On a crisp autumn night in 1860, more than three thousand British troops set fire to the Qing emperor’s summer residence in Beijing, destroying the entire palace and, along with it, China’s preëminence in the world order. A century and a half later, Jackie Chan, China’s most famous fighter, was in New York to pick up a Star Asian Lifetime Achievement Award and promote the North American release of his hundred and first film, “12CZ” (also known as “Chinese Zodiac”), which depicts the historical humiliation.
Dressed in a silk mandarin-collared black suit and square wire-framed glasses, Chan—action star, comedian, and, lately, cultural envoy for the Chinese government—chatted with a small group of solemn-looking Chinese businessmen and Hong Kong dignitaries before his appearance at the Walter Reade Theatre, at Lincoln Center. He told his guests that he’d been doing a lot of flying recently, “going here, and there, and then there,” he said, his hands swooping through the air.
Twelve hours earlier, for example, Chan had been in L.A., cementing prints of his hands in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, meeting with Hollywood executives, and reading scripts (“Rush Hour 4”? “I said no!”). The next day, he would be off to film festivals in Toronto, Beijing, India (“on behalf of the government”), and, then, back to Shanghai. One of the businessmen nodded his approval and commended, in Mandarin, “All for the purpose of spreading Chinese culture!”
A door swung open and another man in a dark suit and wire-rimmed glasses walked in, who an assistant hurried to introduce: “This is the Consul General of China, Sun Guoxiang.”
“Hello, hello,” Chan said, extending a hand. “Did you like the movie?”
“I liked it,” Guo said. “We hosted a screening at the embassy.”
“I’ve been telling him to make this film forever. It’s the best storyline,” a thick voice boomed from across the table. “12CZ” is a reference to twelve famous bronze statues representing the Chinese Zodiac that were looted from Beijing’s Old Summer Palace by the British and French during China’s defeat in the Second Opium War. The film, which Chan wrote, directed, and co-produced, uses the popular national grievance as the basis for an action caper: a Chinese treasure hunter, played by Chan, sets out to find the lost heads for purely mercenary reasons, but finds, by the didactic climax, his allegiance to the motherland instead. (The film broke box-office records on the mainland but posted mediocre sales elsewhere.)
Chan laughed. “Remember when we were in London brainstorming the script?” He slapped the table. “And after the film came out, of course, the French had to give the heads back,” he said, alluding to a set of rabbit and rat heads donated by a businessman to the new Chinese President, Xi Jinping, and the French President, François Hollande, who visited China back in April.
Chan said that more zodiac heads, apparently, were waiting to be claimed. He’d received a mysterious fax from a man who claimed to know the location of five bronze heads that were never recovered.
“He wrote that he had been trying for years to be taken seriously, but the movie would finally give him legitimacy,” Chan said. “He wanted witnesses to notarize the fact that he had told me this great secret. I said to myself, Who notarizes?”
After the mingling session, Chan and his entourage took a private elevator to a dressing room to wait for the ceremony to start. Chan plopped himself on a couch, ignoring the Twinings green tea that a staff member had produced.
“Oh God, where is the award?” someone said.
A woman tottered into the room in heels, balancing a blue velvet box on her forearms. Another walked in behind her, with a giant long-zoom camera around her neck, and asked if it was a good time for pictures.
Chan, surveying the pre-show chaos, periodically contributed comments in a mishmash of English, Mandarin, and Cantonese, the language of his native Hong Kong.
“I’ve forgotten how to speak Cantonese!” he said. In Beijing, where he lives now, Mandarin is spoken. He leaned over to a young Chinese-American visitor nearby. “A bilingual speaker like you should look around in China. There are so many jobs in China.”
He went on, thoughtfully: “In a good corporation, you can find lots. They need bilingual folks like you in China, in Hong Kong…”
The question of proficiency in Cantonese, the dialect spoken by more than eighty-nine per cent of Hong Kong’s population, received a vigorous shake of the head. “Who speaks Cantonese anymore? No one speaks Cantonese! I don’t even speak Cantonese! I speak Mandarin now,” Chan said.
To illustrate his point, Chan did exaggerated imitations of Shandongese and Shanghaiese, dialects spoken on the mainland: “See, I have a gift for languages,” he said.
A man carrying a radio came in and said, “Five minutes.”
Chan got up and continued to extol life in Beijing. But what about the city’s sky-obscuring pollution? The star maintained that it wasn’t a big problem. “There are some countries you go to where there is no pollution, but you are still unhappy,” Chan said, gesticulating with an open palm. “Then there are other countries where you are always happy, no matter the weather. Beijing is like that. I’m living there now, and I don’t care about all that pollution. The sunshine is absolutely fantastic.”
SOURCE: NEWYORKER.COM
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