The Essential Jackie Chan Source Book

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

just what is this book?

1

THE Personal JACKIE CHAN

a biographical profile

2

THE Professional JACKIE CHAN

Chan’s professional affiliations

3

THE Entrepreneurial JACKIE CHAN

Chan-owned businesses

4

THE Notable JACKIE CHAN

awards and acknowledgments

5

THE Mythical JACKIE CHAN

things you thought you knew

6

THE Charitable JACKIE CHAN

Jackie’s favorite causes

7

THE Uninsurable JACKIE CHAN

a summary of Jackie’s major injuries

8

THE Fit JACKIE CHAN

how Jackie stays fit

9

THE Transliterate JACKIE CHAN

a word about HK videotapes

10

THE Cinematic JACKIE CHAN

the complete filmography

11

THE Fighting JACKIE CHAN

an explanation of kung fu, its styles, plus a glossary of terms

12

THE Peerless JACKIE CHAN

other notable HK action stars

13

THE Quizzical JACKIE CHAN

test your Jackie IQ

14

THE Name Game

a Mandarin/Cantonese who’s who

15

THE Fanatical JACKIE CHAN

information about joining a Jackie fan club

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the world of Jackie Chan.

Although Jackie’s movies have enthralled a generation of fans in Asia and Europe, he was virtually unknown in America until Rumble in the Bronx broke down the walls. Because he seemingly appeared overnight, many people don’t have a clue as to who this guy is who jumps off buildings as easily as the rest of us step off curbs.

The Essential Jackie Chan Sourcebook is here to answer questions you may have about Chan the Man, as some of his fans refer to him. The book contains a biography and a complete filmography, which can be considered his professional life story. In between, there are chapters devoted to other specific areas of Jackie’s world.

Since Jackie doesn’t work in a vacuum, the book spotlights the other top names in the Hong Kong action film industry and also explains the origins of kung fu and why it plays such a big part in Hong Kong movies. Directly after a glossary of martial arts terms is a quiz to test your Jackie IQ.

Now strap yourself in. It’s going to be a wild and surprising ride.

THE ESSENTIAL

JACKIE CHAN SOURCEBOOK

1

THE

Personal

JACKIE CHAN

Sometimes it seems as if Jackie has lived his entire life in the public eye. By American standards he’s that rare celebrity who embraces the media and is accessible almost to a fault. Maybe it’s just a function of culture. Whereas in the West we tend to tire quickly of those we see too much of in the media and often develop an overpowering urge to see the mighty fall, in the East heroes are more revered. Their continued presence is appreciated and encouraged.

People in all parts of Asia just can’t get enough of Jackie Chan and follow his moves with respectful interest. Every movie release is a huge event. It has become a tradition for a new Jackie film to premiere at the time of the Chinese New Year festivities, proving his work life has become an ingrained part of people’s daily life in Hong Kong and elsewhere.

Jackie’s on-screen exploits are so mind blowing that they often overshadow his equally compelling real-life story—which he himself downplays. Unlike Hollywood celebrities and politicians who dwell on the miserable aspects of their private lives in interviews and on talk shows, Chan and other Asian performers tend to be much less forthcoming about personal matters. They simply were not brought up in a tell-all society where you open your soul to strangers. The intimate exposure of celebrities that Americans take for granted Asian society finds distasteful. Interesting, but distasteful.

Jackie won’t tell, but we will. The following chapters will paint a picture of Chan the Real Man, a portrait that will help explain what makes Jackie run … and jump and fight and dive and tumble and continually risk his life to be one of the greatest action stars the world has ever known.

THE PEKING OPERA BLUES

That Jackie has achieved and accomplished all he has is nothing short of a miracle, considering the circumstances of his birth and childhood.

Chan Kwong Sang came into the world by cesarean section on April 7, 1954, the only child of painfully poor parents, Charles and Lee-Lee Chan, who lived in a Hong Kong ghetto. They were so destitute that the Chans considered selling their son to a British doctor for the equivalent of about US$200.

