Charlie Chan Actor Warner Oland Not Mongolian, Say Wikipedia

When my mom was pregnant with her third child, my dad loved it when people asked if they were expecting a boy or a girl. "Well" he'd answer with a twinkle in his eye. "They say one of every 3 children born in the world are Chinese, so for our third child, that's what we're expecting!"

My parents were Swedish. My father was born in Gary, Indiana, but grew up in northern Sweden; my mother was born in Sweden and her mother was a Lapp, or Saami. After his retirement, my father became very interested in genealogy, and he traced his ancestors and relatives, almost 10,000 of them. Since about the year 1400 Sweden has done a very good job of recording births and deaths in church records, and since people didn't move around much, it's not hard for us to trace people. In the farming villages where my parents came from, everybody is related to everybody else.

I've inherited my dad's database and I've put it online. Doing so has has put me in touch with a fascinating variety of distant cousins. Among my distant relatives was the actor Warner Oland, who became famous for portraying Charlie Chan in Hollywood movies. Warner Oland, whose real name was Johan Verner Ölund, was a third cousin to my father's mother. My father noted in his database that he remembered when Warner Oland came to their village by car and met my grandparents. It must have been the same year Warner Oland died, 1938.

Naturally, I pay attention whenever Oland in mentioned in the media. Over the last week, I've read articles in the New Yorker and in the New York Times about a new book by UCSB English Professor Yunte Huang. The book is entitled Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History; it tells the story of the "real" Charlie Chan, a detective in Honolulu, Hollywood's portrayal of Charlie Chan, and Huang's own story as a chinese immigrant in America. A significant part of the book recounts the odd story of how a Swedish actor came to portray the quintessential Chinese detective.

When I read the New Yorker article, I immediately put the book on my "must read" list. (Unfortunately, it's not available as an ebook, and is sold out of my local bookstores!) But one sentence of the New Yorker review, written by Harvard history professor Jill Lapore, stuck out for me:

Oland, born in Sweden in 1880, had, beginning in 1917, specialized in playing Oriental villains, including Dr. Fu Manchu. (Oland's mother was Russian, and he had slavic features.)

Oland's mother was NOT Russian. Oland's mother was my grandmother's third cousin. His father was a 5th cousin to my grandmother. The Swedish genealogist Sven-Erik Johansson has specialized in the digitization of the church records in the region of northern Sweden where Oland and my grandparents came from and has published an ancestor chart for Warner Oland going back 5 generations. None of those ancestors come from Russia. To top it off, Warner Oland was born in 1879, not 1880 as reported in the New Yorker.

So where did the idea that Oland had a Russian mother come from? Doesn't the New Yorker have fact checkers? I went to Wikipedia to find out. The Wikipedia article said that "His mother was Russian of Mongolian descent.", referencing a "page not found" Internet Movie Database (IMDB) article. I refound that article, which says:

He didn't need make-up when he played Charlie Chan; all he would do is curl down his moustache and curl up his eyebrows. In fact, the Chinese often mistook him for one of their own countrymen. He attributed this to the fact that his Russian grandmother was of Mongolian descent.

So IMDB says it's his grandmother who's Russian and of "Mongolian descent"; the key thing to note is the attribution. I immediately edited the Wikipedia article to omit to spurious information. A day later, a wikipedian had put back the Mongolian bit, but more accurately worded as being something Oland said. A proper reference, to a book by Ken Hanke, Charlie Chan at the Movies: History, Filmography, and Criticism (Google Books, Amazon) had been added. That book says:

"Even before the role of Charlie Chan came his way, Oland was a frequent onscreen Oriental, despite the fact that he was born in Sweden to a mixture of Swedish and Russian Parents. Physically, he had an exotic look to begin with, and the addition of an Oriental-style mustache and beard made the transformation complete. "I owe my Chinese appearance to the Mongol invasion," he once told Keye Luke. "That's true," Luke agrees, "because the Mongols did get up there around Sweden and Finland and naturally sired some children, and so, he said, 'I come by it naturally.' And, his whole family looked like that." There was never any need for elaborate make-up. "All he did," explains Luke. "was put that little goatee on his chin. Otherwise, he had his own mustache. Everything was just like that. No make-up. It's just amazing."

