Abstract:The author argues that Jackie Chan's success in the United States should be understood in terms of the transformation of Kung Fu cinema from its preoccupation with racial politics envisioned by Bruce Lee to its current embracing of multiculturalism stipulated by Chan's Kung Fu comedy. Chan's sense of "multiculturalism" has nothing to do with racial politics or cultural diversity but points to the fact that Kung Fu cinema now aims to accommodate the tastes and needs of the middle class on a global scale for profits and entertainment.
Key words: Asian Americans; Chan, Jackie; cultural nationalism; global entertainment; Kung Fu cinema; Lee, Bruce; masculinity
Since the late twentieth century, Hollywood has witnessed a renewed interest among American audiences in Kung Fu cinema, which was pioneered by Bruce Lee and transformed by Jackie Chan. When Rumble in the Bronx (1996) opened in the United States, Chan began appearing on talk shows hosted by the major television networks and made the headlines of the major newspapers throughout the country. On February 7, 1996, the Wall Street Journal carried a short article titled "Jackie Chan Makes Push into U.S. Action Films" under its business section, which predicted that Chan would "stand out as an Asian lead in a role dominated by Euro-Americans" (Wynter B1). Situating Chan within a multicultural context, the reporter assessed the Hong Kong superstar in terms of commercial suc-cess and suggested that he would diversify and bring change to American action cinema.
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Bruce Lee shows off his masculine "hard body" in The Chinese Connection.
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Bruce Lee shows off his masculine "hard body" in The Chinese Connection.
When the Washington Post featured a similar story on Chan on February 25, 1996, its staff writer David Richards employed a more humorous and sensational tone: "Kung Pow! Jackie Chan Is Asia's Biggest Star. Now He's Invading America." Richards began by making fun of the major Euro-American figures of action cinema and then detailed Chan's life and career in contrast: "Sylvester Stallone is a phony. Bruce Willis is just a wimp. And don't even mention Jean-Claude Van Damme, that . . . that. . . Belgian waffle. In the pantheon of movie action heroes, there is only one true god and his name is Jackie Chan" (G1). In giving Chan such publicity, critics in the United States seem to have found in the Hong Kong superstar not just a master of Chinese Kung Fu but also a possible cultural icon who could fit into America's conception of multiculturalism. But to what extent can a Hong Kong Kung Fu superstar be related to the multicultural rhetoric of the United States? What does multiculturalism really mean in Chan's films?
Chan's success in the United States should be understood in terms of the transformation of Kung Fu cinema from its preoccupation with racial politics envisioned by Bruce Lee to its current embracing of multiculturalism, which has been stipulated by Chan's strategic move from tragedy to comedy. By "multiculturalism," I want to suggest that the Kung Fu comedy has aimed to accommodate the tastes and needs of the middle class on a global scale. When Chan invented the Kung Fu comedy as a point of departure from Brace Lee's Kung Fu tragedy, he changed the genre formalistically and toned down Lee's politics concerning race and the working class. The films are geared more toward the broader audiences of the middle class in Asia, Europe, and America. As a result of his move toward comedy, Chan unwittingly deconstructs the hard bodies of masculinity projected by both the Kung Fu tragedy and the American action cinema, and he demonstrates the vulnerability of the male body in a way that would appeal to the female viewership as well as the male viewer. Finally, although the Hong Kong film industry has become part of a transnational operation, which is second only to Hollywood in scale, Chan challenges the problems and consequences of globalization as much as he benefits from its practice and influence. In highlighting his personal skills and talents against the backdrop of an increasingly dominant global economy, Chan has paradoxically presented his films as transnational as well as individualistic, multicultural as well as apolitical, and chronological as well as ahistorical.
The Bruce Lee Legacy: Race, Class, and the Chinese Cultural Imaginary
Any analysis of Kung Fu cinema has to begin with its pioneering figure, Bruce Lee, who introduced Chinese martial arts to Western audiences and rewrote the history of action cinema in both Hong Kong and the United States. In his study of the initial reception of Kung Fu cinema in North America, David Desser tries to recapitulate the surprise and influence of Lee's films both inside and outside the American film industry in 1973: "The Kung Fu craze of the 1970s is a deceptively complex moment in American cultural history, when a foreign cinema grabs hold of the box-office as never before and eventually gives rise to a new and significant genre in American cinema" (39). In defining the Kung Fu craze as "a deceptively complex moment," Desser speculates that the phenomenon could be related to the rebelliousness of the black and youth audiences as well as to the American trauma of the Vietnam War.
