Apana Chang and Charlie Chan

Apana Chang is the real man who Charlie Chan is loosely based on. I say loosely because Apana Chang is so bad ass that you simply have to read more about him to know what I am talking about. A real American  Hawaiian Cowboy, and a police detective, he carried around a bullwhip instead of a gun and wore a Panama hat. I think Indiana Jones was also based on a Charlie Chan Chang Apana Combo made white.
There have been many Charlie Chan movies, and now a bunch of Ip Man and Wong Fei Hung movies. There needs to be an Apana Chang movie. First of all you wouldn't even have to make anything up for at least the first one. Where to make Wong Fei Hung, Ip Man's, and Fok Yun Gap's lives more exciting, all sorts of fictitious events have to be created, Apana Chang has well documented bad assery in newspapers. And if you ever did want to make stuff up, Sun Yat Sen was in Honolulu around the same time as Apana.
The movie could be (like I heard Iron Man 3 was) a joint U.S. China production. Apana Chang (marketed as the original Charlie Chan) has plenty of fans already in the U.S. All the old Charlie Chan fans will be curious and plus a Kung Fu Western, Hawaii movie... it will make it in the U.S. Plus it will be easily Marketable in China. After reading a novel where Apana popped up as a minor character
I had to find out more about him and so I borrowed a book from the Library.

Yuante Huang's "Charlie Chan The untold story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History" This book ends up being about a lot more than Apana Chang and Charlie Chan. It's about Chinatowns in general, Chinese and yellowface actors, Fu Manchu and Sax Rohmer, Hollywood, Anna May Wong, basically it is about Chinese America and also the "colored" America because talking about Yellowface, you have to talk about blackface. And the history of Hawaii involves a lot of racial political tension  And there is a bit about the author himself.
If there is such a thing as Chinese street cred Yuante Huang has it. He was one of the Chinese students protesting at Tianamen square but his parents tricked him into coming home before the big crackdown on the pretense that his mother was gravely ill. He immigrated to Alabama where despite his education he had to open up a Chinese Take Out joint to earn a living. Later he would become a Harvard professor. If anyone knows about the different walks of life of a Chinese American I think it's him.

Anyway Yuante Huang's book is a must read for Chinese Americans or anyone interested in Chinese American culture, or American Culture really.