by KENNETH LI
Photographed by Haruka
A Magazine Inside Asian America
June/July 1996

Thanks Nameless!

Picture of CYF on the cover with following title:

The Hitman Chow Yun Fat is shooting for Hollywood stardom
Is America ready for the coolest actor in the world?

He's been a lethal two-gun killer, a thief with a heart of gold, a romeo with an irresistible devil's grin Now Chow Yun-Fat, Hong Kong's coolest actor, is up for the role of his life: Hollywood superstar

Ho: Do you believe in God?
Mark: I am God. God is human. Anyone can be God, if he controls his life.
Ho: But sometimes you couldn't.
Mark: When you gamble, you either win or lose. [cigarette drag, smile]

True confession: Chow Yun-Fat, my first hero, was the reason I flunked out of Chinese school. Every Friday night at home, bootlegs of The Bund-nine 40-minute episodes to a tape-seized six hours of my life, enfolding me in the television grip of Chow as mop-topped Chinese refuge, Chow as rags-to-riches Shanghai triad boss, Chow as Icarus, plunging from neon grace into the Free City’s back-alley depths. And Chinese school was Saturday mornings. Who had time to study?

So it’s all too ironic that, interviewing Chow in a presidential-sized suite at New York’s plush Peninsula Hotel, we must struggle with each question-handicapped by my adolescent Chinese and his still-in-progress English.

He’s in town to kick off a film retrospective in his tribute, "Chow Yun-Fat: The Hero with a Thousand Faces." The 14-film, three-week traveling show is a celebration of the best of Chow's cinematic opus, and also a kind of memorial: The man who was once my sole link to my homeland has left the Crown Colony, possibly forever.

Chow's cult of worshippers in the West knows only one of his faces-the one carved from granite, terror, and noise; the killer, the hard-boiled cop, the virtuoso of ultraviolence. Yet his Hong Kong canon actually shows an impressive breadth of range, from jaw-dropping comic tours de force to red-eyed melodrama of the first water. Chow’s challenge in America will be to ensure that all of his thousand faces don’t get compressed and condensed into one bloody cartoon.

And perhaps that's the reason why today, Chow seems to be testing a new face on me. It's his God of Gamblers poker face, with a twist: eyes squinting as if to scrutinize the situation, an occasional flash of Cheshire Cat grin, and then, back to blankness. This is Chow away from the gaze of the lens and the glare of the spotlight: quiet, reserved, humble, but almost cold. Make that the Hero with a Thousand and One faces.

His speech is measured, and his diction is sometimes elusive. Struggling through the nuances and syllabic pitfalls of a new language, Chow the man stands in stark contrast to Chow the icon-the decibel-abusive Hong Kong Dai Lo, the ever-confident gangster striding the tenuous line between manners and mayhem. His legs are crossed, his brow furrowed, his face drawn in deep concentration, as he searches for the right broken English responses to my broken Chinese queries. While we wrestle with the agonies of interpretation, I half expect him to hurl his six-foot, size 52 frame over the glasses of Evian in slo-mo fury, whip a pistol to my temple, slam a bottle of whisky next to the fancy water, and demand that I recite the capitals to all 50 states.

Instead he asks, "How do you like it here in America, Ken?" The politeness is jarring. It shows how life has changed for Southeast Asia’s most beloved dramatic actor. Here in America, where he shuttles from Hollywood studio to studio schmoozing with high-power execs in relative anonymity, he has found solace from the cockfight intensity of Hong Kong cinema. In their new California home, the star of 70-odd films and hundreds of hours of television finally has the time, as wife Jasmine Chow says, to "help with the house chores."

To really know Yun-Fat, you have to talk to Jasmine. Since October 1984, when they speed-wed in New York after Chow wrapped production on An Autumn’s Tale, the Singaporean ex-businesswoman and self-professed "traditional wife" manages Chow’s life and career with active interest and incredible stamina. She choreographs his appointments, acts as traffic cop for information on (or access to) her beleaguered husband, and combines the roles of publicist, business partner, and personal manager into one dynamic package. "People say I'm tough, but that’s the wife’s job," she says. Later on in the evening she passes around a jar of macadamia nuts.

It is she who brings us Chow face number One Thousand and Two. This much she reveals of their life together: An aproned Yun-Fat taking out the garbage, ironing clothing, washing the dishes; sweating out his English lessons, more garbage and dishes; TV, script reading, any dishes left? And on his days off, there’s hiking at nearby Topenga Canyon.

"He has a book that lists all the trails," says Jasmine. "It's not dangerous-he stays on the very low ones." Ouch. A domesticated Chow is something this die-hard fan is not quite ready for. But it’s reality, which always punches through perception like a wide-bore round through a rice-paper screen. "He's a totally different guy from what you see in the movies," she continues. "He's always portrayed as very romantic. He's not. He's a very earthy guy. When he likes you he doesn't say he loves you or buy you flowers or anything. But the little things that he does are enough to prove that he's a good husband." So Chow is a closet romantic with sensible shoes. One Thousand and Three.

