During the depression, white audiences embraced Charlie Chan, a character who combined the contradictory stereotypes of Chinese mystic and Chinese buffoon. Between 1925 and 1932, six Charlie Chan detective novels, written by Earl Derr Biggers, appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in serial form and spawned forty-eight films. Chan was a brilliant, rotund Chinese detective who, while not evil, exuded, like Fu Manchu, an aura of Oriental inscrutability. As played by Caucasian actors, most famously Swedish-born Warner Oland, he had a face resembling an ancient Chinese mask, with half-closed eyes and a cryptic smile. He personified the wise old Confucian sage, dropping proverbs faster than his antagonists could drop clues. Yet his demeanor lent itself, inevitably, to ridicule. His words of wisdom sounded like fortune cookie messages, and his personality could be reduced to Chinese menu offerings: a white police sergeant in Charlie Chan at the Opera (1937) refers to Chan as “egg foo yung” and tells him, “You’re all right. Just like chop suey. A mystery, but a swell dish.” (Chang 208-209)