At this point, I must make an observation. Please look at the photo and decide for yourself. As far as I can judge, Warner Oland didn't look the least bit Oriental. He looked like most everyone else living in that area of northern Sweden would look if they put on a smudge of eyebrow makeup. But the resemblance to that Chinese detective in the movies is uncanny!

There is, however, a story I remember my dad telling about a deserter from the Russian army. (The Russians burned down the closest city, Umeå, in a war in 1720.) It was said that this deserter hid in the woods or disguised himself as one of the locals. The way my dad told it, it was quite a scandal, even 200 years later. So maybe Warner Oland was joking when he said his mother was "Russian". In any case, the mysterious Russian in my family does not appear in the church records!

If Oland really had exotic features, it's much more likely he got them from a source other than a stray Mongolian. The closest the Mongols got to northern Sweden was Lithuania. In the area where Oland's family originated, the ethnic mix was dominated by Finns, Swedes, and Saami.

Take a look at a photo of my mother's cousin (unrelated to Oland), a pure Saami. With a bit of make-up (and some acting talent), she would have easily been able to play a Chinese woman. The Saami look quite different from the Finns and the Swedes. They are an indigenous people of Scandinavia, and no one really knows where they came from. Though their language is related to Finnish, they are not genetically related to the Finns. A recent DNA study (PDF, 399KB) published in the American Journal of Human Genetics suggests that they are related to the Berbers of northern Africa. It may well be that Oland thought they might be related to the Mongols.

There's another interpretation of Oland's references to his "Mongolian" blood. In his time, children with Down's syndrome were referred to as "Mongoloid". In the 19th century, Down's syndrome was regarded as an expression of genetic "degeneration" toward the inferior "Mongoloid" races. It could well be that jokes about Mongolian ancestry reflected a belief that cases of Down's Syndrome were a result of racial contamination. My father's database shows many examples of women with large families bearing children into their 40's; his own familiy of 11 included one Down's child.

So it seems likely that Warner Oland's statements about his ancestry were either inventions or jests. What's interesting to me is how this truth is constructed. It's not hard for people to look at the evidence now available and decide that a genealogist working with church records is probably more reliable than a co-star's recollection of an actor's constructed persona with regard to Oland's ancestry. Yunte Huang, the author of the new book, emailed me to say he agreed that it was a jest of Oland, who was known to be "quite a wisecracker". Now THAT sounds like my Dad's family!

At first glance you might say Wikipedia is totally unreliable, because anyone can change it. But compared to the New Yorker, IMDB, and a book published in 2004, Wikipedia is more reliable because it CAN be changed, and because it supports a version history and a culture of citation and transparency for any information that might be disputed. While I'm optimistic about Wikipedia's ability to construct truth, I'm worried about systems that extract facts from Wikipedia articles and feed them in to the semantic web. While editing the article on Warner Oland, I deleted the assertion that he was a "Swedish Person Of Russian Descent". I wonder about the lifespan of this assertion as it has been copied and distributed throughout the world. There are really no good mechanisms to de-sert this sort of assertion. It's only with context that assertions can build truth.

As it happens, I married into a family that really IS Chinese. I remember showing my mother-in-law old pictures of Saami ancestors in their traditional dress. "Those look like Manchu people!" she exclaimed. It's true. If you put aside the lens of race, we all look more or less alike, and we all look a bit exotic.

Update: The author of the New Yorker article, Jill Lapore, got back to me to report that her article relied on the entry for Warner Oland in American National Biography (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2000) for the assertion about Oland's mother's ancestry.

Update, August 23: Some additional research shows that Oland is also a third cousin of my grandmother.

