In early 2007 the London newspaper The Telegraph reported on a survey taken among 3,000 British teenagers which highlighted how fiction and reality are so often confused in the public mind. About a fifth of the young respondents thought that Sir Winston Churchill, the dominant British personage of World War II, was a fictional creation, while fully 58 percent believed Sherlock Holmes was real.
This brought to mind a time in the early 90s when I was a visiting professor at a Beijing university, and a Chinese colleague was relating some of his own experiences in the US about a decade before. He recalled viewing an American TV program (he couldn't recall its title, but I'm certain it was "Family Feud") in which competing teams tried to match results of surveys taken among other Americans. On one program those taking the survey were asked to name a Chinese person, past or present. The top three responses were Confucius, Sun Yat-sen and Mao Zedong, all very easily understood. Ranking No. 4 was a more modern figure, martial arts icon Bruce Lee, but in 5th place was someone who (like Holmes) never existed, fictional detective Charlie Chan.