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Bruce Lee demonstrates his superhuman ability in Fists of Fury.
In his essay "Kung Fu Film as Ghetto Myth," Stuart Kaminsky argues that Lee's films do not manifest any sense of common good as do Japanese Samurai films or American Westerns, but instead promote violence, vengeance, and destruction. Because of its articulation of underclass needs and values, Kaminsky observes that the Kung Fu film has a direct appeal to inner-city audiences and has intended to play out their fantasies in a way that would "give satisfaction of revenge and the opportunity to earn the respect of others who witness the performance of superman agility" (138). In this sense, Kaminsky attributes Lee's success to his deployment of racial politics and his superman physical performance. On the one hand, the films develop an aesthetic of "dirty fighting" that gracefully depicts violence within a ritual pattern. On the other hand, violence in this special circumstance allows a certain dignity for the minority protagonist and serves as a form of redressing the problem of social injustice. Although limited by his white middle-class viewpoint, Kaminsky does acknowledge the fact that the reception and interpretation of Lee's films in Amer-ica hold a political and racial significance. Indeed, to what extent has the representation of race and gender in Lee's films affected its reception in American context? And how has the Chinese cultural context become relevant to the American one?
In her discussion of the political dimension of Lee's films, Hsiung-ping Chiao situates these films within the context of modern Chinese history, which foregrounds the uniqueness of colonial Hong Kong and considers Lee's anticolonial sentiments as an explanation for his popularity among the audiences in Southeast Asia and the American inner city. In alluding to a time when China was repeatedly defeated and humiliated by Western powers and Japan, Chiao argues that the Kung Fu film functioned as a means of catharsis for the overseas Chinese, who have come to terms with their experiences of colonialism and imperialism and reconfigure their cultural identities outside mainland Communist China. Chiao concludes that the message of nationalism and anticolonialism in Lee's films can find ready audiences among the once-colonized nations and racialized enclaves: "The blatant and exultant advocation of national identity was congenial not only to Chinese, but literally to all people who felt that they had been degraded by Western Imperialism" (37).
Although interesting and insightful, Chiao never fully explains what nationalism really means in Lee's films and readily celebrates the universality of its anticolonial elements without specifying their historical and cultural con-texts. Ironically, during the period when Lee was making his films and emerging as the great master of Kung Fu film locally and globally, colonial British Hong Kong was experiencing its economic takeoff, whereas mainland China was still suffering from the political, economic, and cultural turmoil of the so-called "Cultural Revolution." In this light, what kind of nationalism could Lee's films offer to the inhabitants of Hong Kong? How would Lee's anticolonial sentiments function both inside and outside Kung Fu films? In his analysis of Hong Kong identity and the representation of the male body, Kwai-Cheung Lo points out the problem of "inherent inconsistency" in Lee's films: "The China portrayed in Lee's films is a remote space emptied of social and political reality, an imaginary and void China with which Hong Kong inhabitants can associate" ("Muscles" 110). Lo's critique offers two things: First, China in Lee's films does not correspond to any space of historical or cultural specificity but only serves as a moment of cultural imagination with which the inhabitants of Hong Kong have been able to identify (Lo just assumes that they are all ethnic Chinese). Second, Lee's rendition of China equally highlights the problem of cultural dislocation among the inhabitants of Hong Kong, who do not identify themselves with either mainland China or the British empire, but who live in a space of anxiety, ambiguity, and contradiction in between. Such a sense of uncertainty can be easily turned into anticolonial sentiments.
This representation of China is exactly how nationalism works in Lee's films. First, his films play out the discontent of Hong Kong's inhabitants toward British colonial rule and associate that feeling with the racial and cultural memory of a distant China. The films also situate this sense of Chinese nationalism in some dramatized tension and confrontation with colonialism. Interestingly, it is not the British but the Japanese who have been targeted as the embodiment of colonialism and imperialism mostly because the Japanese government has never apologized or compensated its Asian neighbors for the atrocities its troops committed during the second World War. Finally, Lee embodies a kind of nationalism in his own physical presence and allows his body to evolve as the filmic representation of nationalism. He reinvents the Asian masculine body and reinscribes it with political and cultural significance, making his films relevant as an expression of Asian American politics and culture.