Things got slightly better for the family after Charles and Lee-Lee found jobs working as domestics at Hong Kong’s French embassy. Although the pay was minimal, they were able to set aside enough money to feed little Kwong Sang. But there were many other things his parents, who were in their forties, couldn’t provide their son. Stability, for one thing.

Like many impoverished children, Jackie was unsupervised a lot of the time. His parents were too busy trying to keep their heads above water to be conscientious disciplinarians. He picked fights and didn’t pay enough attention to his studies. Jackie roamed the streets with other young children, occasionally causing trouble but mostly just killing time and searching for companionship. Considered a chubby child, Jackie’s nickname growing up was A-Puo, which means cannonball. Actually, he had several nicknames—Big Nose was among the more painful, and it inspired more than one fight.

When I was a child, I wanted to be a fighter, like Muhammad All, Chan said in an interview about his past. He was my hero. I was training hard by eating a lot of Western food, so they called me Double Boy—everybody said I had double bone, double muscle, double everything.

Chan’s father had gotten a job in the kitchen of the French embassy, so he was able to bring home thick cuts of meat to feed their daydreaming son. But life was about to change. Jackie remembers the day a family friend suggested his parents take him to the Chinese Opera Research Institute, an old-fashioned Chinese performing arts school with a curriculum that encompassed acting, singing, dance, mime, acrobatics, and martial arts. The studies would be more like torture, but Jackie didn’t know that yet. All he knew was that this was a place that seemed like fun.

In a way, the school was like the army—the children all wore uniforms of white tennis shoes and black pants, Jackie has said. Then my father and his friend left me at the school and went to go have a drink. While I was there I picked a fight and broke some kid’s glasses—I had fun.

Initially, Jackie thought he had found heaven on earth.

"They sent me there one day a week at first, early in the morning. I loved it—I was able to kick and punch and do anything I wanted. So when we went to sign me up, I was asked if I wanted to join for three, five, or ten years. At that age, I had no concept of time so I just picked ten. Besides, my mom was in Hong Kong to take care of me, right?

Then later I was told it was good I wanted to stay because both my parents had to go to Australia to work.

After years of struggling and barely surviving, they simply couldn’t turn their backs on relatively decent-paying jobs for each of them. Positions for a cook and a maid had become available at the embassy in Canberra, Australia, and Chan’s parents jumped at the chance. There was one little problem, though—they couldn’t take their child because the embassy didn’t provide accommodations for the children of staffers. Who would take care of him? What to do?

Jackie’s father had already left Hong Kong, leaving Lee-Lee behind to make arrangements for their son. Her solution was to enroll him at the Chinese Opera Research Institute, which was Hong Kong’s version of the Peking Opera School, while they moved to another continent. In compensation for selling their child into indentured servitude, the school sifu, headmaster Yu Jim Yuen, paid the family a token amount of money. Jackie took the news like a little trouper, making the parting all the more heartbreaking.

I told my mother it was okay and not to worry, that I’d be okay to stay there by myself.

Jackie was only six and a half years old.

It’s easy from our I 990s perspective to look back with horror at the thought of leaving a small child in the hands of strangers. But life was run by a different set of rules in I 960s Hong Kong than it is today. What most people would now consider child abuse was looked upon as an opportunity for the family’s future.

Despite the harshness of his upbringing at the school, Jackie never engaged in self-pity—probably because he was too busy trying to avoid beatings at the hands of his exacting teachers, which almost certainly began just days after he said good-bye to his mother.

"After my mom moved, I was crying like hell, and after about two days, the sifu said, ‘All right—time to get started.’ What followed was a beating the likes of which the little boy had never known, kicks and punches meant to break his spirit. All I could think about was getting away, Jackie has said to journalists. I wanted to see my mom, I didn’t want to be there anymore because everybody beat me."

