Jackie Chan is one of the biggest, most influential personalities out there and there are only a handful of people who aren’t familiar with his work. He has been in countless films, bringing all kinds of entertaining stories to life. However, Jackie Chan’s real life is no less than a movie either.
Back in 2003, Jackie Chan came out with a documentary titled Traces of a Dragon: Jackie Chan and his Lost Family. The movie was directed by Mabel Cheung. A visit to his father, Charles Chan, in Australia, turned out to be drastically different than what he was expecting it to be. His father unraveled the truth about Jackie Chan’s family, something the actor had no idea about.
Jackie Chan Was In For a Shock
When Jackie Chan invited Mabel Cheung and Alex Law to visit his father in Australia, neither knew what they were signing up for. While the two got acquainted with Chan’s father, Charles Chan, the actor himself showed up a few days later. This is where the story gets interesting.
After Chan’s arrival, his father decided to tell him the real story about the past lives of his parents. Charles started off by revealing that he was once a Nationalist spy and a gangland boss and his mother, Lee-Lee Chan, a gambler in the Shanghai underworld.
Both Charles and Lee-Lee had children from their previous marriages, something Chan had no idea about. Charles had two sons with his first wife and Lee-Lee had two daughters with her first husband. His visit to his father in Australia unveiled the secret that his two half-brothers were still alive.
Chan’s parents met each other when Charles arrested Lee-Lee for smuggling opium, an act she did to support her two daughters. Talking about the revelations made about his mother, Cheung stated,
“The fact that his mother was an opium smuggler, a gambler, and a big sister in the underworld was a big shock to Jackie and also to us. Everybody in Hong Kong knew that his mother was like a common housewife, very kind, very gentle.”
Chan also learned that his father’s real name was not ‘Chan’ but ‘Fang.’ It was not easy to get Charles to talk about the family’s astonishing history and he seemed to get quite irritated when the questions got a little too personal. In order to make him comfortable, they had to become his friend. Cheung recalled how they would dance and sing karaoke with him before he finally opened up.
Jackie Chan Has Not Seen the Documentary
Cheung was unsure what Chan wanted from the film and what she was going to do with the footage as she had no experience in making a documentary, whatsoever. However, she soon realized that this story, although personal to Chan, tells the story of many Chinese families. She stated,
“Every single Chinese family has a story more or less like this.”
Chan commissioned the entire film and paid for the rights to the archive footage. In fact, he was not looking forward to the monetary benefits of the documentary as the story revealed an intense and personal part of his life. It was revealed that while Chan cried several times while watching the rough cut, he has never seen the finished, polished product. According to Cheung, the footage in the documentary might have been too painful for Chan to watch.
“He was visualising for the first time how it must have been for his parents to survive during the wars. When you’re listening to the story, you don’t visualise that much, but when you see the actual footage, he actually got very emotional. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why he doesn’t want to see it again.”
Who knew one of our most beloved actors would have had such a dark and gritty family history? We cannot imagine what Chan would’ve felt like when his father was unveiling the secrets of his life.
Source: The Guardian
