The fictional Charlie Chan was popularized through novels, films, radio, comic books, and even board games. In his account of this phenomenon, Yunte Huang weaves together the stories of Earl Biggers, author of the Charlie Chan novels, and Chang Apana, the Honolulu detective who provided a real-life counterpart to the aphorism-spouting fiction, with those of a host of minor characters.

Huang adopts a lively style suited to his subject, and vigorously pursues certain details, such as the exact genesis of the first Charlie Chan novel, The House without a Key (published 1925). Some of the most interesting moments depict Warner Oland, the Swedish actor whose yellowface defined the Charlie Chan films, and whose other roles included Cantor Rabinowitz, father to Al Jolson's character in The Jazz Singer. There is likewise fascinating material on the reception of Charlie Chan films in Shanghai, making note of a particular critique of Anna May Wong “dancing in a crowd of naked natives” (255) in The Chinese Parrot, and on how Shanghai and Hong Kong studios produced their own versions of Charlie Chan films, with actor Xu Xinyuan copying Oland's mannerisms for his performance as Chan.

The book includes a running commentary on Asian American histories of immigration and labor, racial violence, Chinese exclusion, stereotypes, and popular culture, asserting that the Charlie Chan oeuvre should be taken seriously as a subject for scholarly research on American race politics, not simply dismissed as a set of racist texts. Ultimately, however, it provides more loose association than deep critical reflection. Huang chides those he finds to be overly dismissive of Charlie Chan as ideologues: “if every time we smelled the odor of racism in arts and literature we went out and rallied in the street, then we probably would have killed off everything from jazz to hip-hop, from George Carlin to Jerry Seinfeld” (282–83). However, this defense does not pinpoint more precisely how Charlie Chan novels and films enlarge our understanding of racial formation. For example, descriptions of the pairing of Charlie Chan with Stepin Fetchit in Charlie Chan in Eygpt fall back on racial stereotypes to describe an ending in which Fetchit's “dimwitted lackey” decides “to follow a Chinaman's path of spiritual enrichment rather than the white men's expedition” (243).

Opportunities for historical reconstruction are likewise shortchanged. Nowhere is this more evident than in the treatment of Chang Apana, which demonstrates a failure to engage seriously the histories of Hawaii, Hawaiian people, Chinese settlers, and American colonialism. At first, it seems a small error that Huang gets Apana's birthplace wrong (Waipi‘o on Hawaii Island, not Waipi‘o on Oahu), or that he misspells Hawaiian words (e.g. “kappa” for “kapa”), or that he mistakes Chung Kun Ai for a member of the same Chang clan as Apana, without looking more closely at his own authoritative source (Chun Kun Ai's autobiography) (7, 11, 23). References to supposed Hawaiian cannibalism (20) or to Apana's “outgrown” Chinese Buddhist beliefs in reincarnation (46) unfortunately do not come off as ironic but rather as serious echoes of all-too-familiar typecasting of Hawaiian savagery, childish Native mimicry, and the infantile magical thinking of Chinese religion.

While Huang generously uses a variety of voices on American history, Asian American history, and American popular culture and literature, the lone Hawaiian voice is a fictive Hawaiian invented by Jack London. That the book's early chapters use London and Twain to speak to American colonialism and missionary power, and that later chapters depend on discredited historical apologists for colonialism such as Gavin Daws, is telling. There is nothing of the wealth of more recent scholarship on Hawaiian history that includes writing by Native Hawaiian scholars using Hawaiian-language sources.

Huang explicitly claims an insider perspective as Chinese in researching and writing about Apana. But this insider perspective is limited to personal reflection, and the research in the Apana sections relies on sources in English only. The use of Chinese-language skills (let alone Hawaiian-language skills) in research could only have profoundly deepened this story, for Apana was a recognized and celebrated figure in the Chinese community of Honolulu, which did publish Chinese-language newspapers available in libraries. No evidence of those materials or of the Chinese-language gazetteers and genealogies that could have shed light on Apana's life and context in Oo Shek in Hsiangshan appears in the book. The only Chinese-language text used to shed light on Apana's life is his gravestone at the Manoa Chinese Cemetery. Thus the people of Apana's Honolulu Chinese community are only sketchily visible in the book, giving way to sensationalized description of a “yellow peril” Chinatown of gambling dens and prostitutes, and Native Hawaiians all but erased.

Neither Chinese nor Hawaiians come into focus the way whites do in this book. These omissions are all the more dismaying considering that Apana was a child of Chinese immigrants, probably spoke Hawaiian better than English, and married a woman of mixed Chinese and Hawaiian ancestry. This limited perspective reduces Apana as a figure who can counter the power of the overdetermined Charlie Chan characterization, and fails to follow up on clues that might further important broader objectives.