It is no surprise that Jackie Chan’s memoir does not tell a clean tale. He has a dark side. In fact, everybody has it - some are just darker than others. There’s no perfection, just degree of imperfections in our life.
Here’s the tally for those bent on keeping karmic scores?
Jackie Chan admitted to a time when he abused a child. In his memoir Never Growing Up, it reports that “his fans will likely be shocked to learn that the action star once threw another toddler - his own son, Jaycee - across the room during an argument with his wife, former actress Lin Feng-jiao.”
But Jaycee was not hurt as he landed on a sofa.
Yet, that’s not all. Jackie Chan further admitted that he “used to visit prostitutes and drive when he was drunk. Once, he crashed a Porsche in the morning and a Mercedes-Benz later at night.”
And his marriage with Lin was not exactly unblemished either. It was a marriage not so much out of love as it is out of necessity. She was pregnant in 1981. So, to legitimise it, they registered their marriage.
However, he was paranoid over Lin because “he believed his friends when they told him Lin might have got pregnant on purpose.” As such, he “constantly thought of ways to keep (his) money from her.”
Then came the affair. He broke Lin’s heart when “he had an affair with actress and former Miss Asia, Elaine Ng.” They had a love child from that illicit affair.
Although the memoir is quiet about the affair, Jackie Chan told Lin and Jaycee this: “I’ve made an unforgivable mistake and I don’t know how to explain it, so I won’t.”
Jackie Chan recalled that Jaycee just stared at him when he confessed while Lin cried. But they had over time forgiven him.
Lesson? I guess tallying life’s scores like this can go on and on for a life as complicated as Jackie’s.
He is a multimillionaire, world renown, and I would expect such a life to be a sizzling magnet not just for media attention and scrutiny, but also controversies, scandals and temptations of all earthly kinds.
Jackie Chan “pins his wildlife down to his work as a stuntman.” He wrote that “we all knew that if something went wrong, we wouldn’t live to see the sun rise the next day. We had a short-term mentality, which means recklessly spending our money.” And that accounted for his splurging on “gambling and prostitutes.”
So, there you have it, it is a life (at 64 and still counting) with all the ingredients of a good movie plot, that is, action packed, drama filled and seedy as usual. Well, they say fact is stranger than fiction, but in Jackie’s case, it is hands-down juicier too.
Some may call it our “skeletons in the closet”, while others call it our dark side, but whichever way you cut it, our secret life and the mental processes that run through it is always the massive iceberg underneath the seemingly calm waters.
It is an undeniable fact that what is conscientiously projected in public is seldom what happens most habitually in private, and for this reason, it is convenient to call it the hypocrisy gap. But maybe, we might just want to consider calling it the ”being-human” gap.
It is curious that being human invariably comes with many rules and regulations about how to live our lives. Religion composes it. Society presupposes it. Our government in maintaining law and order superimposes it.
And needless to say, we break any of them with dire consequences to our conscience, to our reputation, and to our freedom.
But the truth about life, as Jackie Chan’s 64 years has shown, is that the greatest test of our character is not so much how we try our darnest to live up to them (rules and laws and all), but what becomes of us when we fail to live up. Do we then continue in our destructive ways or do we turn around and change?
As a human being, expect to disappoint, expect to fall and stumble, and expect to do things we will regret, and for some of us, regret most painfully.
But if God has us a lifetime to get it right, or at least come to our senses, then don’t expect to change in an instant. And we should always be wary of such confession of overnight transformation, because that which is given a lifetime to live out invariably takes a lifetime to change for good.
In the end, Jackie Chan had a point when he said “I’ve made an unforgivable mistake and I don’t know how to explain it, so I won’t.”
Some deeds done are indeed beyond explanation. No words suffice because it is the life lived thereafter that counts more than any explanation one can ever offer.
That is the finest and truest test of our character. It is a test that comes closest to closing the hypocrisy or “being-human” gap.
And I believe that we will get it right one day - for in this journey of life that each of us is accountable for, it should never be our failings that define us. Instead, it is our comebacks, however long it takes, that should inspire us all. Cheerz.
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