is, moreover, marked by a hostof eccentricities. While the former is naïve,obtuse, and rule-bound, the latter is endowedwith an outsized intelligence, taking frequentliberties with the letter of the law, in order, it isbelieved, better to serve the spirit of the law.He writes:

The detective’s action is situated both on thenear side of legality – he often acts before thepoliceman, the agent of the legal order, hasbeen able to intervene – and on the far side. Hisacts are based on a moral support structuretreated as superior or even transcendent withrespect to the legal structure, as attested by hisnumerous infringements of the legal order inpursuit of his goals. The detective justifiesthese infringements by referring to moralconsiderations of which legal forms are only arough approximation, when they are not indirect contradiction. Nevertheless, his failuresto respect the rules to the letter are neversanctioned by the policeman, who closes hiseyes to them, as if for him it were a self-evidenttruth that the detective’s acts remain within thespir i t o f the ru les , no matter wherecircumstances may take them (and this may bequite far). (Boltanski 2014, 52-53)

The proverbial distinction between the letterand the spirit of the law points to troublinggaps— between law and morality or betweenimmanent justice as the raison d'être of thejudicial system and transcendent justice asthe summum bonum of the moral-politicalorder. While law formalizes and solidifies moralnorms, the moral-political order exceedslegality per se in its preoccupation withlegitimacy and its tolerance of tensions,ambiguities, and dilemmas. We will return tothis point in the next section. In a class-basedsociety, broadly divided into a dominant(master) class and a subordinate (servant) classbut nonetheless upholding the rule of law,formal equality is often a fig leaf for equalitywith respect to crime—i.e., everyone is apotential suspect in the eye of the state—butnot with respect to justice. The servile classfilling the manual and menial occupations (ascooks, maids, chauffeurs, and commonlaborers) is believed to be ruled by elementalpassions and prone to committing crudecriminal offenses. The master class, bycontrast, counts among its ranks the nobility,the landed gentry, state officials, and thenouveau riche. Highly educated and oftenholding important political posts, members ofthe elite every so often find themselves caughtbetween multiple loyalties and obligations,having to bend rules and settle for the lesser oftwo evils. Their transgressions come with atouch of the tragic as they struggle with moraldilemmas and weigh private interests againstthe public good which they have beenentrusted to safeguard. They turn to the privatedetective in the hope of keeping certainmatters from ballooning into public scandalsthat threaten to ruin their good name andundermine, to the extent that they are itsbackbone, the political order.

In calling attention to the contradictionbetween the state of law and the class-basedsociety, Boltanski builds on Roberto Unger’sseminal insight that the modern state is markedat birth by a central paradox: “The state, which

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is the child of the social hierarchy, must also beits ruler; it must be distinct from any one socialgroup in the system of domination anddependence. Yet it has to draw its staff and itspurposes from groups that are part of thissystem” (Unger 1976, 61). Its laws mustsimultaneously serve the power interests of thedominant groups and appear to embody someinherently right order that is universallybinding. The resultant fissure is both registeredand camouflaged in crime fiction by a cast ofspecial, liminal characters.

Boltanski notes that the special in-betweenstatus of elite servants, such as butlers andgovernesses, accounts for their prominent rolein the detective genre, but they are rarelygrouped together with the detective. It seemsthat the only thing that sets the latter apartfrom the former is his (sometimes her) labilepositionality vis-à-vis the law: whereas eliteservants, when implicated, are almost alwayson the far side of the law as culprits,accomplices, or pawns, the detective venturesto the far side only to return to the near sideafter freeing the masters from the binds theyhave found themselves in while discreetlyshielding them from the prying eyes of thepress and the penal instruments of the state.The true counterpart of the detective,therefore, is not the high-class servant,however deviously clever or conniving he orshe may be, but the elite (professional)criminal, although they rarely share thefictional stage to the same extent. Thedetective and the master criminal have much incommon, most notably their superiorintelligence, facility in subterfuge, doggedperseverance, and disdain for rules.

