January 17, 2013, 2:00 PM
Why Did Jackie Chan Body Slam America?
By Jeff Yang
Associated Press
Hong Kong movie star Jackie Chan poses for photographers during the charity premiere of his new movie “CZ12″ in Hong Kong Thursday Dec. 13, 2012.
Jackie Chan is famous for his glorious on-camera recklessness — leaping out of windows, crashing through walls and tumbling from rooftops for the sake of his millions of global fans. Recently, however, he’s made a habit of performing a somewhat less crowd-pleasing stunt: Shooting off his mouth.
The latest incident occurred last week, during an otherwise mundane interview on Qiang Qiang, a popular talk show on Hong Kong-based cable net Phoenix TV. After 15 minutes spent discussing Chan’s latest film, CZ12 (“Chinese Zodiac”), the conversation turned to the action hero’s reputation for fervent nationalism, which has prompted criticism from some on the Internet.
“Chinese are dissatisfied with many things, but you always say ‘China is so good.’ Now many people on the net are displeased with you,” said the talk show’s host, Dou Wentao. In response, Chan pointed out that while China has many problems, particularly with corruption, its ascent into global prominence has occurred only over the last dozen years. “If you talk about corruption, does the entire rest of the world — does America have no corruption?…America has the most corruption in the world!”
After the statement was translated into English by China-watching blog Ministry of Tofu, the Washington Post’s Max Fisher penned a commentary on Chan’s “anti-Americanism,” wondering how the star could “square his criticism of the United States with his long embrace of the American film market.”
The article had the effect that anyone could have expected, generating over a thousand comments and a firestorm of social-media reaction, much of it decrying Chan’s “ingratitude” and vowing to boycott his future creative output, in an uncanny echo of the last time a scandal erupted around an Asian pop icon’s bashing of America.
There are notable differences between PSY’s gaffe and Chan’s, however. PSY dropped his buzzbomb over a decade ago as a relative unknown, driven by youthful passion and the prevailing attitudes in his native country. Chan hardly has that excuse. He’s experienced enough to know that words have power, and he’s famous enough for his voice to carry as far as the Internet can reach, in every language in the world.
So what could possibly explain Chan’s willingness to alienate fans and risk his hard-won reputation with comments that, at the least, could be termed indiscreet? (It seems excessive to call his statement “anti-Americanism,” when Americans, including action stars like Chuck Norris, regularly spout far harsher charges against America’s culture, society and government — but it was certainly poorly considered.)
I don’t know for sure. But I can make a stab at guessing.
Back in 1997, I wrote a book called I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action — Chan’s autobiography, and the first, and to this day only from-the-icon’s-mouth accounting of his humble beginnings and rise to international stardom. I spent the better part of that year traveling with him on and off, and listening to the anecdotes of his many-colored life, from his birth to refugee parents in Hong Kong, to his ****ensian years as a foster student at Master Yu Jim Yuen’s China Drama Academy, through his wild and woolly stuntman days, and finally his rocky (and then rocketlike) rise to global superstardom.
If there was a common theme across all of these many chapters, it’s this: Chan’s life has been an ongoing, obsessive quest for self-definition. It’s why by the time he was an adult, he’d answered to a half-dozen different names, from Chan Kong Sang (“Born in Hong Kong Chan”) to Yuen Lo (“Yuen’s Tower”) to Chan Sing Lung (“Becoming the Dragon Chan”) to Fong Sing Lung (after his father let slip the secret that their true family name, obscured during wartime, was Fong); from “Paul” to “Jacky” to Jackie.
It’s why he has always surrounded himself with a tight, nearly impenetrable circle of insiders, and why loyalty — to him and from him — is the primary trait of all his closest relationships. And it’s the reason why he was Hong Kong’s most ebullient cultural ambassador before 1997 — and why now, after Reunification, he’s transformed into The New China’s most fervent public advocate.
Chan’s eagerness to belong was shaped by a history of repeated abandonments, separations and betrayals, both small and large. His parents, unable to care for him, signed him over at a tender age to a master who had the right to punish him “even to death.” Then, after putting Chan through a decade of harsh training for stardom on the Chinese opera stage, his teacher announced that there was no longer a market for such skills, shut down the school and retired to Los Angeles, leaving his students to fend for themselves with minimal book learning and no adult supervision.
His early film years were marked by repeated humiliation and disappointment. Living in the shadow of the late, great Bruce Lee, Chan found himself forced to emulate Lee’s stoic screen image, with unconvincing and financially disastrous results. (Even the nom d’ecran Chan chose for himself, “Becoming the Dragon,” reflects Chan’s youthful aspirations to rise to Lee’s heights.)
Breaking free from the clutches of Lo Wei, the “millionaire director” who would later claim both Lee and Chan as proteges, Chan created the persona that would endear him to millions: Both Everyman and Ubermensch, an ordinary joe with extraordinary abilities hidden beneath his plain surface. But while it served him well in Asia, where he became the biggest and most bankable star of his generation, it did nothing to break him through to the world’s largest movie market, the U.S. The forays Chan made into Hollywood — the dull “Big Brawl,” the clownish “Cannonball Run” films, the misguided “Protector” — again forced him into roles and contexts that were ill-suited for his abilities and personality.
And Chan’s youthful interactions with American studio execs and members of the U.S. media during that run, which ranged from dismissive to condescending to straight-up racist, gave him a bad taste that he has never quite been able to wash away.
In 1998, “Rush Hour” gave Chan the American success he’d long been seeking. But his experience on the film also confirmed many of his suspicions about Hollywood: He has privately expressed resentment over the fact that his costar Chris Tucker’s paycheck for the Rush Hour sequels — $20 million and $25 million plus a portion of the gross for RH 2 and 3 respectively — far outstripped what he was paid, even though Tucker has had almost no box-office success outside the RH trilogy, and even though Tucker risked little more than a case of drymouth, while Chan put his fortysomething body on the line in every other scene. (He still refers to the “Rush Hour” films as his “least favorite movies.”)
So Chan has a bit of bitterness about America, how it treats foreigners, its sense of value and its sense of values. Combine that with his lifelong desire to be an acknowledged and appreciated member of his “home team” — channeled into a self-appointed role as chief evangelist for The New China, a place that is lifting itself up by its bootstraps, that’s fixing its problems and that’s poised to shape the future of the world — and you get a formula for unpredictable blurts of an impolitic nature.
In 2004, Chan called the election that gave independence advocate Chen Shui-Bian the presidency of Taiwan “pathetic” and an “international joke.” In 2009, he called for greater restriction of freedoms on China, pointing to Taiwan and Hong Kong as examples of the “chaos” that occurs when the people are not “controlled.” He has expressed support for China’s censorship policies, unleashing angry responses from Chinese Internet users.
And yet, despite, or maybe because of his verbal eruptions, Chan’s star in China continues to rise. CZ12, by most accounts a mediocre addition to Chan’s canon, had a record opening weekend and continued to soar, ultimately becoming China’s second-highest-grossing domestic film ever, with over $130 million in total box office.
If there’s one thing that Jackie Chan has learned how to do in four decades of action, it’s falling on his feet.
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