History ComicBook / TheGoodAsian

Edison begins working together with the virulently racist Detective O'Malley in San Francisco's Chinatown as he tries to chase down leads on Ivy Chen, and soon learns that the local Asian-American community faces much greater repression and open bigotry than was the case in Hawaii, complete with complicated politics and tensions both within the Asian-American community and with the the white majority around them. Edison encounters numerous obstacles, not the least of which is when he learns that there is a vicious killer loose in Chinatown, with rumor saying that the killer is Hui Long, a notorious assassin who worked for [[TheTriadsAndTheTongs the Tongs]] years ago, and who has returned in a quest for revenge against the bosses who turned on him. If Edison can't find and stop the killer quickly, the police will terrorize every Asian-American in the city in a brutal crackdown...

* NotBloodSiblings: Despite having been raised as essentially foster siblings after the death of Edison's mother, Edison and Victoria Carroway wound up as lovers in their teens, and Edison still carries a fierce torch for her, even though he bitterly believes that their relationship was doomed from the start due to racial attitudes of the time and refused to truly give it a chance.

** FallGuy: [[spoiler:Both Michael Martinez (the man convicted of and executed for killing Edison's mother), and Edison himself become convenient fall guys for the police, not as part of a conspiracy or to protect some dastardly conspiracy or ManBehindTheMan, but because it became much more convenient and easier to blame things on them than to find the parties truly responsible for the crimes they were accused of doing.]]

** TheFixer: The Carroways employ Nash as one. [[spoiler:According to Victoria, he made the situation much worse by trying to torture Silas's location out of Ivy, making Ivy DefiantToTheEnd. When a tied up Ivy tried to attack Victoria, Nash promptly killed her, making it certain that Silas would be out for revenge.]]

* StartOfDarkness: The origins of Silas and how he came to harbor a bitter hatred for White America are told via a flashback. It shows how his mother, a white woman and heiress to a rich family, was disowned by her parents for falling in love with a Chinese man, how they refused to help when their daughter begged for help with medical treatment for Silas's father and refused to have anything to do with her or Silas, leading to the preventable death of Silas's father and, years later, her own. This led to Silas trying to find a home with San Francisco's Chinese community, only to be largely excluded because for the most part he looks white. The exceptions to this would be [[spoiler:his half-sister Ivy Chen and her friend Holly Chao]], who accepted him and to whom he would become fanatically devoted.

* TheBeard: Played with. [[spoiler:Victoria was ''sorta'' one to Terrence Chang. The two became friends, but despite Victoria's attempts, a RelationshipUpgrade wasn't exactly successful due to Terrence being gay. They remained friends and business associates, and were seen together enough that Silas believed they were a couple and tried to obtain proof. It instead lead to him getting proof of Terrence being gay, and Victoria paid him off to keep it secret rather than see Terrence and all his work in Chinatown ruined.]]

* WhamEpisode: The first trade volume concludes with [[spoiler:Hui Long (actually Silas Woodward in a disguise), killing both Donnie Yan and then Frankie Carroway in the Jade Palace, more or less guaranteeing disaster for Chinatown.]]

* ArrangedFriendship: When Edison was a boy and his mother the Carroway family maid, she pushed him hard to be friends with Mason's son Frankie, knowing that being friends with a rich white family opens a lot of doors for a poor Chinese-American boy in that era that would otherwise be closed. Edison likes Frankie decently well, but was also shown to resent being encouraged/forced to spend all his time with Frankie. Years later as an adult recognizes that he has basically been manipulating and lying to Frankie so long he can no longer even distinguish what his real feelings are for his friend/foster brother.

* ArrangedFriendship: When Edison was a boy and his mother was a maid to a wealthy family, she pushed him hard to be friends with the millionaire's son Frankie, knowing that being friends with a rich white family opens a lot of doors for a poor Chinese-American boy in the early 1900s that would otherwise never open. Edison likes Frankie decently well, but resented being encouraged/forced to spend all his time with Frankie, and many years later as an adult recognizes that he has basically been manipulating and lying to Frankie so long he can no longer even distinguish what his real feelings are for his "friend".

* GoodOldFashionedFisticuffs: Edison is a good old fashioned brawler, and is quite good at it, as he can and on several occasion does take on multiple attackers with his bare hands. But when he faces off with Hui Long [[spoiler:actually Silas]] for the first time, Hui Long proves to be a skilled martial artist and ''way'' out of Edison's league. In his narration Edison despises martial arts.