In his philosophical reading of the film, TheUsual Suspects (1995), Joshua Landy (2012)argues that the figure of the criminalmastermind is a modern secular incarnation ofthe Devil. In his evil genius and omnipotence,the arch-villain re-enchants the world byturning everyday objects into potential cluesand endowing random suffering with meaningand purpose: “The slightest incident gainsinfinite significance, inasmuch as our eternaldestiny may turn on it; the slightest actiongains infinite weight, inasmuch as it may turnout to be a move in a cosmic struggle betweengood and evil. What is more, human sufferingthereby gains an explanation and loses,accordingly, the best part of its sting” (Landy2012, 45). In the film, we watch the primarysuspect, Roger “Verbal” Kint, walk away fromthe police station a free man with thepleasurable realization that he is Keyser Söze,

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the shadowy ringmaster of a transnationalcriminal empire responsible for engineeringmany a legendary heist. Landy maintains thatthe sense of satisfaction we derive from seeingKint/Keyser once again elude the grasp of thelaw resides in his ability to re-enchant theworld, notwithstanding all the blood on hishands. Landy also notes the amoral nature ofour siding with such a colossal wrongdoer in arejoinder to those who believe in the power offiction to improve our morals.

Extending Landy’s insight, we might say thatboth master criminal and master detective arefabulously monstrous beings—insofar as theirsuperhuman intell igence makes themotherworldly—born of law’s inherent limitationsthat operate in the realm of the exception,where they play fast and loose with the rules.Both take on “the task of re-enchanting aderelict world” (Landy 2012, 47), and it is onlythe genre—noir or whodunit—that determineswho claims our primary sympathies in a givenstory. Note that the chief investigator in TheUsual Suspects, customs agent Dave Kujan, isindeed no Sherlock Holmes, being so handilyfooled by his quarry, who masquerades as asmall-time crook with a glib tongue but apalsied left arm and limp. He is, rather, a merefunctionary, like the obligatory ham-fisted copin the classic detective story, “a good sort butlimited to his job description; his actions andhis intelligence are confined within the limits oflegality” (Boltanski 2014, 49).

Charlie Chan, the Exceptional Oriental

In Legal Orientalism, Teemu Ruskola exposesthe regime of exception that underpins theAmerican state of law at the turn of the lastcentury, which has its most virulent and absurdexpressions in America’s de-territorializedempire, stretching from Asia to CentralAmerica and from Alaska to the South Seas andincluding the native-American “domesticdependent nations” in the heart of thehomeland (Ruskola 2013, 118). He focuses on

two China-related manifestations: theestablishment of the U.S. District Court forChina in 1906 and the Chinese exclusion lawsof the 1880s and 1890s. Both were buttressedby a rac ist convict ion in the radicalincompatibility between the law and China. Thelatter barred Chinese laborers fromimmigrating to the U.S. mainland and (forthose already here) from obtaining Americancitizenship through naturalization on thegrounds that the Chinese, reared in a land ofOriental despotism, were incapable ofassimilating democratic values and obeying thelaw of the land. The former followed upon theunequal Wanghia Treaty of 1844 between theU.S. and China that asserted extraterritorialrights for American citizens. In passing this act,Congress envisioned a “District of China,”where American citizens would come under thejurisdiction of consular courts instructed toapply an improbable patchwork of laws,including pre-Revolutionary English commonlaw, the municipal code of the District ofColumbia, and the territorial code of Alaska,among others. The exceptional nature of thisjuridical act is further accentuated by the factthat the U.S. Constitution itself did not apply inthe District of China; hence “there was no rightto a jury trial nor to constitutional due process,among other legal niceties” (Ruskola 2013, 7).

Even so, for a “civilized” American, this wasconsidered far superior to being subject to thejurisdiction of Chinese law. In the legalOrientalist discourse, Chinese law was seen aspredominantly penal in emphasis, with fewprovisions for due process. Civil law wasvirtually non-existent, nor was there anyconstitutional check on state power. In place ofthe rule of law, China had the rule of man, aconclusion that seemed to be amply supportedby Confucian ideology, according to which thelegitimacy of the Chinese political order restedon the moral excellence of the ruling class(Ruskola 2013, 14). In the Orientalistimagination, this normative, indeed highlyidealized self-image translated straight into

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despotism, providing a convenient receptaclefor the outward projection of law’s aporia.Hence “it is precisely the laws at the margins ofa liberal democratic state that define itscenter” (Ruskola 2013, 8).

