Behind That Curtain

"Charlie Chan is also one of the most hated characters in American popular culture. In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, distinguished American writers, including Frank Chin and Gish Jen, argued for laying Chan to rest, a yellow Uncle Tom, best buried. In trenchant essays, Chin condemned the Warner Oland movies as 'parables of racial order'; Jen called Chan 'the original Asian whiz kid.' In 1993, the literary scholar Elaine Kim bid Chan good riddance—'Gone for good his yellowface asexual bulk, his fortune-cookie English'—in an anthology of contemporary Asian-American fiction titled 'Charlie Chan Is Dead,' which is not to be confused with the beautiful and fantastically clever 1982 Wayne Wang film, 'Chan Is Missing,' and in which traces of a man named Chan are all over the place, it’s just that no one can find him anymore."

In The New Yorker, Jill Lepore reviews Yunte Huang's Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History.