Jackie tends to avoid speaking publicly about what he endured during the ten years he spent at the school, as if he doesn’t want to delve too deeply into those memories. But what glimpses he does give of the brutal experience are difficult to fathom. They are as shocking and unbelievable as many of the horror kung fri ifims Hong Kong loves so much.

It was tough, Chan says matter-of-factly. "It was so bad you probably won’t believe it. I would get up at five in the morning and start training immediately—study voice, run, do stick fighting, knife fighting, sword fighting, work on kicks, practice jumping, hapkido, judo, karate, boxing, more singing, then dancing—just go-go-go.

Every teacher would instruct me for two hours, and I kept running constantly from one teacher to another. I didn’t have time to take my shoes off or even brush my teeth. There was no time for anything but training. This would go on until midnight. Every day.

If any of the boys had the nerve to resist the back-breaking schedule, or if they were simply exhausted, fear and pain were powerful incentives to conform, and the school’s teachers doled out both liberally. Starvation was considered an acceptable punishment if a student failed to live up to expectations. And caning with bamboo sticks for a lackluster performance was practically a school tradition, as were other forms of corporal punishment.

"We had a lot of different teachers and each one would hit you everywhere—in the face, on the hands, butt, chest, feet—everywhere. You just learn to live with the pain.

"Sometimes we would have to do headstands for up to eight hours. Or we’d be required to do the horse stance (legs wide apart, feet parallel), keeping perfectly still. The teacher would place a bowl of water on your outstretched hands and head, and if any water spilled, you’d be beat.

We learned by the stick—the stick told me when to jump, the stick told me when to kick.

Jackie says he was convinced the sifu had a particular dislike for him and held him up to special scrutiny … and torture.

"Other kids would do a trick and he would say it was okay. Then I would do the exact same thing and be told to do it again … and again … and again. Every difficult routine, I had to do first. ‘Jump over that table and do two somersaults.’

"If I said I couldn’t, he took out his stick and the stick would tell me I could. Again, again, again until I could do it."

It’s easy now to see where Jackie’s near-irrational sense of perfectionism comes from. It was literally beaten into him as a child.

After a while, inhumane treatment became the norm for the new students. In order to survive, the youngsters simply learned to accept their situation.

That’s the way it was, day in and day out, Jackie says with a shrug.

Ironically, Jackie’s early days at the school gave no indication of what was to come in his future. While Chan was physically capable, he was not a standout student in any of the disciplines. Not even close. His greatest talent appears to have been a penchant for bad behavior and being a troublemaker. It’s difficult to reconcile this image of a youthful ruffian with the gently impish Chan currently loved by billions. But it’s no secret why Jackie was such a handful. Even Jackie understood why.

I was very angry, he admits. "And bitter. Every month parents used to come out to see other students—but not mine. Every time the other parents brought food, clothes, socks—but not mine.

I didn’t hate my parents, Jackie has said in interviews, but I was so … unhappy.

In between punishments and the endless training sessions, Jackie and the other students squeezed in some academic classes. Too bad they were so exhausted they could barely keep their eyes open.

"When it was time for regular school classes the next day, we all slept through them. We’d fall asleep saying the alphabet—A,B,C,D …. Jackie has said. So everyone loved school time."

Unfortunately, the Opera schoolteachers didn’t seem overly concerned with the intellectual growth of the students. As long as the kids were as agile as monkeys, all was well with the world. Less than ten hours a week was spent on fundamentals Learning to read was not nearly as important to the sifu as being able to do a perfect back flip. To this day, Chan laments his lack of a formal education. Because of that, he is very vocal in encouraging children to stay in school.

Back then, though, all Jackie dreamed about was finding a way out of his. Not even the nights offered any respite or comfort, except for the nearness of the other children with whom Jackie huddled. And even that became oppressive. Once their day was over, Jackie and his classmates would retire to a communal sleeping area that sounds straight out of Charles Dickens.