Warner Oland in Charlie Chan’s Secret,1936

I submit that Charlie Chan, the unassumingOriental detective of a beloved Americanpopular culture franchise, is a product of theconvergence of two regimes of exception: legalOrientalism and detective fiction. Detectivefiction, to recall Boltanski’s point, pointedlyexploits law’s aporia in the duo of the detectiveand the policeman. Whereas the latter acts onbehalf of the state, the former acts in lieu of thestate in order to achieve what a liberal-democratic state cannot accomplish withoutexposing the very aporia that inhibits it: “Thedetective is the state in a state of ordinaryexception” (Boltanski 2014, 72). The questionof why an “Oriental” should come to assumethis peculiarly powerful role, however, stillremains. Yunte Huang (2010) sets out toanswer this question in his group biography ofthe key players in the Charlie Chan franchise:

Earl Derr Biggers (1884-1933), author of theoriginal six Chan novels; Warner Oland(1879-1938), a Swedish-born actor and Chan’sbest known screen avatar, and Chan’s real lifemodel , Chang Apana (1871-1933) , aswashbuckling police sergeant in the employ ofthe Honolulu Police Department. Chang Apanawas Hawaiian born and conversant in severallocal languages. Though illiterate, he was anenergetic and relentless crusader against pettycrime, mostly involving smuggling andgambling. He was known for carrying abullwhip—a relic of his earlier career as acowboy—on the job. In contrast to thecorpulent and phlegmatic Charlie Chan, whowas perpetually sniffing out murderers, he hada lean physique and a hot temper, and wasinvolved in very few murder cases. AfterBiggers publicly acknowledged Chang as hisinspiration (from reading local newspaperaccounts), Chang came to be called CharlieChan by the local media, eventually meetingwith Biggers and Oland to much media fanfare.

Rubb ing aga ins t the gra in o f voca ldenunciation from the Asian Americancommunity, Huang, himself an immigrantscholar from China, professes his attraction tothe character and credits Biggers for creatingan overall positive image of a “Chinaman” in adeeply racist era out of a desire to counteractthe pernicious discourse of the “yellow peril.”1

He is particularly fond of what he calls“Chanisms”: “Interestingly, Chan’s troubleswith grammar—or what he calls ‘my recklesswanderings among words of unlimitableEnglish language’—enable Biggers to craftsome Chanisms that border on comedy,absurdity, and poetry. ‘Endeavoring to makeEnglish language my slave…I pursue poetry’”(2010, 155).2 He recognizes how remarkable itis that Charlie Chan’s “rendezvous” withAmerican culture should have coincided withone of the worst paroxysms of xenophobia inAmerican history (2010, 147). Indeed, giventhat the first Chan novel, The House Without aKey, from which the above choice Chanisms are

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taken, was published merely a year after thepassage of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act thatdenied American citizenship to foreign-born“Asiatics,” the birth of an Asiatic star seemsnothing short of a miracle. In a largelyappreciative review in The New Yorker, JillL e p o r e ( 2 0 1 0 ) r e g i s t e r s a n o t e o fdisappointment: “The trick of Huang’s book,which he doesn’t quite pull off, is to explainwhy so many Americans became so enamoredof Charlie Chan at just this moment. Why,hating and fearing the Chinese, did they lovethe Chinese detective? Was he—so unmanned,so obsequious, so humbly offering hisservices—reassuring? Or was something elsegoing on? On this question, Huang dodges.”Before Huang, others (Song 1999, Doherty2004) have also sought to explain Charlie Chanby recounting Chang Apana’s hardboiledcareer. To me, identifying a historical prototypegoes only so far toward unraveling the enigmaof Charlie Chan, especially when the icon isseparated from the prototype by a yawninggap.

Instead of seeking answers in history andauthorial intention, Charles Rzepka (2007)looks to genre in order to crack the enigma ofCharlie Chan. He points out that Chan has arelatively minor role in The House Without aKey, and that it was in response to enthusiasticdemands from his readers that Biggers madeChan the protagonist of the subsequent titles,thereby creating the first nonwhite populardetective hero in American literary history.Being the first to swim against the prevailingsentiment against Chan among AsianAmericans, Rzepka acknowledges the racialistand racist dimensions of the character:obsequious, self-effacing, effeminate, asexual;fortune-cookie English; “a personality reducedto a Chinese takeout menu”; “an Asian UncleTom, the bastard offspring of ‘racist love’”(2007, 1464). Aside from the odd coupling ofracism with love in place of the more familiarsentiments of hate and fear, to argue that“racist love” was enough to keep the franchise

af loat for decades would be a toughproposition. There is indeed something elsegoing on, as Lepore intuits, beyond the author’sprogressive impulse and the readers’retrograde pleasure. And Rzepka believes thatattending to genre allows us to bridge that gap.