* BeneathTheMask: Edison often indicates that he has to lie ''a lot'' when he's taking to other Asian people, because as a police officer, he knows just how deep the racism goes and, as a police officer, he has to indulge in it himself in order to get the other officers behind him. Even Detective O'Malley, who is virulently racist against Asians, is pretty fine with Edison. Edison, however, ''loathes'' the fact that he needs to constantly betray his own people just to try to minimize the harm that they will inevitably be dealt.

* {{Blackmail}}: When Eddy and Victoria talk, Victoria shows him the books showing how the Carroways accounts were regularly seeing large withdrawals on the same day every month. Eddy figures it was Mason paying blackmail to Ivy Chen. [[spoiler:It was actually Victoria paying a blackmail to Silas, Ivy's half-brother, in order to make sure Terrence Chang's secret homosexuality remained secret.]]

* {{Fingore}}: During their fight early in the second volume, Edison bites off one of [[spoiler:O'Malley's]] fingers. [[spoiler:It's safe to say that this doesn't

* HyperAwareness: The reason Edison Hark is a good detective -- he can see details that people are hiding, like a Chinese man trying to hide scars or his partner, Detective O'Malley, no longer caring if his suit is in good condition. The eye for detail actually come from the fact the Edison wanted to be an artist and was shown to have genuine talrnt, but that got pushed to the side as he grew up.

* CrusadingLawyer: Terence Chang. Frankie hired him to get Edison out of prison, but they already knew each other because Chang is from one of the Six Families, the leaders of San Francisco's Chinatown, and is determined to make a better world and life for Chinese-Americans.

San Francisco, 1936. Edison Hark has just arrived from Hawaii, where he was the first Chinese-American to become a police officer. Edison Hark is here on a mission for the man who took him in after his mother died: the extremely wealthy and exceedingly well-connected Mason Carroway. Mason's Chinese maid and secret lover, Ivy Chen, abruptly disappeared and the shock of it has left Mason in a coma. His son, Frankie, asked Edison to take the case and find Ivy and reunite the two, but something about the whole affair is not right.

Working with the virulently racist Detective O'Malley in San Francisco's Chinatown, where the local Asian-American community faces much greater repression and open bigotry than was the case in Hawaii, Edison's job is complicated when he realizes that there is a vicious killer loose in Chinatown. And if Edison can't find and stop the killer quickly, the police will terrorize every Asian-American in the city in a brutal crackdown...

* AntiHero: Edison is a cynical, manipulative, deeply disillusioned man. He recognizes that an uncomfortably large part of his job is going after his own people and sometimes terrorizing and abusing them in the hopes that it prevents the rest of the police and larger white communities from doing much worse. At his absolute best, he's a PragmaticHero with a case of GoodIsNotNice, in his darker moments he can slip pretty far into being an UnscrupulousHero.

* BelligerentSexualTension: As children, Victoria Carroway despised Edison, believing that he was sucking up to her father Mason and brother Frankie as a meal ticket. (Largely thanks to pushing by his mother, who saw the obvious benefits to having rich white friends and how it could open doors and opportunities for Edison.) Sometime during their teens they became lovers.
* BeneathTheMask: Edison often indicates that he has to lie ''a lot'' when he's taking to other Asian people, because as a police officer, he knows just how deep the racism goes and, as a police officer, he has to indulge in it himself in order to get the other officers behind him. Even Detective O'Malley, who is virulently racist against Asians, is pretty fine with Edison. Edison, however, ''loathes'' the fact that he needs to be racist against his own people.
* BluntNo: Terence Chang asks Edison Hark to help them capture the killer loose in Chinatown. Edison, who has only returned to find Ivy Chen, shuts him down with a quick "No." Edison's narration says that it was worth it just for the look on Chang's face.

** In the first volume, an Asian kid leads Edison to an unlocked basement where he found a dead body. However, the body has been there for ''days'' and become bloated and infested with maggots. The skin is so discolored that the only way Edison knows it was white was due to the fingertips.

* BoomerangBigot: Edison has definitely internalized some pretty nasty attitudes and beliefs about Chinese Americans.

* CrusadingLawyer: Terence Chang. Frankie hired him to get Edison out of prison, but they already knew each other because Chang is one of the Six Families, the leaders of Chinatown, and is determined to make sure that Washington D.C. doesn't overlook Chinese-Americans.
* DeliberateValuesDissonance: The story is set in 1936 and it includes all of the casual racism and ugliness of that time period. Edison's partner, Detective O'Malley, uses quite a number of Asian slurs.