Racial Politics and the Invention of the Asian Male Body in an Asian American Context
Lee's Kung Fu tragedies were produced and released in the United States when the country was experiencing unprecedented racial violence and political turmoil. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the African American Civil Rights movement began challenging institutional racism and articulating the need for racial equality; the anti-Vietnam War protests questioned the essence of American democracy and the capability of American moral leadership in an international context; and the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X complicated the political and racial landscape of the United States. In 1969, students at University of California-Berkeley and San Francisco State University staged what was called the "Third World Student Strikes"; the active involvement and participation of students of Asian descent brought about the new concept of "Asian American," a political construct aimed at building a coalition among people of Asian descent in the United States. "Asian American" also made a distinction between the generation of Asians born and raised in the United States and Asians in Asia who had been dubbed "Orientals," a term that carried the cultural baggage of colonialism and imperialism.
In 1974, Frank Chin and other activist writers and scholars published an anthology of Asian American literature under the title Aiiieeeee! and wrote their political manifesto "Fifty Years of Our Whole Voice." In articulating their desires and anxieties, Chin and other editors defined the major problem that Asian Americans have confronted in constructing a political and cultural identity and rebuilding a positive image of the ethnic group in American culture and society: "Seven generations of suppression under legislative racism and euphemized white racist love have left today's Asian-Americans in a state of self-contempt, self-rejection, and disintegration" (viii). What had bothered the editors most was the stereotype of the Asian male: "Good or bad, the stereotypical Asian is nothing as a man. At worst, the Asian-American is contemptible because he is womanly, effeminate, devoid of all the traditionally masculine qualities of originality, daring, physical courage, and creativity" (xxx). Using an explicitly gender-biased language, these editors articulated their strong resentment against the emasculation of Asian and Asian American males in American culture. However, as Elaine Kirn points out in Asian American Literature, the editors were caught in a dilemma when referring to "traditional masculine qualities": They were fighting the emasculation of Asian American men by the dominant culture while redefining Asian American masculinity within the very same parameters of that culture, under which Asian and Asian American males had been disqualified in the first place (189).
It was precisely at this point that Bruce Lee and his Kung Fu tragedy became a possible scenario for Asian Americans to rethink and reinvent the Asian male body. Although not directly involved in any Asian American movement in the United States or any decolonization movement in East and Southeast Asia, Lee had the same impulse to redefine Asian and Asian American masculinity and deployed his own body as a location of nationalism and remasculinization in his films. In other words, Lee tried to rationalize what Kaminsky calls "dirty fighting" as a means to break away from "the Asian soft body" represented in American popular culture and to remasculinize the Asian male body as tough, aggressive, and competitive:
First of all, I do not believe in blood for the sake of blood. There has to be a reason! Why do I start fighting? Actually, I don't call it "violence." I would say this is "action." I didn't create this monster, all this blood in the Chinese pictures. It was there before I came. Hopefully, I can use [my films] to show the audience why these things are happening, (qtd. in Logan 28)
In justifying violence in his films, Lee explained his motives and desires in creating the Kung Fu tragedy. Lee talked as if he truly believed that his Kung Fu tragedies would redress the defeat and humiliation the Chinese had suffered from Western and Japanese imperialism, along with the institutional racism that Asian Americans had experienced in the United States. In that sense, Lee's nationalism became identical to Asian American cultural aspirations in that both tried to redefine and conflate their identities with the image of the masculine body. Yvonne Tasker accurately describes how Lee performs this sense of nationalism in his films:
This assertion of nationalism is very clearly inscribed through the revelation of Lee's body-as he ritualistically removes his jacket-so that discourses of masculinity and nationhood are complexly bound up together in his star image. It is Lee's body that marks the assertion of a masculine national identity. ("Fists" 318)
In defining violence as action, Lee also makes a clear distinction between his Kung Fu tragedies and the American gangster film and focuses on his own hard body as the very center of the genre. In a sense, Kaminsky is right in considering performance as essence of the Kung Fu film and Bruce Lee as the Fred Astaire of the Kung Fu genre. Action as performance and performance as action have indeed become the language of the Kung Fu cinema.