Rzepka points to two innovations Biggersbrought to bear on the classic detective genre:anti-Chinatown South Seas exoticism and theracial outsider status of the detective. He callsour attention to the South Seas setting of TheHouse without a Key: “By choosing Honolulu ashis inaugural mise-en-scène, Biggers decisivelyrejected Chinatown regionalism as a genericcontext for the debut of his Chinese Americandetective, replacing the ‘architectural uncanny’of its dark alleys, tunnels, and opium dens withsunshine, fresh air, and broad sandy beaches”(Rzepka 2007, 1469). Coming from thebuttoned-down East, Biggers found the racialintermixing in Hawaii refreshing, and wasespecially struck by the degree of integrationinto local political, social, and economic life onthe part of Chinese Hawaiians—thanks to thecontinuous influx of Chinese immigrants,particularly women, to the islands until 1898,the year of Hawaii’s formal annexation. He wasthen able to introduce “a utopian prototype ofassimilationist multiculturalism” (Rzepka 2007,1469) to his white middle-class readers on themainland, who had hitherto known only racialsegregation and animosity.

Hawaii ’s racial melting pot, howeversuperficial, suggests Rzepka, gave Biggers boththe inspiration and license to take the final boldstep in rule subversion that is requisite of thegenre: Instead of merely endowing hisdetective hero with features “distinctly at oddswith Doyle’s keen-eyed, sinewy, and slightlyBohemian sleuth [that is, Sherlock Holmes]”(2007, 1472) in the molds of Father Brown,Miss Marple, and Hercule Poirot, by subvertingexpectations of looks, class, nationality, andgender, Biggers crossed the final barrier ofrace, giving us the first “Oriental” detective

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who pursued crimes in both the metropolitanprecincts of the Occident and its far-flungempire. Charlie Chan is the bastard offspring ofdetective fiction and legal Orientalism: As aman of law, he faithfully executes his officewithin the broad framework of law and order;he adopts the scientific method of gatheringevidence, following clues, and probingsuspects; he interacts with his law-enforcementcollaborators in a dignified, professionalmanner; he conducts business in an impeccablewhite linen suit, never losing his cool while inthe line of duty. Overlaying this bland, staidpersona are his Oriental quirks: his usualsidekick is his Number One Son Lee Chan, aplot contrivance apparently alluding to theOrient’s inability to maintain a wall ofseparation between impersonal law andnepotistic loyalties; he buries the inductivemethod in a florid verbiage that leaves hisinterlocutors more mystified and awed thanenlightened; he has no qualms about usingdeception and trickery on anyone, whatevertheir relationship with the law, guided only bywhat he calls, in deadpan manner, the“psychic” abilities of the Chinese people(Biggers 1925, 125).

Chan & son

In The House Without a Key, John Quincy

Winterslip, a Bostonian fresh off the boat, putshis finger on the key to Chan’s attraction: “JohnQuincy laughed. ‘Damned clever, theseChinese!’ he quoted [his interlocutor]. ‘Youdon’t mean to say you’ve fallen for that bunk.They seem clever because they’re so different’”(Biggers 1925, 119). A few pages later, he toowould fall for the “bunk,” as would countlessfans of the novels and the films. The pleasure ofthe Charlie Chan mysteries is overdetermined,but the central ingredient is indeed difference,as required by genre and by Orientalism. At theclimactic conclusion of the murder caseinvestigation, when a handsome lawyer namedHarry Jennison is exposed as the culprit, theprosecutor hits a stone wall when trying toextract a quick confession from the former. In amoment of apparent oblivion, Chan stoops topick up a casually dropped pencil. The accusedmurderer, sitting close by, spots a pistolprotruding from under his coat, promptly seizesit, and shoots himself in the forehead.

