The first Jackie Chan movie I watched last April was Fearless Hyena, Jackie Chan’s directorial debut, made in 1979 when he was around 25 years old.1 This is the one that hooked me and launched my Jackie Chan viewing marathon. Do not get distracted by the title. There is neither a fearless nor a frightened hyena in this movie. There are, in fact, no hyenas whatsoever. Instead, the movie is about a badly-behaved grandson whose grandfather is a kung fu master passing along his skills. I usually don’t linger on the plots of Jackie Chan movies, but this one has something to relish every step of the way, all the way into the arms of my uncle Doug, so stick with me.
Jackie Chan’s family practices a style of kung fu from a school whose members are being summarily hunted and eliminated. He is not supposed to reveal his skills, lest he expose their whereabouts, but he cannot help himself. On the sly, he begins fighting in disguises at a bogus local kung fu school for money. Unfortunately, true bumbler that he is, Jackie Chan literally writes the name of his grandfather’s secret kung fu style on the front sign of the mediocre spot that has hired him. Exactly the wrong person sees it.
The villain in Fearless Hyena is played by Yam Sai-kwoon, wearing long, silvery hair, a dramatic v-shaped widows peak, an especially evil glint in his eyes, and three erratic slugs of white hair for a mustache and eyebrows that all look like the same prop, glued in different direction on his face. Although his build is slight, when he walks, he reminds me of Bluto in Popeye the Sailor, chest forward, arms swinging. One of the many tropes I admire from this era of kung fu movies is the assumption that the elderly are super-powerful. The older you are, the more potent your kung fu becomes, like a Marmite of the spirit—dense, salty and odorous. When Yam sees the school’s sign, he is able to track down Jackie Chan’s grandfather. He murders him while Jackie Chan looks on in horror. Heart-broken, bereft, and hungry for revenge, Jackie Chan has to reckon with the fact that his kung fu is actually lousy and brash. Luckily, The Unicorn (actor Chan Wai-lau), a hobbled elderly hobo with a cane who comes from the same kung fu school as Jackie Chan’s grandfather, comes to the rescue, putting Jackie Chan through one of the most awe-inspiring training sequences I’ve ever seen.
The training sequence is the honeypot of a kung fu movie—sweet, golden, pure delight—and Fearless Hyena has one of my all-time favorites. There is slapstick comedy: Everyday household objects become the tools for training. Chan Wai-lau asks Jackie Chan to pick up a piece of pork from a bowl, and proceeds to do gymnastics with his adept chopsticks, always keeping the pork from entering Jackie Chan’s mouth. At another juncture, he trains Jackie Chan by requiring him to stand on pots and bowls, which he knocks out of his way using his cane, forcing Jackie to dance precariously throughout the room from one pot or bowl to the next. There’s also the supremely athletic, verging on masochistic: For what feels like an eternity we watch Jackie Chan, his feet tied to a post, his head hanging towards the ground facing the post, pull himself into a full sit-up like a jackknife, let his back smash into the wooden post, and then return to hanging—a knife opening, closing, bashing into wood, and then opening again. He does this for what feels like an inhumane amount of time. We are suspended in disbelief—both that he can physically do this feat, and that he can take this degree of pain. It feels uncomfortable but also real—for our pleasure as viewers in all the scenes to come, Jackie Chan the actor has had to master actions as mundane and brutal as this one. This is much closer to what his real life training sequences probably looked like.
Once again, an unassuming elderly person, in this case The Unicorn, Chan Wai-lau, is revealed to be the skillful teacher. It’s a reminder that there is so much to learn from our elders. This role, of master and mentor, is called shifu in Mandarin, sifu in Cantonese. The wizards of kung fu hide in plain sight as elderly men who are poor, disabled, inebriated. In this universe (and our own), no one should be underestimated.
Chan Wai-lau knows that Jackie Chan will not be able to defeat Yam with his family’s style, and so he introduces him to a new mode: Emotional kung fu. This is a very literal name: Enacting happiness, sorrow, joy, and anger, Jackie Chan learns how to transfer raw emotional energy into sequences of movements that create new fighting styles.