Accentuating the action of the Kung Fu hero, Lee builds the plots of his films around his own body as a location of political ideals and cultural implications. In The Chinese Connection, which is set in late nineteenth-century China, several Japanese Samurai warriors challenge the Chinese Martial Arts School in Shanghai by sending a banner reading "Sick Men of Asia." The insult is directed at the Chinese generally, but it is immediately construed as a challenge to the physical body of the Chinese male. When the Lee character, the best student in the school, learns of this incident, he returns the same banner to the Japanese martial arts school and fights single-handedly an entire group of Japanese karate instructors and students. To demonstrate his superior martial arts skills and agility, Lee not only shows off his muscular arms and chest, which correspond to a pristine masculinity, but also frequently uses some simple fighting tools that have been associated with the Chinese martial arts tradition for two thousand years. After winning a victory all by himself, Lee speaks to the defeated Japanese, whose abilities depend entirely on their swords: "Now you listen to me, I will only say [it] once: We are not sick men!" In equating his body with "we," the Chinese, Bruce Lee appropriates nationalism as a matter of physical strength and connects the body with individual dignity, family responsibility, and national honor.
To play out such a presentation of nationalism as based on the male body, Lee's character finally confronts the Russian martial arts champion, who has been hired by the Japanese consul general in Shanghai as a bodyguard and whose physique is enormous and intimidating compared with Lee's. In defeating such an opponent, Lee has defended his honor at the personal, familial, and national levels, and asserts the belief of the oppressed that the small can beat the big and the weak can defeat the strong. As Bey Logan puts it, "This virtuoso piece struck a chord all over the world, not just with Southeastern audiences. Oppressed minorities of every race had found a new hero to call their own" (31). The film ends with a frozen shot of Lee jumping into the air, fol-lowed by the sounds of a gun firing, a ceremonial moment that transforms the character's death into a symbol of heroism and eternity.
Emphasizing the action of the hero, Lee also uses his body to show the fighting skill, agility, and superior coordination that a human being can achieve. In Fists of Fury, Lee demonstrates his superman performance in group and one-on-one fighting. When the son of his boss and his group of Kung Fu thugs want to kill him in the last scene, Lee's character fights the entire group by himself. Lee deals with attacks from four directions and fights fiercely with the armed villains. He jumps, kicks, and punches, smashing his enemies against each other or killing them with their own weapons. When he finally confronts the archvillain, an expert Kung Fu fighter like himself, Lee shows more of his fighting pattern and sequence. First, Lee jumps high into the air and meets his opponent's kicks right in the middle. Since they both have good fighting skills and agility, they have equal opportunities of winning. During the fighting, Lee's clothes are ripped and his muscular body is exposed to the audience. When his opponent draws Lee's blood, Lee marks this as his moment for revenge. Lee tastes his own blood before he charges full speed at his enemy to finish the latter's life.
Lee refused to use any special effects in his films, such as "glowing palm" and "flying gimmicks" frequently employed in Hong Kong motion picture production. In this way, Lee created a new form of martial arts for Hong Kong cinema that exemplified a masculinity for Asians and Asian Americans that was contrary to the "soft bodies" that had been represented in American popular culture. As described in his biographical film Dragon, Lee showed a strong resentment toward the representation of Asian and Asian American manhood by the dominant culture, and he endeavored to compete with the hard bodies and tough guy images that had been embodied in and exemplified by the dominant figures of Edward G. Robinson, John Wayne, Marion Brando, James Dean, and Clint Eastwood.
Although Lee's Kung Fu tragedies created the hard body and tough guy image of Asian and Asian American males in American popular culture, it doesn't necessarily mean that all Asian Americans can really identify with Lee's characters in the films. What is problematic here is that Lee's sensibility was more Chinese than Asian American, even though he was legally a U.S. citizen. At a time when Asian Americans emphasized their American roots, they tried to keep some distance from Lee and his rendition of a remote China. As most of his villains are Japanese rather than British, Lee might have alienated many Asian American activists, who had built their ethnic coalition precisely on the basis of their common cause against institutional racism, and who would have liked to leave behind the conflicts and struggles among their ancestors in Asia.
Jackie Chan: From Kung Fu Tragedy to Kung Fu Comedy
With Bruce Lee's untimely death in 1973, the Kung Fu film came to a crossroads and waited for new inspirations and expressions. A group of new Kung Fu talents emerged, among them Jackie Chan. At first, Chan was instructed by his directors to imitate Lee, and he was marketed as Lee's successor. When Chan suffered commercial failure in this regard, he decided to practice his own style and brought to the genre some comedic elements. In comparing Lee with Chan, Robert Clouse, director of Enter the Dragon, commented, "In many ways, Jackie was a better actor. He was a very good acrobat and a good martial artist. Plus, he could handle humor beautifully. His look on screen was very much a joke-a-minute existence. It was softer. It wasn't hard like Lee. Jackie didn't break through but we absolutely thought he would" (qtd. in Logan 66).