“That’s it!” cried [the prosecutor] triumphantly.“That’s my confession, and not a word spoken.I’ve witnesses, Jennison—they all saw you—youcouldn’t stand the disgrace a man in yourposition—you tried to kill yourself. With anempty gun.” He went over and patted Chan onthe shoulder. “A great idea, Charlie,” he said.“Chan thought of it,” he added to Jennison.“The Oriental mind, Harry. Rather subtle, isn’tit?” (Biggers, 309)

The spin-off film series following on fromBiggers’ novels greatly magnified the slapstickaspect of the entire conceit: Fan commentarymakes it plain that these stories invite abemused, indulgent attitude among members ofthe audience as they are taken on around-the-world rides with Chan, who always intervenesin an unofficial capacity as a visiting detective,dispensing far more colorful Chanisms thanthose found in the novels with far greaterfrequency as well. The somewhat circus-likefeel, however, papers over an implicitrecognition of the racist displacement of law’s

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aporia, particularly as it pertains to the Chineseexclusion laws and America’s “jurisdictionalimperialism” (Ruskola 2013, 20) in Asia. This isperhaps best illustrated when Chan is broughtto imperialism’s wild west, Shanghai. In CharlieChan in Shanghai, the film with which webegan this article, the honorable detective issummoned to the city to help bust aninternational opium smuggling ring. As theringleaders are all non-Chinese, this is not acase of bringing in an ethnic “insider” to dealwith restless “natives.” Rather, Chan’s servicesare requested due to the reputation that he hasbuilt up combatting white criminality in suchcinematic locales as London and Paris, as wellas in his native Hawaii. Granted, there is a briefreference to the soundness of this idea on thegrounds that Chan might excel even more in hisancestral land, but the plot turns out to hingevery little on his “native” sensibility or affinity,with much of the action confined to theInternational Settlement jointly governed bythe British and the Americans. Even minorcharacters, such as chauffeurs and telephoneoperators, are non-Chinese. A telling instancecomes early in the film: at the welcomebanquet, the British police commissionerColonel Watkins and a Chinese businessmanmake complimentary speeches about Chan.Chan then gives a long reply in Chinese (orwhatever can be managed by Warner Oland).When a foreign reporter asks a Chinesecolleague for a translation, he is told that Chansaid his customary ‘Thank you so much!’”(Mitchell 1999, 100-101). What Chan has to sayto the Chinese banquet attendees clearly is ofno import to the film audience. He is not inShanghai to reconnect with his Chinese roots,but to solve murders and other crimes. In otherwords, his Chineseness is merely a marker ofhis difference/cleverness, without anysubstantive significance. Obligingly, a murderfollows in the very next scene: a booby-trappedpistol shoots dead Chan’s host, Sir StanleyWoodland, a Scotland Yard officer who, welearn in an intertextual reference to CharlieChan in London (1934), has previously had the

pleasure of collaborating with Chan on a toughcase.

But murder is merely an appetizer in theShanghai badlands. A seething entrepôt thathas lent its very name to criminality (as in theverb “to shanghai”) calls for something lesstame and neatly wrapped than a country-housewhodunit. The main course is, instead, opiumsmuggling. Smuggling is arguably a far messiercriminal activity, one that challenges themodern state’s ability to underwrite its versionof reality and claim total knowledge of abounded society. It plies the byways of theglobal capitalist network just as internationalfinance and trade travel its highways. Duringthe gilded age, quite a few of the commercialpowerhouses in the U.K. and U.S. (includingthe Delano and the Forbes families) were knee-deep in the enormously lucrative opium tradeand smuggling business. The opium trade,forced upon the Qing empire at gunpoint, maywell be the original sin of Western capitalism inAsia. The mid-century wars fought over theright to export opium violently propelleddynastic China into the global capitalist orbit,inaugurating the era of unequal treaties,missionary proselytizing, foreign control ofc u s t o m s a n d r a i l w a y s , a n dextraterritoriality—an era indignantly summedup in Chinese history textbooks as “the centuryof humiliation.” In this light, opium smugglersare merely the foot soldiers of a global crimesyndicate known as colonialism. However muchsmuggling is treated as a scourge thattemporarily eludes the policing powers ofindividual nation-states, it is only the shabbier-clothed twin of starch-collared globalcapitalism, sometimes sharing personnel withthe latter and constituting a glaring sphere ofexception internal to the Westphalian legalorder.

