For the past several months, I have been writing about or recapping episodes from the 1977-1979 TV Show The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries. For the first season, the episodes would flip-flop back and forth between featuring The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, and eventually the two would join forces before they began to phase Nancy out all together.

This time around, I’m writing about the episode entitled The Secret of the Jade Kwan Yin which features The Hardy Boys.

This one will take the boys into a crime underworld stemming from smuggling originating in Hong Kong. The episode starts with Fenton Hardy watching a news broadcast talking about items being smuggled into “ports all over the world” from the small Asian country.

I don’t know if I remember the Hard Boys hometown being on the ocean before this episode, but maybe it was, because they find themselves scuba diving in the ocean when a package drops under the water in front of them. They’re confused but haul it out. They don’t know that two “Asian” men (I think the one man may actually be Hispanic but they are supposed to be of Chinese decent) are watching from the shore in scuba gear. They are  upset that the two boys  have picked up the package.

“If I had known anyone was going to be here, I wouldn’t have chosen this cove,” the one man says.

This man, by the way, is Richard Lee-Syeung who I recognize as the con-man trinket seller on M.A.S.H.

According to IMdb, Lee -Syeung, “has been seen and heard on numerous commercials and voice-overs. His roles include some of the most popular characters on TV shows such as M*A*S*H, Happy Days, What’s Happening, Hardy Boys, The Incredible Hulk and played an Asian version of Ed McMahon on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.”

And, no, he is not Chinese. He’s an American with Chinese and Mexican heritage. There is your bit of trivia and now back to the show.

The other man tells Lee-Syeung that they will get the package back. No big deal. It’s just two teenage kids.

Well, these two teenagers have taken the package home with Frank’s girlfriend (and Fenton’s secretary) Callie.

The boys open the package and find what looks like an ancient statue inside an adorned green box. They find some Chinese writing on the bottom and Callie says she’s seen a statue like in Chinatown.

So, the three go to Chinatown to find the shop. They find the shop and a couple of statues that look just like the one they found. The Chinese-American shop worker says that the statues in her shop are $14 but there is an original statue that his priceless because of what it means to her people.

It is a depiction of Kwan Yin who was a Chinese Buddhist deity, a goddess of mercy, she says.

In the old days she was thought to be the guardian of fishermen and there was a little Kwan Yin temple in every fishing village.

Now the boys are worried. Could they have found the real statue after it was smuggled out of Hong Kong?   

They show the young woman the inscription on the bottom of the statue, which they had gotten a rub of earlier, and she says the inscription is a Chinese poem that reads: “A branch without leaves, a raven perched on it, this autumn eve.”

She suggests they go see her uncle across the street. He’s at the Kung Fu studio, where he teaches.

She walks them over and tells them what Kung Fu is actually called, which I thought was very interesting. I won’t write what she said here because I don’t know the spelling and don’t want to share any misinformation.

After watching a Kung Fu match and finding out that the uncle is an expert in it, the boys are a little nervous when he says he wants to talk to them alone over tea.

(I will say one annoying thing about this episode is every time they are in a Chinese house or shop there is Chinese-styled music playing in the background and it almost drowns out the dialogue.)

The uncle says he paid for the Kwan Yin statue to be sent to his shop, but it was stolen by a Chinese-American criminal who demanded a ransom for the statue.

The uncle, Mr. Chen, asks the boys to bring the statue back to him so he can see if it is the same one and if it is then he can tell the police the statue has come back to the rightful owner. The statue will be shown at the parade the following night.

Unfortunately, when the boys get home, they find out the statue has been stolen. Of course, we know it is the two men who were supposed to retrieve it from the boat in the first place. We watch them do it. The boys catch the men in the act and then have to chase them on their motorcycles.

When they lose the men, they have to tell both their dad and Mr. Chen that the statue was stolen from them. Oh, and the police because, as usual, calling the police is an afterthought for the Hardy Boys

The police chief is not happy at all because he was working with the FBI to get the statue back to its rightful owner.

“If you had called us when you had fished it out, then Chin Lee would have had his precious kwan yin and I’d have no problem,” the chief snaps. He tells the boys he called them in to tell them he wants them to stay out of it.

“This is our job, not yours!”

The boys say they understand and hang their heads like scolded puppies. They’re not going to stay out of it. We all know that.

They go back to the shop to talk to the girl at the shop — Lily. They want to apologize to her. She tells them a legend about the statue when they arrive. She says the statue is over 200 years old and was put in a temple in a fishing village after a tidal wave destroyed the village but everyone survived. The people credited Kwan Yin for saving them and had the statue installed in the temple.