In his own career, Chan had to move out of Lee's shadow and release his own creative energy and power. Chan told the media in Hong Kong and the United States that he had tried to become an antithesis to Brace Lee: "When he kick high, I kick low. When he not smiling, always smiling. He can one-punch break the wall; after I break the wall, I hurt. I do the funny face" (qtd. in Wolf 25). If his original intention was simply to reinvent himself and market himself in a landscape that had been dominated by Lee and his unfading image, Chan actually started a new wave of Kung Fu cinema that would change the philosophy of the genre as well as challenge Lee's image of toughness, which had been grounded in both Asian and American cultural contexts. Instead of focusing on any conflict between the Chinese and the Japanese, which seemed to put the Chinese national honor at stake, or between the Chinese and the British, which would evoke the modern Chinese history of colonialism, Chan introduced humor into his characters and comedy into the Kung Fu genre. In other words, Chan revised Lee's life-is-Kung-Fu philosophy into his Kung-Fu-is-fun worldview. Chan's adoption of humor and comedy changed the Kung Fu genre formalistically and shaped the genre politically and culturally. First, in his comedy, Chan actually humanizes the hero of the Kung Fu tragedy, whose rigidity might ironically be construed as stubborn, inhuman, and superhuman, confirming another aspect of the Orientalist representation of Asians and Asian Americans. Second, as Chan shows the humane aspect of Kung Fu, he casts serious doubt on Lee's infallibility and construction of toughness. In other words, Chan inadvertantly deconstructs the hard body of Bruce Lee. Whereas Lee's character waits for the right moment to fight and kill his opponent, Chan's first impulse is to stay away from any trouble and avoid confrontation unless it is absolutely necessary. It is precisely in this sense that Yvonne Tasker notes, "Chan's 'softness' does not consist in a lack of masculinity or an inability to fight, but more in a refusal either to take the male body too seriously or to play the part of Oriental other" ("Fists" 334).
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Jackie Chan often put himself in harm's way by performing his own stunts in Rumble in the Bronx.
Chan's philosophy of the Kung Fu comedy is best illustrated in his Rumble in the Bronx, in which Chan's character, a Hong Kong police officer on vacation, attends his uncle's wedding in New York, where he gets into all kinds of danger and cross-cultural comic situations. Unlike the working-class character in Lee's films, Chan's character is ready to adapt to different social and cultural environments and to help those who, he thinks, are caught in difficult situations, even though the consequences are often unsatisfactory and even disastrous. Chan begins by revealing the weakness and limitation of the Kung Fu hero in the American cultural context. He misidentifies his aunt-to-be, who turns out to be an African American instead of Chinese American, and at some point uncovers his own racial preoccupation. As he tries to help the new owner of his uncle's grocery store and fends off the harassment of local gangsters, he causes damage to the store that eventually leads to its total destruction. Similarly, when he tries to help the law enforcement agency fight organized crime in the New York streets, he ends up cooperating with the Mafia, a mistake that almost costs him his life. Moreover, as Chan's character is usually middle class in language and behavior, he does not have any reason to show his fists of fury constantly like Lee's alienated and bitter characters. In the same film, when he ventures into a crime-ridden neighborhood, Chan's character calls the lower-class, multiethnic gangster group "the dregs of society," and questions their social responsibility. Finally, whenever he is caught in a tough situation, Chan usually tries to run away first, then shows agility and skills in the process, and eventually fights only for the sake of saving his own or others' lives.
In one scene in Rumble in the Bronx, when he is forced into a dead-end alley and his only way out is blocked by a wall, Chan, like any mortal being, tries his best to save his own life and to keep his face and body from getting bruised by the flying wine bottle pieces smashed by the gangsters. Chan not only loses control of the situation but actually succumbs to the power of the armed gangsters, a scene that Bruce Lee would never allow. Ironically, Chan's super agility and fighting ability are best when he runs away from trouble. Chan jumps some fifteen feet from one skyscraper to another to escape the gangsters in one scene and rolls all over the ground to avoid flying glass in another. Lee senses who will try to attack him and from which direction, whereas Chan seems vulnerable, and he gets hurt easily like anybody else. Similarly, while Lee glorifies violence as a moment of justice and triumph, Chan avoids bloodshed by all means. In a sense, if Lee reinforces and articulates masculinity as necessary and important to the representation of Asian and Asian Ameri-can men in a political sense, then Chan humanizes the Asian and Asian American male and unwittingly challenges the stereotypes perpetuated by Orientalism in the process.