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It seems logical that smuggling should becomeCharlie Chan’s bailiwick whenever he is calledto the margins of the Occidental empire.In Charlie Chan in Egypt (1935), for example,he goes after the colonial plunderers ofEgyptian archeological treasures.3 In CharlieChan in Shanghai, he and his son Lee Chan arekidnapped by Russian mob boss Ivan Marloff’sminions and brought to a dimly lit house, wherehe parleys with Marloff as if addressing hisopponent during a game of chess. He concedestemporary defeat, but fends off Marloff’s gruffqueries with a Chanism: “Cold omelet like fishout of sea, does not improve with age. Ifanswer known, question seem unnecessary.”Father and son then bluff their way out of thegang’s lair and, after a few more maneuvers,track them to their warehouse in a riverfrontcafé. By this point, Chan has survived threeattempts on his life, whereas Woodlandpromptly falls victim to the fatal trap at thebanquet, leaving Chan to receive and work withthe American secret agent James Andrews, whoarrives on the scene shortly after the murder.

When Chan and Andrews reach the café anddiscover the opium stash in the cellar, Chancomes within a hair’s breadth of an ambushlaid by gun-toting gangsters who are waitingunder a trap door. Just as he is about todescend the stairs below the trap door, his

flashlight goes out and he offers a charmingChanism to Andrews, who is crouching behindhim: “Insignificant offspring of searchlightseems to have internal trouble!” This brief stallbuys him just enough time for the police toarrive by boat and burst in on the gang. In thefinal scene of reckoning, Chan outs Andrews asa member of the smuggling ring who bumpedoff the real secret agent back in San Franciscoand assumed his identity. The police, of course,were summoned by Lee on his father’s secretinstruction. We are greatly relieved to learn, expost facto, that Chan had seen through theAmerican imposter and known that the latter’stelephone call requesting police backup was aput-on. We smile at the recollection of thetimely malfunctioning flashlight and Chan’sobfuscating remark that conceals so muchcunning behind a façade of Oriental clumsinesswith technology (even something as crude as aflashlight), puerile flight of fancy (bigsearchlight siring miniature flashlight),maddening fondness for indirectness (“internaltrouble”), and incurable respect for rank andhierarchy (“insignificant offspring”).

The flashlight episode calls to mind anotherregime of exception that R. John Williams calls“Asia-as-technē.” He points out that the goldenage of the Oriental detective genre alsocoincided with an era of deep technologicalanxiety in the West. Contrary to the prevailingOrientalist depiction of Asia as a land of tech-less irrationality, Asia-as-technē projects amore organic way of living with technology.Charlie Chan (as well as spin-off figures likeMr. Moto and Dr. James Lee Wong) is“constantly involved in reframing and evenundoing the dangerous intrusion of technologyinto modern life” (Williams 2011, 100). “CharlieChan’s stereotypical ‘Asianness’ is consistentlyportrayed as a cultural asset in solving theproblems created by modern technology. Chanunderstands and yet crucially stands apart fromthe dangerous Western technological systemshe is called in to remedy” (Williams 2011, 101).In other words , he knows h is way in

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technoculture well enough to know when to“permit” it to stand aside for the sake of ahigher goal—just as he knows when to sidestepthe law for the sake of justice. He carries ahandgun, but rarely fires it; he has anauthoritative command of forensic science, butscarcely needs to rely on it; he surroundshimself with state-of-the-art tech gadgets, buthas no qualms about coming off as a klutz. In aparallel fashion, he defends the law by takingnonchalant liberties with it. In his infinitewisdom, the Oriental detective offers atherapeutic salve to the West’s anxiety ofreason, legal as much as technological.

Conclusion

The majority of the Chan films had Caucasianactors in the leading role, the most influentialamong whom was Warner Oland, who playedthe rotund and amiable detective in all sixteenTwentieth-Century Fox productions. Perhapsnot so coincidentally, Oland’s credentials as a“yellowface” actor were cemented in his titlerole in three Fu Manchu films between 1929and 1931. The history of cross-racial casting inHollywood cinema is a complex one; suffice itto say that both the blackface and yellowfaceconventions have come to be seen asdemeaning and offensive to African Americansand Asian Americans. In my view, however,Charlie Chan can really only be portrayed by anon-Chinese actor, as he is, through andthrough, a creature of the Orientalistimagination. Casting an ethnic Chinese actorwould lend a kind of false authenticity andundeserved legitimacy to the role. But for aconvergence of historical factors, the Orientaldetective could very well have been a Japaneseor a Turk, so long as he fit the bill of the racialoutsider exercising the sovereign power of thelaw by inhabiting the space of ordinaryexception.

