Honoring the Past

Two articles about honoring/dishonoring classic literary "landmarks" popped up in my newsfeeds today. One was about the home of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in Hindhead, England, which he designed himself, and was where he wrote some of his finest work, including The Hound of the Baskervilles. Unfortunately, it's been abandoned and fallen into disrepair, and now a developer has bought it with plans to turn it into apartments. A government-sponsored report declared that the house was not very noteworthy architecturally and that its associations with Conan Doyle weren't that big a deal because "He cannot be said to be an author of the standing of, for example, Charles Dickens or Jane Austen."

The other story is a little more upbeat, an NPR report on the new book Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History by Yunte Huang. It looks at the history and legacy of Earl Derr Biggers' Chinese detective and Charlie Chan's impact on American culture. Although some contemporary Asian-American critics have dismissed Chan as a "Yellow Uncle Tom" and helped ban Chan movies from TV network schedules, this animosity hasn't always been the case. Swedish actor Warner Oland played Chan in some of those movies, but when he made a trip to Shanghai in 1933, he was celebrated by Chinese movie audiences for bringing to life the first positive Chinese character in American film.