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Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker make a comedic pair in Rush Hour 2.
In his crossover hit Rush Hour, Chan brings his philosophy of the Kung Fu comedy to Hollywood and tries to embrace the multicultural rhetoric of the United States. Set in Los Angeles and Hong Kong, the film revolves around the plot of rescuing the kidnapped daughter of the Chinese consul general in L.A., whom Chan had befriended as a police officer in Hong Kong. Chan and Chris Tucker team up and play the lead roles in the film. As in Rumble in the Bronx, when Chan's character Lee comes to Los Angeles to rescue Consul Han's daughter, he creates a situation in which Asian stereo-types are deployed for comic effects. He does not speak English to Tucker's character Carter at the airport, and he allows the latter to assume that he does not speak the language or understand the culture. Similarly, Lee repeats Carter's greeting to his black buddies and creates many funny situations. In turning racial issues into comic moments, Chan downplays the question of politics and suggests that everything should be fun. When it turns out that Lee speaks English and enjoys American popular music, which becomes a point of communication and understanding, Lee teaches Carter Kung Fu punches and tricks, and the latter demonstrates how to perform African American music. Finally, although excluded from the FBI operation, Lee and Carter take matters into their own hands and save the kidnapped girl. In playing such racial jokes, Chan again tones down the political implication of the film and makes nothing sacred and everything comic.
Kung Fu Comedy and the Body Politic Inside Out
It would be wrong to assume that Jackie Chan deconstructs Lee's hard body and tough guy image without considering the issue of Asian and Asian American masculinity. As a matter of fact, Chan devises his own way of carrying on Lee's tradition and redefining Asian masculinity. Both as a strategy to market himself and a gesture to compete with the hard bodies of Hollywood, Chan has constantly exposed himself to the media on both sides of the Pacific and highlighted the fact that he always does his own stunts and uses his own body, not special effects, as a means of attracting his audiences. Chan creates two personas here. On the one hand, there is the "soft" Chan on screen, who runs away from trouble, gets hurt easily in escape, and wins the fight purely by luck. On the other hand, there is the real "tough" Chan off screen, who defies death by jumping from one skyscraper to another or by dangling under a helicopter. All the escaping episodes and fighting sequences in which Chan has really risked his own life constitute an important part of his strategy in reinventing himself and reconstructing masculinity.
In her interview with Chan entitled "Return of the Dragon," Lynette Clemetson highlights Chan's sense of masculinity, which has been pitted directly against that of U.S. action heroes and their "softness" in resorting to special effects. Chan makes a direct comment on this issue himself:
"In American movie now, walking is special effect, talking is special effect, everything special effect. And American heroes never scared. Put a gun to their head, they say 'shoot me, shoot me.' But I'm not a superhero, I'm a real human being," Chan proclaims with a couple of thumps to his well-muscled chest which he is consciously displaying now, jacket off, maroon turtleneck tight against his shoulders. With special effects, he adds, "You can be superwoman. You can lift a car up. That's special effects. Everybody can be a superman, but nobody can be a Jackie Chan. My body is my special effects." Here Chan jumps up, throws a few lightning punches, then dances to and fro, showing off some very fancy footwork. (Clemetson 47)
Like Lee, Chan focuses on his Kung Fu hero's physical body and gives priority to agility, skill, and performance. But unlike Lee, all this practice is meant to create a more humane dimension of his hero, not a superhero in Lee's sense nor a special-effect superman as created by Hollywood action cinema. Moreover, Chan knows that he has taken an upper hand in his competition with his American action hero counterparts precisely because he has shown the fantasy of masculinity inside out and portrayed masculinity in more realistic terms. In other words, Chan pushes Lee's body politic in an opposite direction, but he achieves Lee's effect just the same. It is in this sense that Clemetson values his warm personality and realistic approach as compared with the superheroes created by Stallone and Schwarzenegger: "A self-proclaimed martial-arts amalgamation of his screen idols Buster Keaton and Gene Kelly, Chan's onscreen warmth is a welcome contrast to the stoic, often icy heroes portrayed by the stars such as Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger" (47).
