Abstract
Before Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu became household names, San Francisco-born detective Mr. Wang and his rival Jugatai, the Manchu head of the Secret Society of Federated Asia, entertained young British readers in the early twentieth century. This article examines these under-explored characters, created by the prolific military officer-turned-writer Charles Gilson. It explores how Gilson developed a fictional formula that appealed to young readers and made slight variations to it in order to keep those readers interested. The characters of Mr. Wang and his nemesis Jugatai are also examined in terms of the conventions of the adventure story; in particular, the classic detective story stereotypes of the Chinese and fears of the yellow peril are subject to analysis. It is seen that Gilson created Mr. Wang as a respected character possessing many positive traits. However, to some extent, Mr. Wang is also a mouthpiece to support Western involvement in China, while Jugatai is an evil plotter destined to fail because of the superiority of the British. Therefore, although Gilson pushed some boundaries in detective fiction by featuring a Chinese detective more than a decade before the creation of Charlie Chan, he still conformed to certain formulaic plotlines of the boy’s adventure story genre.
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Notes
Fictional Chinese American detectives have been discussed in works such as Sleuthing Ethnicity: The Detective in Multiethnic Crime Fiction (2003) and The Post-Colonial Detective (2001), while books such as Chinese Justice, The Fiction: Law and Literature in Modern China (2000) explore the role of Chinese detectives in China.
Chinese secret societies, particularly the Tiandihui, had been introduced to Europeans by M. Gustave Schlegel in 1866. William Pickering expanded on existing scholarship on the subject in “Chinese Secret Societies and their Origin” (1878–1879) and William Stanton investigated the Triads in The Triad Society (1900). While there were Anti-Manchu or Anti-Qing secret societies such as the Triads who aimed to restore the Ming dynasty, the Gelaohui (Elder Brother Society) which attempted an uprising in 1906, and the Ko-ming, an Anti-Manchu Society, it was rare to have a Manchu Brotherhood such as the Secret Society of the Tortoise Mask that was against the Han Chinese.
Ah Sin appeared in the poem known as “The Heathen Chinee.”
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Shih-Wen Sue Chen received her PhD in Literature, Screen and Theatre Studies from The Australian National University and is a lecturer in literary studies at Deakin University. She was previously post-doctoral fellow at the Australian Centre on China in the World, ANU, Adjunct Assistant Professor in Tamkang University, Taiwan and has also lectured in National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. Her research interests include children’s literature, print culture and publishing history, and histories of reading. She is the author of Representations of China in British Children’s Fiction, 1851–1911 (Ashgate, 2013).
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Chen, SW. Adventure and Detection in Charles Gilson’s Fiction, 1907–1934. Child Lit Educ 46, 53–69 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-014-9227-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-014-9227-x