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The Evolution of Names and Personal Identifiers

One of my Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Great (8G) Grandfathers was born around 1590 in northern Sweden and was named either Pål or Påfvel. A written record of him that survives refers to him as "Pål de Äldre", or Pål the Elder, to distinguish him from his son, called either Pål Pålsson or Påfvel Påfvelsson, depending on which record you believe. Pål de Äldre's father was also called either Pål or Påfvel; in a written record he was called Pål Finne, or Pål the Finn. In 1600, it just wasn't important for a farmer in northern Sweden to have a consistent spelling of his name, or even to have a consistent name. It's likely that his name was written down only a dozen or so times in his lifetime- in church baptismal records, maybe a marriage record. If he had been a city dweller, it would have been different, but for the most part the writing down of names was part of a effort by the church and thus the government to extend its dominion into the countryside. It was common for people to be identified only by their first name and the name of their village. Patronymics were the cultural norm in the cities, and as the countryside developed and communicated with other parts of the kingdom, the patronymic names and registration of those names became more formal and regularized.

In the late 1800's, it became popular in Sweden to adopt family names instead of patronymics. Probably this had to do with an increase of awareness of naming conventions in the rest of the world. My great grandfather, born Abel Olsson, and his brother, Salomon Olsson, decided to take the family name "Hellman", which translates as "bright man". Their brother Olof took the name "Holmberg", while brother Magnus went with "Hellgren". Salomon later emigrated to America, and on entry changed the name to "Hallman" because a religious member of the family who knew English disliked having the word "Hell" in their name.

Personal names are now used globally- my name has to to compete with that of other Eric Hellmans around the world when somebody wants to search for information about us on Google- I am NOT the Eric Hellman that used to manage the band Blink-182. So the global village reduces us to using the same attribute- based disambiguation schemes that were used in 1600- I am now Eric Hellman of Montclair, New Jersey, or Eric Hellman the Linking Technologist.

When I was a scientist, writing articles for technical journals, I always used the form "E.S. Hellman" for my name, because I had searched Science Citation Index and knew that no one else had published under that name for at least 10 years. The process was exactly the same as you might use now to pick a twitter hashtag- temporal disambiguation is the best I can hope for.

My mother-in-law has used many names. She was born in China, and her birth name indicated her birth-order in the family and a "generation name". When she entered school, she received a school name. As an adult, she chose a name for herself. When she emigrated to the US, she chose to adopt an English name and a transliteration of her family name. When she married, she began to use a married name. When the full married name didn't fit on important legal forms, she chose a legal name.

With this family background, you'd think I'd know better. When I designed a database-driven e-journal with front-to back automation in the early days of the internet (1995), I had the bright idea of giving identifiers to all the entities involved in publishing a paper. I imagined a world in which the authors of every paper and the institutions they worked for would have global identifiers, and the every article would be rendered using the up-to the minute information from the database. In short, my design for the e-journal was hoping for a linked data future.

I briefly considered the possibility that an author would change their name, and I naively decided that papers were authored by people and not by author names. If an author changed their name in real life, the name on the paper should change as well. By the time this circumstance actually occurred, I had learned enough about how citations were used by abstracting services and the like, that I realized what a bad idea a retroactive change in an author list would be. I changed the way data binding occurred to prevent the retroactive change from happening. But because I used author identifiers in the database underlying the e-journal, the generated author pages displayed all the papers written by the author who had changed her name.

At this point in the post you might expect to read a clarion call for the establishment of global person identifiers, to enable the global cloud of URI-based linked data to know all the articles authored by a given person. If so, I have to disappoint you. What I have for you is an observation, and a question. The observation is that naming of individuals is a universal practice across all human societies, and name shifting is almost as universal, and certainly as human. The regularization of names on the other hand, the conversion of names into identifiers, if you will, has always been a governmental activity. It was the Kingdom of Sweden and its Church that wrote down Pål Pålsson's name; my middle name seems to exist mostly for entry onto forms, and to lend an initial to my signature. It was the organizing force of my e-journal database that regularized the authornames it displayed.