Moreover, Chan deploys his body's vulnerability as a strategy to market himself and promote his uniqueness in the action cinema. In a 1995 special report in the New York Times entitled "Faster than a Speeding Bullet, but Also Humanly Fallible," Neil Strauss captures another side of Chan when the latter narrates his experience of doing his own stunts and enduring the ordeal of life and death:
"I have many permanent injuries," he said, "I can't hear properly out of my right ear because of the Yugoslavia accident, and then there's the problems with my head, my brain, my shoulder: oh, I can't tell you, from the head to toes. All those years of doing stunts." (C13)
In glorifying his injuries and foregrounding his courage in facing real-death situations despite his status as a superstar and a multimillionaire in East Asia, Chan makes another gesture to appeal to global audiences and to challenge his American counterparts. In another interview with David Richards, Chan makes a direct appeal: " I just want audience to know my movies, appreciate my movies,' he says, 'I break my arm. I break my leg. I almost die. Now, all my efforts I put into movie I want to present to audience. Even for free' " (G6).
Indeed, in the end of his films, Chan always includes outtakes that feature some stunts gone wrong. In Rumble in the Bronx, Chan selects the scene in which he hurts his ankle as he jumps from one skyscraper to another without much protection. Rather than just showing the failed scene, Chan wants to prove himself as courageous but vulnerable, funny but admirable, and superman-like but still human. Chan has now become more confident with the Hollywood film industry as shown in his interview with Amy Wallace of Los Angeles Magazine:
In Hollywood, last year somebody is the biggest. This year, gone! But me? After 30 years in the film business-not necessarily in the United States but in Asia -I'm always on the top. There must be a reason. The audience, they trust me. No matter how the movies change, I never change. (20)
In telling the insider's stories to the outsider and showing off his body both inside and outside his films, Chan not only challenges the Orientalist construction of the Asian male body as being "soft" but also deconstructs the hard body of the American action cinema as both a fantasy and an illusion.
Of course, Chan's challenge to the hard body of the American action cinema should be considered more in artistic and commercial terms than in political and cultural ones. Because of that, Chan sometimes creates his sense of humor at the expense of women and other racial minorities, as in Rush Hour 2, in which Chan and Chris Tucker team up again to look for the murderer of Chan's father, a former Hong Kong police officer. When Chan brings Tucker to a massage parlor, an equivalent of a brothel, there is an unnecessary moment that objectifies young Asian women as passive, obedient, and eager to pamper any man, white or black, yellow or brown. Such a scene certainly evokes such Orientalist films as The World of Susie Wong. Second, when Zhang Xiyi, a well-known Chinese actress, plays a villainness, she doesn't really have anything to perform; she blows up the American office housed in the Hong Kong customs building and shoots people in cold blood. What we see here is the revival of the stereotype of the dragon lady, played and popularized by Anna May Wong. Finally, when Tucker uses the counterfeit money he has stolen from the bad guys in the Red Dragon Casino on the Vegas Strip, he gets into trouble with the bouncers who seem to have Mafia connections. Tucker parodies Martin Luther King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech, and wants the casino owner to recognize his right as an African American man to gamble. Although such objectification of women and appropriation of African American political tradition may not be Chan's intention or practice, at least the superstar never raises any questions about these strategies. In fact, similar scenes might be found in Chan's Hong Kong-made films in which women serve as objects of men's desires or as minor problems in Chan's way to accomplish his mission. Similarly, Africans and native Americans have also been deployed as a means of highlighting Chan's own sophistication and masculinity as in films such as Who Am I? and Shanghai Noon.
Kung Fu Film, Hollywood Industry, and the Global Economy
Although Chan challenges the hard bodies of the American action cinema and questions the Orientalist construction of the Asian body in Hollywood, his relationship to Hollywood is complicated. In fact, Chan needs Hollywood for the American market as much as Hollywood wants Chan's unique skills and talents to maximize its own profits. In their essay "Action Films from Hong Kong Knock out Hollywood," Peter Stein and Lisa Bannon report that Hollywood showed interest in the Hong Kong action cinema and made an effort in marketing the Kung Fu film in the United States:
Miramax is picking up hit Hong Kong movies and dubbing them into English for the U.S. market, as is Turner Broadcasting System Inc.'s New Line Cinema unit. Others, like Sony Corp's Columbia TriStar Pictures and News Corp's Twentieth Century Fox, are making movies in the U.S. featuring Hong Kong stars and directors. (B1)
Hollywood's venture and interest in the Hong Kong cinema is further analyzed in David Ansen's report "Movies: Chinese Takeout" in Newsweek. Ansen considers the Kung Fu film in terms of global entertainment and discusses Hollywood's involvement in the genre as a matter of sharing profits and rejuvenating its own declining business:
It was inevitable: in the rapidly shrinking world of global entertainment, Hollywood was destined to discover Hong Kong. Can a vampire resist fresh blood? Can an industry that always goes where action is-think how Hollywood gobbled up virtually every hot Australian director in the '70s and '80s-turn its back on an industry whose products are even more thrill-happy than its own? Action is where action is today, and Hong Kong, the second-largest exporter of movies in the world, has been churning out some of the most exuberant mayhem since Bruce Lee clenched his fists of fury. (66)
While focusing his investigation primarily on Hollywood's efforts in appropriating the Hong Kong action cinema for its own profits, Ansen notices that Hong Kong itself has become a major exporter of movies to the world and has developed its own agenda for marketing the Kung Fu film on a global scale. If Chan and his films have been part of this global economy, how do we reconsider his popularity and that of his Kung Fu comedies?