Let us now return to the driving question posedby this article: why should Charlie Chanemerge in an age of deep racism and

xenophobia in American history? I amproposing two parts to the answer to thisquestion: First, the sovereign exception thatconstitutes law’s aporia gives the lie to law’spretensions of generality, neutrality, andautonomy. It is thus disavowed in the liberalstate of law. This disavowal finds expression inthe genre convention of detective fiction thatrequires the detective hero to be a maverickfigure who operates in the zone of theexception. Second, because China, in the legalOrientalist imagination, is the epitome oflawlessness, a Chinese detective is in theperfect position to inhabit the dodgy state ofordinary exception and absorb all of the odiumattendant on the arbitrary, contingent, andmystical substratum of the rule of law. Made tobear both the aura and the taint of lawlessarbitrariness, Chan is but a proxy player in amuch larger power game, someone who posesno threat, no matter how much he knows. Hebelongs to the class of elite servants who aregranted special confidences and extra leewayin order to clean up their masters’ messes.Chan actually operationalizes this linkagein The Chinese Parrot (Biggers 1926), when heis sent on a special errand by his formermistress and then reprises his previousoccupation of houseboy, impersonating aChinese butler as a cover for his investigativework. Being a member of a denigrated andexcluded ethnic group, Chan is the fetish thatallows the white majority to simultaneouslyaffirm the exclusion/discrimination/oppressionof an immigrant/minority/foreign “race” anddisavow its guilt and anxiety. By sending Chanon a globe-trotting career of cleaning up theflotsam and jetsam of colonial-capitalistadventures, the legal Orientalist imaginationshores up the myth of legalism. In the colonialzone of exception, what is white is what isright.

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Peter Sellers in Murder by Death

In the 1976 parody of the classic detectivegenre cheekily entitled Murder by Death, fiveworld-famous fictional sleuths are gathered atthe gothic residence of an eccentric hermit.The comedian Peter Sellers plays a CharlieChan look-alike in the film. Sporting a garishChinese robe that could only have been takenstraight out of a Chinatown curiosity shop anduttering insipid lines with all of the articlessystematically exiled (prompting theexasperated host, played by Truman Capote, toholler “Use the article!”), he delivers a CharlieChan mock-up that is barely distinguishablefrom Fu Manchu. In all likelihood, Sellers wascast in this role by dint of his previous stintplaying Fu Manchu in an episode (The TerribleRevenge of Fred Fu Manchu, 1955) of the BBCradio program The Goon Show. Still worse, fouryears later, he went on to star in the title roleof The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu (1980),

his last and probably worst film. Though Sellersdied shortly after making this disastrous film,the twinning of Charlie Chan and Fu Manchucarried on. In the film industry’s botched andpossibly final attempt at reviving Charlie Chan,Peter Ustinov plays the detective in CharlieC h a n a n d t h e C u r s e o f t h e D r a g o nQueen (1981), in which he resorts to sinister,feline squeals while stomping about in Chan’ssignature white linen suit to blur the linebetween the evil Chinaman and the goodChinaman. As the Siamese twins of the legalOrientalist imagination, both have thankfullybeen laid to rest by a popular culture that hasmoved on and located the regime of exceptionon new frontiers—where the state of lawencounters terrorists, aliens, cyborgs, oranimals.

Acknowledgements

Research and writing of this article weresupported by a Frederick Burkhardt ResidentialFellowship from the American Council ofLearned Societies. I presented earlier versionsat the University of Notre Dame, the Center forAdvanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences,and the University of Toulouse. I would like tothank Nan Da, Louis Hyman, Katherine Howe,Lionel Jensen, Joshua Landy, Mark Selden, R.John Williams as well as the three anonymousreaders for Transnational Asia for their helpfulfeedback. An earlier version of this articleappeared in the inaugura l i s sue o fTransnational Asia: an online interdisciplinaryjournal.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of exception.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Arendt, Hannah. 1968. The origins oftotalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace &World.

Biggers, Earl Derr. 1925. The house without akey. New York: Grosset & Dunlap.

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Biggers, Earl Derr. 1926. The Chinese parrot: Anovel. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-MerrillCompany.

Boltanski , Luc. 2014. Mysteries andconspiracies: Detective stories, spy novels andthe making of modern societies. Cambridge,UK: Polity Press.

Dimock, Wai-chee. 1996. Residues of justice:Literature, law, philosophy. Berkeley:University of California Press.