Though Chow is decades away from his sunset days, his life is quieter now than it's been in years-or, perhaps more accurately, he’s in the calm between storms. Jasmine points to a difficult, not-so-distant time in their lives, when she suffered a miscarriage in the final stages of pregnancy. She saw it as a sign from God that they should put off a real domestic life. Instead, they both agreed, he would focus on his career with renewed vigor. Even if it meant learning a new language and coming to America-starting over, in essence, from scratch. But the Hero of a Thousand and Three Faces is used to reinventing himself. He grew up in a poor family on backwater Lamma Island, and dropped out of school early to help put food on the table. He proceeded to juggle dead-end jobs as a postman, a camera salesman, a bellboy, and an office boy, until, in the early '70's, he saw a newspaper ad promising "free" acting training at Sir Run Run Shaw's TVB studios. Answering the ad on a whim, he was accepted-and wallowed in bit parts at slave pay for years, until he finally broke through with starring roles in television serials like Man in the Net and Hotel in the late '70's. His role as 1930's Shanghai triad boss Hui Man-Keung in 1981's The Bund represented the apex of his television career, drawing him his first significant attention from audiences, and allowing him to perfect his trademark Dai Lo swagger. (Less notably, around this time he dabbled in pop music, in accordance with Hong Kong superstar-wannable tradition. A poorly received album and a less-than-enthusiastic response from audiences prompted a quick retreat. "No one would come see me sing," says Chow. This remains one of his cleverest career decisions to date.)

In the late '70's, he also managed to break into films, appearing in over a dozen forgettable genre retreads. It wasn't until 1981's The Story of Woo Viet, directed by then-rookie New Wave auteur Ann Hui, that a flash of his cinematic promise surfaced. In Woo Viet, he played a Vietman war refugee who attempts to steal his way to Hong Kong, but is unexpectedly detoured to the Philippines. There, to save a refugee girl tricked into prostitution (played by frequent costar Cherie Chung), he double-guns his way to a climactic finale. While the action was tailored for commercial appeal, beneath the flying bullets was a character with a pathos and vulnerability never before seen in a male Hong Kong lead. Audiences ate it up, and were primed for a second helping in Leong Po-chih's apocalyptic wartime drama Hong Kong, 1941 (1984). Once again, Chow played a sensitive action hero, a Northerner who migrates to Hong Kong, befriends a neighborhood coolie, and steals his epileptic girl's heart-then sacrifices everything in order to help his new friends survive.

Hong Kong won Chow Best Actor kudos from the Asian Pacific Film Festival and Taiwan's prestigious Golden Horse Awards. Suddenly, he was an actor with critical acclaim and commercial promise-but he wasn't yet a star. That would all change when he met the man who more than anyone would shape his cinematic image, a filmmaker then famous for his skill at slapstick farce-John Woo.

Shortly after Hong Kong, 1941, Chow's career had taken an unexpected nosedive, as a string of box office disasters whittled away at his hard-earned marquee value. Woo, shackled to his reputation as a comedy director, was in a similar situation, having attempted to jump-start a non-comic filmmaking career in Taiwan and failed with a resounding thud. "We found that we had the same kind of experiences," says Woo. "Our movies were flopping. We were looked down on by people. And I never let anyone look down on me."

The problem, Woo believed, was not the quality of their work, but Hong Kong itself. The city had changed during Woo’s two-year Taiwanese sabbatical. "The whole society seemed to have lost something," Woo remembers. "There was a lack of values, of morality, especially among young people-they had no role models to follow. They seemed to have lost their own character."

Woo felt a need to remind an increasingly nihilistic Hong Kong audience of the true essence of Chinese heroism, of what a modern "Chinese knight" should represent. One day, as he was flipping through the local papers, Woo came across a story about an actor who had recently donated money to an orphanage. "A man with that kind of heart," he recalls, "was the man I wanted." In Chow, he'd found his knight in shining armor. Together, they would make the film that would father an entire genre of modern gangster films: A Better Tomorrow.

In Woo’s melodrama of an aging gangster (Ti Lung) torn between his loyalty to family and to his Triad brotherhood, beneath Chow's cool killer pose was the expression of Woo’s great vision: the Triad gangster as spiritual descendent of the ancient swordsman warrior. Tomorrow is a gangster film-perhaps the ultimate gangster film-but to those of us who grew up enthralled by the misty, mystical tales of the "martial world," Tomorrow was a transcendental folktale of sacrifice and valor, played out on the social margins of modern Hong Kong. It was also a box-office juggernaut, becoming Hong Kong's top-grossing film and propelling Woo and Chow to the airy heights or stardom.