My question is this: if we give people global identifiers, what will they do with them? Will they view them as progress for civilization, like roads and communication systems, or will they view them as encroachments on privacy and liberty and on their rights to change their name and identity? Will people embrace their identifiers and view them as property, or will they attempt to subvert them and hide them away as Americans must do with their social security numbers? Is the urge to regularize our identifiers a natural extension of our human proclivity to give ourselves names, or is it something that can only be accomplished as an expression of human government?
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There is no truth on the internet

In his retirement, my father took up genealogy as a hobby, and after he died, his database of thousands of ancestors (most of them in northern Sweden) passed to me. If you're interested, you can browse through them on the hellman.net website. Having all this data up on the web has been rather entertaining. Every month or so, I get an e-mail from some sixth cousin or such who has discovered a common ancestor through a google search, and the resulting exchanges of data allow me to make occasional corrections and additions.

Since I've taken the database on, huge amounts of genealogic information has become available on the internet. When I first started finding this information, I made the mistake of trying to suck it into my database, since I had become more a less a professional data sucker and spewer in my work life. Once I had spent hour after hour pulling data in, I started to wonder what the point of it all was. Could I relly determine, and did I really care whether Erik Eriksson, born 1837 in Backfors, was really my fourth cousin thrice removed or not? What is the relationship between the data I sucked in and the truth about all the real people listed in the database? I quickly regretted my data gluttony.

Traditional genealogists focusing on Sweden use a variety of material as primary sources of information. Baptismal records typically give a childs name and birthdate along with the names of their parents; burial and marriage records similarly give names and dates. The genealogist's job is to connect names on different records to construct a family tree. But things are not always simple. Probably 20% of males in the Backfors region were named Erik, and since patronymics were used, 20% of those males were also named Eriksson, though the name might be abbreviated in the records as "Ersson". To judge whether a girl named Hanna listed on a birth record from 1877 which lists "Erik Eriksson" as the father is really the daughter of the Erik Eriksson born in 1837 in Backfors, the genealogist must consider all the information available together with conditional probabilities.

The internet genealogist (e.g., me) has a different task. Rather than looking at the birth records and assessing the likelihood of name coincidences, the internet genealogist looking at the same question searches the internet and finds that the web site "sikhallan.se" lists Hanna as Erik's daughter. The internet genealogist then makes a judgement about the reliability of the Sikhallan website. For example, how do we know that Sikhallan's source for Erik's birthdate isn't just the hellman.net website? If the two databases disagree, who should be believed? In my case, I just look at my father's meticulous notes about where his information comes from and if he noted some uncertainty, then I'm much more likely to believe the other sources available to me. Unless of course my data has come from one of my data sucking binges, in which case the source of my data has been lost and I can no longer judge its reliability.

In my last two posts on reification (Part 1, Part 2), I promised that I would have a third post evaluating whether the reification machinery in RDF was worth the trouble. This is not that third post, this is more of a philosophical interlude. You see, another way to look at genealogic information on the internet is to think of it as a web of RDF triples. For example, imagine if Sikhallan made its data available as a set of triples, e.g. (subject: Erik Eriksson; predicate: had daughter; object Hanna). Then we could load up all the triples into an RDF-enabled genealogy database, and all our problems would be solved, right? Well, yes, unless of course we wanted to retain all the supporting information behind the data, the data provenance, all the extra care in citation of source taken by my Father and and ignored by me in my data-sucking orgies. In reality, the triple itself is worthless, devoid of assessable truth. If the triple were associated with provenance information its truth would become assessable, and thus valuable. The mechanism that RDF provides for doing things like this is... reification.

Wikipedia is the most successful knowledge aggregation on the internet today and is also, not coincidentally, the best example of the value of comprehensive retention of provenance and attribution. Wikipedia keeps track of the data and author of every change in its database, and relentlessly purges anything which is not properly cited. Wikipedia is, in my opinion the best embodiment of my view that there is no truth on the internet- there are only reified assertions.
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