Doherty, Jim. 2004. Just the facts: True tales ofcops and criminals. Tuscon, AZ: Deadly SeriousPress.

Huang, Yunte. 2010. Charlie Chan: The untoldstory of the honorable detective and hisrendezvous with American history. 1st ed. NewYork: W. W. Norton.

Landy, Joshua. 2012. "The Devil, the master-criminal, and the re-enchantment of the world(on The Usual Suspects)." Philosophy andliterature 36 (1):37-57.

Lepore, Jill. 2010. "Chan, the man: On the trailof the honorable detective." The New Yorker, 9August.

Mitchell, Charles P. 1999. A guide to CharlieChan films, Bibliographies and indexes in theperforming arts,. Westport, Conn.: GreenwoodPress.

Posner, Richard A. 1999. The problematics ofmoral and legal theory. Cambridge, Mass.:Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Ruskola, Teemu. 2013. Legal orientalism:China, the United States, and modern law.Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Rzepka, Charles J. 2007. "Race, region, rule:Genre and the case of Charlie Chan." PMLA122(5):1463-1481.

Schmitt, Carl. 2005. Political theology: Fourchapters on the concept of sovereignty.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Shklar, Judith N. 1986. Legalism: Law, morals,and political trials. Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press.

Song, Jaymes K. 1999. ""Charlie Chan" Isle'stoughest crime fighter." Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

Symons, Julian. 1972. Mortal consequences: Ahistory from the detective story to the crimenovel. 1st U.S. ed. New York: Harper & Row.

Unger, Roberto Mangabeira. 1976. Law inmodern society: Toward a criticism of socialtheory. New York: Free Press.

Weisberg, Richard H. 1992. Poethics, and otherstrategies of law and literature. New York:Columbia University Press.

Williams, R. John. 2011. "The Chinese parrot:Techne-pop culture and the oriental detectivefilm." Modernism/modernity18 (1):95-124.

Filmography

Charlie Chan in Egypt. Directed by Louis King.20th Century Fox, 1935.

Charlie Chan in Shanghai. Directed by JamesTinling. 20thCentury Fox, 1935.

Charlie Chan and the Curse of the DragonQueen. Directed by Clive Donner. AmericanCinema Productions, 1981.

Murder By Death. Directed by Robert Moore.Columbia Pictures, 1976.

To Kill a Mocking Bird. Directed by RobertMulligan. Universal Pictures, 1962.

The Usual Suspects. Directed by Bryan Singer.MGM Studios, 1995

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Haiyan Lee is a professor of Chinese and comparative literature at Stanford University,Stanford CA, 94305. She is the author of Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love inChina, 1900-1950(https://www.amazon.com/dp/0804754179/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20) (2007) and The Strangerand the Chinese Moral Imagination(https://www.amazon.com/dp/0804785910/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20) (2014).

Notes1 While not the most accomplished among golden age detective fiction writers, Biggers clearlydid not share their conservative mindset. Julian Symons thinks “it would have beenunthinkable for [most of them] to create a Jewish detective, or a working-class oneaggressively conscious of his origins” (1972, 104). But, of course, the detective genre is allabout playing with rules and confounding expectations. Today we would take even an autisticchild for a detective (see Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: ANovel [New York: Random House, 2004])2 Huang characterizes Chan’s mangled English as “Chinese pidgin,” pointing to its lack ofsubjects, delinquent articles, and randomly conjugated verbs (2010, 154-155). Yet in lardingChan’s speech with pseudo-Confucian aphorisms, Biggers gives it a quaint elegance. In TheHouse Without a Key, the author tells us forthright that Chan takes pains to rise above pidgin:After a false telephone call lures the Bostonian newcomer John Quincy (who becomes Chan’sunderstudy in the investigation of the murder of his uncle) to a shady Chinese shop, herealizes his error: “For he knew now that Charlie Chan had not called him on the telephone. Itcame to him belatedly that the voice was never Charlie’s. ‘You savvy locality?’ the voice hadsaid. A clumsy attempt at Chan’s style, but Chan was a student of English; he dragged hiswords painfully from the poets; he was careful to use nothing that savored of ‘pidgin’”(Biggers 1925, 256). Evidently, Biggers wants his fictional sleuth to be different, but notdéclassé.3 See Huang’s engaging reading of this film as a racial parable with its unusual multi-ethniccast (2010, 239-244).