In his critique of the global economy "Sites of Resistance in the Global Economy," Masao Miyoshi argues that the profit principle of transnational corporations has destroyed the local and regional cultures throughout the world and converted everything possible into an attractive commodity. In this process of globalization and commercialization, he further suggests, national culture becomes increasingly irrelevant, and in its place multiculturalism emerges as a tradeable commodity. Miyoshi uses the film industry as an example of his argument:
All major films are produced for the world market, transcending the local idiosyncrasies. And people's everyday life, where "difference" is vital and significant, is ignored. In the international bazaar of exportable goods, difference is only as in clothing, cooking, or entertainment. (69-70)
Miyoshi's mapping of the global economy and culture offers insight into rethinking what multiculturalism really is in Chan's films. First, rather than promoting what Peter McLaren calls "critical multiculturalism" (i.e., an awareness of "the construction of difference and identity in relation to a radical politics" [126]), diversity in Chan's work becomes a matter of management of differences and identities. A kind of "multicultural management" is thus produced to minimize any potential antagonism in terms of race, gender, class, nation, history, and religion, and to accommodate the tastes and needs of the urban middle class globally. It is precisely against this multicultural management that David Gonzalez problematizes Chan's Rumble in the Bronx for having most of the scenes filmed in Vancouver, British Columbia, instead of the Bronx, and unrealistically portraying the gang members in the movie: "The result is a Bronx bordered by mountains, dotted with skyscrapers and ruled by a cheesy multi-ethnic motorcycle gang that wreaks havoc on Mr. Chan and his supermarket while assaulting viewers with costumes recycled from a 1980's break-dance musical" (23).
In the end, Rumble in the Bronx was made for a global market that transcends local and regional differences. It is preoccupied with a brand of multiculturalism that promotes a myth of inclusion and reflects the viewpoint of the transnational urban middle class. Precisely because of this, we have a multiethnic motorcycle gang, as well as costumes recycled from a 1980s break-dance musical in the film. In this way, it doesn't really matter whether the setting is New York, Vancouver, or Sydney because the basic formula remains the same. Also, most critics and audiences consider Chan's very presence in the United States to be an articulation of Asian values and a reinforcement of multiculturalism.
Most important, Chan's films have been commodified and assimilated into the global economy. He talks about the global market as if he were an insider and outsider, all at the same time:
Before, I want to break into the American market. I go to America. I make movies. The directors all want me to change, not to be like the Jackie Chan way, but their way. So, I do it, because I want the American market. Then the film comes out and [it's] not popular in America or Asia! My own film is a big hit in Hong Kong and also seen all over the world. So I think: "I'm already a big star in Asia. More people in Asia than America. Forget American market." (qtd. in Logan 66-67)
As a one-time outsider, Chan has now positioned himself inside the mainstream film industry and has attracted attention from critics and audiences alike in Hong Kong and North America. According to Amy Wallace, "Chan has committed to make several other Hollywood movies, from Shanghai Knights to The Tuxedo. He's courting a new generation of fans with Jackie Chan Adventures, the WB network's most popular Saturday-morning cartoon" (23). In this sense, Chan can now call himself a true Hollywood superstar in a way that Brace Lee never could.
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[Sidebar]
Action as performance and performance as action have indeed become the language of the Kung Fu cinema.
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[Sidebar]
Chan revised Lee's life-is-Kung-Fu philosophy into his Kung-Fu-is-fun worldview.
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Chan wants to prove himself as courageous but vulnerable, funny but admirable, and superman-like but still human.