By KATE MERKEL-HESS [TLS] – It was in Hollywood that Chan became an American icon. Huang makes the case that Chan’s idiosyncratic language and “Chinese” mannerisms can be seen as charming traits akin to those of Agatha Christie’s finicky Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, who is both ridiculous himself and a mirror for the ridiculous in British society. But on film, Chan was also enmeshed in what Huang calls “racial parables”. With sidekicks like Stepin Fetchit, Chan appealed to an America fixated on racial distinctions at home but determined to stay aloof as Europe and Asia spiralled into wars ideologically predicated on the desire to enshrine such distinctions.
Huang’s analysis of Chan’s film career is capped by a description of the character’s reception in China itself. Unlike Anna May Wong, a Chinese-American actor who was coldly received by Chinese audiences (for what was viewed as her indecency), the Swedish actor Warner Oland, who played Chan, was so popular in China that Chinese and Hong Kong film studios started producing knock-off versions. As Huang writes, this was “the final . . . frontier of yellowface, where a real Chinaman imitates a Swede’s imitation of a Chinaman”.
Continued at The Times Literary Supplement
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