A Bali Conspiracy Most Foul by Shamini Flint

Brian Thao Worra, an award-winning Laotian American writer, laments that all of Jitpleecheep’s adventures are set in or near Thailand’s red-light districts and feature “lots of exotic deaths and kinky eroticism.” These writers have been criticized for bringing an unmistakably foreign and exoticized take on the countries where their mysteries are set. Over the decades, a number of white, often male, authors have created Asian protagonists, many of whom have fallen into the same Orientalist trap: Eliot Pattison’s Beijing Justice Department Investigator Shan Tao Yun, John Burdett’s “philosophical” Royal Thai Police Force detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, and Colin Cotterill’s French-trained national coroner of Laos Dr. Call it the melting pot or the pu pu platter, but Brahmin Boston is where the chop suey of Charlie Chan was first stir-fried by the Harvard-educated Biggers, only to be recast later by wisecracking screenwriters and directors in bronzed and lacquered Hollywood.” Charlie Chan is as American as Jack Kerouac, that stalwart of the American hipster who was born French Canadian and spoke the dialect of joual as his first language. “Anyone who believes that Chan is Chinese would probably also believe that the fortune cookie is a Chinese invention. “Make no mistake: Charlie Chan is an American stereotype of the Chinaman,” writes Yunte Huang in Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History.

Despite Biggers’s claim that Chan was created in reaction to anti-Chinese prejudice the author witnessed in California, the character is an amalgam of stereotypes-a portly and effeminate man who spews faux-Confucian aphorisms.

The portrayal of Asian characters in those detective stories and the films inspired by them, which more often than not featured white actors in “yellowface” (Warner Oland and Sidney Toler cast as Chan or Peter Lorre as Moto, for example), continue to be a source of controversy today.

A Bali Conspiracy Most Foul by Shamini Flint