There's an autobiographical line in the movie that brings tears to Woo’s eyes every time he screens it. Chow and Ti Lung are careening along a mountain road, running for their lives, when they decide to pull over for a quick smoke. Ti Lung suddenly expresses his remorse at returning to the criminal life, prompting an incensed and bloody Chow to scream in response, "I’ve failed for three years! If I have the opportunity, I only want to get back what I've lost!" This piece of dialogue would prove to be the bond that tied moviemaker to muse forever. "When Chow Yun-Fat read the line, he was moved. He said to me, "That line represents me. That line says what I feel." reminisces Woo. It should come as no surprise that Tomorrow is Chow and Woo's favorite film to date. "That line represented the both of us," Woo says. "At that moment, I realized that I had found a real friend."

Into the early '90's, Woo and Chow would continue to craft paradoxical allegories of blood and brotherhood, loyalty and honor such as The Killer and Hard-Boiled, to resounding critical and box-office success. When the two worked together, they were untouchable-a legendary teamup that Woo likes to compare to duos like De Niro and Scorcese, or Kurosawa and Mifune. But even in films not directed by his mentor, Chow excelled. He became a star of incomparable proportions, beloved throughout Asia and even to a burgeoning cult audience in the West, where his legend soon rivaled that of another Chinese denizen of the marital world: Bruce Lee.

The Dragon was ultimately consumed by his own obsessions, but the Chinese Knight has the opportunity to do what Bruce never could: beat Hollywood at its own game, by reinventing himself for the West without losing his soul. Although he's 40 years old, Chow is aware of the pitfalls,, and has decided to take his own sweet time. "The most important thing about my first film is that the script is good, and that the movie does not portray Asians in a negative light," he says. "I want more American fans, but at the same time I don't want to neglect Asian audiences. I want to find a middle ground that can make the Hong Kong audience accept my first American film. That's why we have to spend so much time to choose the right role."

Stereotyped or cliché roles don't hold any interest for Chow, and so a gaggle of writers have scurried back and forth from the drawing board since last July, when he and Jasmine first took up residence near Century City. But if there's a right role among the handful of potentials, trust in the Chows and manager Terence Chang to find it. "From Bruce Lee to Jackie Chan to Jet Li, they were all actions stars," says Chang, who served as producer for Woo and Chow's many Hong Kong collaborations. "Chow can be an action star, but he can be a lot more. His appeal is much broader; he can do comedies and drama. I think that's rare."

Still, there’s the language problem-no small handicap for anyone who's winced through the "Sure! Sure! Of course! Of course!" of Chow's brief English "dialogue" in A Better Tomorrow. It's an especially difficult hurdle for someone who aspires to line-heavy dramatic roles. As a result, he's been practicing two hours a day with a private tutor, five days a week. "I spend a lot of time to practice and understand the lines." says Chow, articulating every consonant. "It's very important." Jasmine, always supportive, agrees: "He has never in his life studied so hard." No small feat for a man who never graduated from high school.

Meanwhile, his team pores over scripts for his first Hollywood vehicle. Among the hopefuls include several wildly disparate action film scenarios. One of the most promising is Columbia Pictures' The Replacement Killer. In it, Chow would play an aging assassin who decides to protect rather than eliminate his fetching female victim, and thus becomes a target himself. Then there's Alpha Ville's X/LA, a futuristic meditation on the L.A. riots, as well as the Oliver Stone-produced The Corruptor, about the relationship between a wayward elder cop and a wet-behind-the-ears rookie, set in Chinatown. ("It’s about friendship, betrayal, those kinds of things," explains Chang.) More of a stretch is Anna and the King, a "comedy of manners" and dramatic interpretation of the novel on which Roger and Hammerstein's The King and I was based. (If there is a God - and it ain't Chow - he won't be singing in it.)

But the pic everyone is really waiting for will be Chow's Hollywood reunion with Woo: The Burning Pit, described by Chang as an "ensemble piece of five characters." The script is currently undergoing rewrites by James Brady, who scribed the classic Six Days of the Condor. Set in 1920's Butte, Montana, the story presages the 1928 massacre in which an entire town of Chinese immigrant miners were slaughtered by jealous white claim-jumpers. "You know, it was very racist," says Chang. Chow will play a Chinatown gangster. Expect him to kick some Klan butt.

And don't tell Chow, but Woo has even more in store for him the next few years. In one untitled script, Chow would play a Hong Kong cop in America-admittedly, not much of a dramatic stretch. In another, Woo pays homage to French director Jean Herman in a "film about a heist" inspired by Honor Among Thieves (Adieu L'ami). In Herman's 1968 original, two thieves played by a young Charles Bronson and French icon Alain Delon are trapped in a building. Grudgingly, they conspire to crack a safe together. Delon, one of John Woo’s idols, was "very handsome, elegant, and noble-like Chow Yun-Fat," says Woo. Both films will probably be made at Fox.

The prospects are many and the promise is great, but Chow has no interest in riding in on the coattails of the Hollywood/Hong Kong hype. He has yet to sign on the dotted line for anything. Which means that American audiences will have to wait a little longer for the modern Chinese knight to ride onto the big screen. and when he does, perhaps then-with Chow out of Chinatown video store dens and whisked into American multiplexes, kids won’t have to flunk out of Chinese school to get their taste of cool.

©1996 A Magazine Inside Asian America. All rights reserved.