Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History »

Yunte Huang has been on the trail of Charlie Chan since the mid-1990s, a few years after he arrived in the U.S. in 1991. A Professor of English at the University of California, he has also taught at Harvard. The author of Transpacific Imaginations and a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, Huang, born in China, now lives in Santa Barbara, California.

"An ingenious and absorbing book, that provides a convincing new mode for examining the Chinese experience through both Chinese and Western eyes. It will permanently change the way we tell this troubled yet gripping story."—Jonathan Spence, author of The Search for Modern China and Return to Dragon Mountain

The Barnes & Noble Review

[Huang] succeeds in revealing the complexity underpinning the stereotype, and the many divergent factors that led to the creation of Charlie Chan and where he sits, however uncomfortably, within American popular culture. For this country excels at creating characters "rooted in the toxic soil of racism" even though "racism has made their tongues only sharper, their art more lethally potent." And as insulting and sobering as this thought is, Huang says throughout his book, Charlie Chan and others like him have blossomed "in spite of as well as because of racism." Wrapping one's mind around such truths is enough to test the wisdom of even a fictional sage.