* EvilCounterpart: [[spoiler:Silas is a dark reflection of Edison, with similar but opposite experiences and upbringing. Edison is the son of a rich family's maid that was taken in by them after she died. Silas is the half Asian son of a white heiress whose family turned their backs on her and him due to her relationship with an Asian man. Edison has lived with the truth of being an Asian American man who will never be accepted by the upper class white America that he grew up on the periphery of, while Silas will never fit in or be accepted as he longs for in the Chinese-American community because he looks white. Mason tried to hand Edison at least some of the keys to the kingdom, but for personal reasons Edison wound up becoming a police detective instead. Silas was denied his birthright and came up with a scheme to strike back as a criminal.]]
* FallGuy: After becoming a cop, Edison learned that [[spoiler:Michael Martinez, the man convicted and executed for killing his mother, was innocent. Mason genuinely put pressure on the police to find out who killed Edison's mother, and having nothing, they simply picked a local criminal and blamed it on him.]]

* HyperAwareness: The reason Edison Hark is a good detective -- he can see details that people are hiding, like a Chinese man trying to hide scars or his partner, Detective O'Malley, no longer caring if his suit is in good condition.

* PrettyFlyForAWhiteGuy: Frankie Carroway, like his father, is a big investor in Chinatown and a fancier of Asian/Asian-American culture. He's deeply hurt to find out that despite the money and time he spends in Chinatown that the residents do ''not'' see him as one of them.
* RaisedByNatives: After Edison's mother died, he was raised by the rich Mason Carroway, whom his mother worked for as a maid. At one point while growing up Edison started bitterly wondering if Mason was actually having an ''affair'' with his mother, since he later had an affair with another Chinese maid, Ivy Chen.

San Francisco, 1936. Edison Hark has just arrived from Hawaii, where he was the first Chinese-American to become a police officer. But San Francisco is different from Hawaii. And Edison Hark is here on a mission for the man who took him in after his mother died: the extremely wealthy and exceedingly well-connected Mason Carroway. Mason's Chinese maid and secret lover, Ivy Chen, ran away and the shock of it has left Mason in a coma. His son, Frankie, asked Edison to take the case and find Ivy, but there's something not right. Working with the virulently racist Detective O'Malley, Edison quickly realizes that there is a killer loose in San Francisco. And if Edison can't find and stop the killer quickly, the police will terrorize every Asian-American in the city in a brutal crackdown...

San Francisco, 1936. Edison Hark has just arrived from Hawaii, where he was the first Chinese-American to become a police officer. But San Francisco is different from Hawaii. And Edison Hark is here on a mission for the man who took him in after his mother died: Mason Calloway. Mason's Chinese maid and secret lover, Ivy Chen, ran away and the shock of it has left Mason in a coma. His son, Frankie, asked Edison to take the case and find Ivy, but there's something not right. Working with the virulently racist Detective O'Malley, Edison quickly realizes that there is a killer loose in San Francisco. And if he can't find and stop him quickly, the police will terrorize every Asian-American in the city...

* AssassinsAreAlwaysBetrayed: Years ago, Hui Long was a hitman for the Tongs, but they betrayed him. Hui Long then vowed to get his revenge on his former employers and their descendents.

* BluntNo: Terence Chang asks Edison Hark to help them capture the killer loose in Chinatown. Edison, who has only returned to find Ivy Chen, shuts him down with a quick "No." The narration says that it was worth it just for the look on Chang's face.
* BodyHorror: An Asian kid leads Edison to an unlocked basement where he found a dead body. However, the body has been there for ''days'' and become bloated and infested with maggots. The skin is so discolored that the only way Edison knows it was white was due to the fingertips.

* GoodScarsEvilScars: Edison Hark has a scar that runs down one side of his face, from above his left eyebrow to his cheek.

* MissingMom: Edison Hark's mother died when he was young, so he was taken in and raised by Mason Calloway. He always assumed the death was natural, but in the second issue, Mason's daughter Victoria says that Mason knew about his mother's ''murder''.
* RaisedByNatives: After Edison's mother died, he was raised by the rich Mason Calloway, whom his mother worked for as a maid. At one point, Edison begins to wonder if Mason actually had been having an ''affair'' with his mother, since he later had an affair with another Chinese maid, Ivy Chen.

* AnAxeToGrind: The dead body Edison finds was killed with an axe to the chest. Since this is the distinctive MO of the Tongs, Edison quickly realizes that if the police find the body, another wave of anti-Asian hate and arrests could be set off.

* MissingMother: Edison Hark's mother died when he was young, so he was taken in and raised by Mason Calloway. He always assumed the death was natural, but in the second issue, Mason's daughter Victoria says that Mason knew about his mother's ''murder''.

-->''And as if on cue...'''my type''' saunters right on by. '''Hollering'' my hypocrisy, all while reminding me...of the trouble--'''my type's''' gotten into me.''