She says her uncle promised people in the community to have the statue brought there to bring back prosperity. If it doesn’t show up her uncle will look like a fool.

Soon we learn that one of Uncle Chin’s students from the Kung Fu studio is actually behind the theft and has left a boat at a marina with his fingerprints on it that will prove he is the one who stole the statue in the first place.

He wants the men who stole the statue from the boys to destroy the boat. They set a bomb on the boat.

Of course, you know what will happen later — that’s right, when the boys find the boat through various ways and while they are exploring it, it explodes, which leaves Callie shocked and screaming because she thinks they’ve been killed in the explosion.

They haven’t been killed, obviously, and we switch back to the men who set the bomb. They are calling Mr. Chen and telling him that they want $100,000 for the statue now. Mr. Chen is upset and says he can’t pay that, and asks who is on the phone.  The student says, “You should have memorized my voice more, old man.”

Meanwhile, Joe has been able to pull fingerprints off some items on the boat and somehow the tape he used to lift the fingerprint survived despite all that swimming they had to do in the water to get back to the pier.

Their aunt bursts in as they start to try to study the fingerprint and tells them that eight hours of sleep is important. I had to laugh a little when Joe tells her that “actually recent research shows that not everyone needs eight —”

She interrupts him and tells him to go to bed. I didn’t realize that research about sleep was out back then too.

The boys go to Mr. Chen’s store to talk to him, but he tells them he has given up and is going to pay the ransom to get his statue back. He leaves and the boys stay back to lament with Lily that her uncle is doing the wrong thing.

The boys then try to find Mr. Chen at his Kung Fu studio to try to talk him out of it, but when they get there, he’s already left to get the money to pay for the statue.

They then try to lift fingerprints from the sparring sticks to see if any of the men there could be involved with the theft of the statue. Once they confirm the fingerprints match, they are attacked by two men. They are able to escape into the street where the parade is going on. They run to find Mr. Chen and stop him from paying the ransom and hide on the edge of the alley while the student reveals himself to Mr. Chen and says he stole the statue. Mr. Chen is sad but says they can keep the money, he just wants the statue. The boys jump in and tackle the men and take the statue and tell Mr. Chen to run.

He does and then everyone is running as the men try to catch up to the boys to get the statue. What follows is a game of keep away while the boys toss it back and forth to each other across the street as the men get closer to one or the other.

Then — PLOT TWIST!!! — during a pretty cool slow motion scene, Joe’s foot catches on the curb and he trips and falls, shattering the statue into a million pieces. What the boys see, though, isn’t ancient glass, but a sidewalk full of tiny, gems of all colors. About this time Mr. Chen and the other men who betrayed him catch up to them.

“This wasn’t the real Kwan Yin, it was a fake to transport jewels,” Frank cries.

“Yes,” Mr. Chen confirms, and then tells them he was the one who ordered the statue with the jewels in it, but his men went rogue and tried to steal it for themselves.

Fenton Hardy and some undercover members of the FBI, as well as the police, show up next and arrest Mr. Chen and his men. The real statue is in Hong Kong, according to Fenton. This was just a way to smuggle in jewels. The chief is now happy because they were able to break up a smuggling ring that has been operation for five years. He says the Hong Kong police will be thrilled with what they’ve done.

Lily says she had no idea what her uncle was doing (ha, yeah right!) and the police say they believe her because Interpol had been watching her uncle for “quite some time.” I guess we are supposed to gather from that the authorities knew she wasn’t involved? I have no idea but the boys say they were help her stay out of trouble however they can.

There is some cheesy joke at the end of the show about Chinese breakfast cereal and everyone laughs like they always do in the last scene of an episode.

This was an educational and interesting episode with a lot of tidbits dropped in about Chinese culture. Unlike some shows made around the same era (1979) the depictions of the Chinese and Chinese-Americans was fairly espectful. There were some stereotypes presented but it didn’t go over the top to me.

This one had a lot of suspense and the reveal of Mr. Chen being the guilty in the end was a good surprise.

The next episode I will be watching will be a Nancy Drew centered one called The Mystery of the Solid Gold Kicker. It will feature a surprise guest star who became a big star in the 1990s and 2000s. Most of my readers will definitely know the actor when I talk about this episode next time around.

If you want to read the blog posts about other episodes I watched, you can find a list here: https://lisahoweler.com/old-tv-show-recaps/

---

Hello! Welcome to my blog. I am a blogger, homeschool mom, and I write cozy mysteries.

You can find my Gladwynn Grant Mystery series HERE.

You can also find me on Instagram and YouTube.