Unfortunately, we all had to sleep together on this big, dirty, old rug that was so disgusting, Jackie has said. I’m sure it had been pissed on by both people and dogs. It was really, really disgusting. And we all shared one blanket.

One blanket … and one dream. Among those little boys shivering next to Jackie were others who would in their own way have a major impact on the Hong Kong film industry—and thus, the world film industry—in the years to come: Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, Yuen Kuei, Yuen Mo, and others.

(The preponderance of Yuens isn’t a coincidence. The school had put together a performance troupe called the Seven Little Fortunes that was actually comprised of over a dozen students. Seven principals and five backups. To honor Master Yu Jim Yuen, each Fortune was required to adopt a stage name that contained the name Yuen. Jackie’s was Yuen Lau—a moniker he only used while performing with the troupe. But some of the other boys, like Yuen Biao, chose to keep the names professionally even after they left the school.)

Of all his classmates, Jackie found special kinship with two very different boys—Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao. Sammo, who had come to the school in 1960 just before Jackie, was a natural leader, which earned him the nickname Big Brother. Biao, a lithe, waifish boy with spectacular acrobatic ability, came to the school shortly after Jackie and became Chan’s Little Brother. Jackie still refers to them by these affectionate terms over thirty years later. And no wonder. They became Jackie’s surrogate family, with all the pluses and minuses that come with that kind of forced intimacy.

My relationship with Jackie is hard to define, Sammo admits. Through all those years of sleeping together, eating together, fighting together, we became closer than family. Even though we still argue at times, I think we’ve remained connected.

Although he didn’t know it at the time, Jackie’s future literally came knocking on the school door one day in 1962 when a local director showed up in search of a new young face to use in his movies.

I was very lucky—I was the child they picked, so I became an actor, Jackie says. "I didn’t know what to expect, but it was so easy—it didn’t require any additional training on my part. I could do whatever they needed. At the school we had learned both the southern style, which emphasizes hands, and the northern style, which uses feet more. My style now has a lot of jumping and footwork, but back then I used both when working."

This is exactly what the school had been preparing him for: a life of performing. Initially, Jackie liked working in films simply because it meant he could sleep a little later on the days he had to report to work.

At that time I didn’t know what I was doing, I didn’t know about films. To me, it was just a way to make a living. You give me a part and I’ll do it. I was very young, so I just followed direction. Whatever he tells me to do—cry, walk—I did. But it was very good training.

But slowly, the process of making movies itself began to steal his heart.

After five or ten years I began to love movies. They’d tell me it was okay, that I could go home, but I’d say no, I wanted to stay. I enjoyed going to the studios and watching and learning. I assumed I could grow up to be a stuntman, no problem. Since I didn’t really need any additional training for that, I literally fell into the movie business. I loved all those early films and I think they were all good.

Jackie eventually appeared in well over twenty films during his tenure at the school. To his chagrin, Jackie admits he can’t remember the titles, and he assumes most of the films don’t even exist anymore.

I wish I did know, Jackie has said. "But at that time in Hong Kong, it took only seven days to make one movie. Seven days. They’d never even move the camera—it was very much like the Opera. They’d just set up two cameras and the actors would act. Then it was finished.

If I could only find them, I’d love to find copies of all those movies and put them in my collection so I can say that’s Jackie Chan back when. But I cannot find them, not even my first childhood film. I think they’ve disappeared. I’d be happy with just a poster, but so far, nothing.

Naturally, his teachers encouraged his career. Not only was Jackie a physical showcase for the school, he was also a cash cow.

"By the time I was a teenager, I had become a Stuntman and was working regularly. Some director would say, ‘Okay, Jackie—you die here, you die there’ I’d do it and get paid seventy-five dollars for the day. But I was still a student at the school, so I’d have to give my earnings to my sifu, and he’d let me keep maybe a dollar. But to me, that was a lot of money, considering that before I didn’t have any money at all."

Between working in films, performing, and the school’s rigorous training schedule and his earlier appearances as a Little Fortune, Jackie’s formal education dwindled from next to nothing to nothing. He’s lucky he was able to read and write, and any higher learning was a luxury he would never experience. It’s a void he’s still acutely aware of today.

In China education and knowledge are very important—there is nothing more important than education, even in the martial arts, Jackie has explained to reporters. "But there is obsession with being number one. Everybody says they’re number one—nobody says they’re number two. So I always say I’m number three. Why? Because it doesn’t matter, as long as you keep learning.

The Chinese have a saying, ‘Clever men move mountains, stupid men must move.’ I believe that.

Then one day, Jackie’s hard youth was over. The time had come for Jackie and his brothers to graduate from the school. Regardless of the hellhole it may have been, for ten years it had also been home. For the second time in his young life, Jackie was cut loose and left to fend for himself. Only this time, he wasn’t even given a filthy rug to sleep on. As fate would have it, just as Jackie left the confines of the school, the Opera had gone out of favor as a performance art. The action, color, and scenery of the movies had effectively killed the stage-bound opera and its glory days. So a life in the Opera was suddenly not a viable option. And since these young men had not received a well-rounded education, they could not easily find employment in another field. All they knew how to do was fight and perform. That left them just one choice: to go into the movie business. With a mix of hope and dread, Jackie joined the multitude of young men jockeying for movie stunt work.

Jackie had grown enthralled with the movies and set his sights on being a stuntman and fight choreographer. He also secretly dreamed of being a star, a goal that would have seemed highly unlikely. He was skinny, had crooked teeth and very small eyes, and lacked any immediately apparent charisma. Details.

However, he also had a fire-hot desire to succeed plus a willingness to do absolutely anything necessary to achieve his dreams. Those qualities would ultimately make all the difference.

Ironically, shortly after Jackie graduated from the school, his father returned to Hong Kong to present his son with a house. The younger Chan was speechless.

For ten years, my parents suffered and saved to buy me a house. This is why I know my mother and father did everything for me.

When asked if there’s any way a system like the Opera School—which Jackie himself has said is accurately depicted as nothing short of a torture chamber in the 1993 film Farewell, My Concubine—could ever be made suitable for children by today’s standards, Jackie doesn’t hesitate.

No way, Jackie has said in interviews. "It’s too tough. If you are older, say thirteen to sixteen, you’re at an age where you’re considered too old to be taught; but if you’re a young child, it is far too tough to go through. When I was seven, I had no energy, but my training still lasted the whole day, almost twenty-four hours.

"We don’t have schools like this now. You hit a kid like that now, you sue, right? Instead, I would teach children how to exercise and martial arts techniques—but I wouldn’t teach them how to kill or hurt people.

"Before 1972, a lot of young people wanted to learn martial arts, but they just wanted to fight—that’s no good. Too many young people today can’t understand that the techniques aren’t to be used aggressively, that you should only use the force necessary to get out of a situation.

"Martial arts are a great thing to know—but only if you also learn that they’re not just for fighting. It’s a different age now, and martial arts are for health and for fun—not hurting people. You might study for forty years and never once use them in a fight but you will still have used them because they improve your mind and help you to learn other things more quickly.

If you master martial arts, then you can go on to master almost anything.

But Chan admits not everyone was able to overcome the lack of a formal education the way he was.

It’s true—me, I’m happy. But I look at some of my other classmates and they’re not doing so well. They have no education—they don’t know English, and even their Chinese isn’t very good. That’s because we spent all that time studying other things.

Never one to dwell publicly on the negative, Chan is quick to point out that his years at the school taught him almost everything he knows about martial arts and the other skills he needed to become the superstar he is today.

"My sifu was a very good teacher and he taught me a lot. He trained