In the final fight scene, after exhausting his basic skills, Jackie Chan brings out his emotional kung fu, one emotion at a time. Happiness is an endless giggle attack. Jackie Chan doesn’t take any blows seriously because he is ceaselessly amused, limber in spirit and body. Sorrow looks like the desperation of a toddler who needs his parent—barely able to stand on his own legs, Jackie Chan repeatedly stomps over to Yam, only to collapse in his arms, dragging his weight to the ground. It’s a confusing attack because when he should be blocking, he is completely exposed, and when he should attack, he instead embraces and collapses. Joy comes as pure delight, hands clapping, movements sometimes like dancing a jig, sometimes like a tumbling acrobat. Unsurprisingly, anger is brutal. It briefly grants Jackie Chan a little more power in every kick, a little more cruelty in his actions. Jackie Chan wins because his opponent has become so frustrated and uncomfortable that he has taken down his guard. The emotions break through the veneer of cold-hearted power and reveal a beffudled old man who doesn’t know how to combat an opponent who is so raw. In a world where most men are socially only permitted a few emotions, most commonly smugness, disinterest, certainty, and anger, this sequence feels transgressive and wild.
Jackie Chan invented emotional kung fu for this movie, and it shows off his silly sense of humor and extraordinary physicality. Once again, our everyman wins not because he is wealthy or smart or even especially capable, but because he is persistent, willing to learn from old people, and always going for it 100 (wait, 1,000) percent. There’s a self-effacing quality to these storylines that in no way maps onto the physical performances, which are singular rather than generic. But the effect is inclusive. Emotional kung fu is a very literal exploration of the power of embracing rather than tamping down our most volatile emotions. One might even say it’s an enactment of the traditionally juvenile, hyper-feminine and hyper-masculine—the emotions that undo us, send us out of our rational minds into our bodies, our hearts, our feelings. And with this exploration comes a lesson, if you choose to read Jackie Chan’s victory literally: You too can embrace and channel your emotions. Emotions may in fact be your greatest secret weapon. Do not fear their intrusion; explore them; learn your varied strengths. The feelings that threaten to tear you apart might actually help you survive.
I could have learned this lesson another way. In fact, it didn’t sink all the way in until the past few weeks. For a week in early June and again over Father’s Day, I spent time with my uncle Doug in Port Townsend, Washington. When I was working on the proposal for Group Living, thinking about the arc of the book and what reporting I wanted to dive into, I realized I wanted to interview my uncle—a man with both a taste for Marmite and an old person’s Marmite spirit. Doug is built like the house builder he was for many decades: in his early seventies, he has a solid barrel chest and powerful, weathered hands with thick leathery skin. He usually wears a t-shirt with a message of peace or political protest (“People say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one,” it read on Sunday) under suspenders holding up large denim workpants that have always recently been in sawdust. His sparse hair, mustache, and eyebrows are white, gleaming against his sun-browned skin. His eyes are piercingly blue, like the sparks of a diamond blade that could cut through granite.
Doug has always been a searcher, going against the grain. He helped found Port Townsend’s first co-housing community; he built the first straw bale home in Washington; he ran for Senate on an anti-military abolitionist platform, in a region with some of the highest military funding in the country. He’s been arrested some ten times for nonviolent protest outside various military facilities. A longtime member of the peace community as well as a Quaker, Doug has a spirituality that is deeply political. He is a man of strong emotions and a raw spirit, easily effected by the brutality of the world but undaunted in his activism. He has fewer filters than most people I know to protect himself from the onslaught of knowledge about our largest global crises—nuclear war, environmental destruction, inequality, ceaseless militarism, poverty. He sees things on a macro scale and does not hide from his fury. He’s also very silly, goofy, playful. He makes funny faces and voices and says words pulled straight from cartoons—boink, splat, boom. As I am learning and writing about his experiences with communal living, I find myself getting pulled deeper and deeper into his politics and passions—this wild kung fu of acknowledging, harnessing, and then balancing the emotional extremes of sorrow, anger, frustration, and joy. I am learning the power of feeling your feelings deeply and with curiosity. Although I feel less raw and more closed off than he is, I am open to learning. If I am in training, which of course I am, he is one of my unassuming mentors—a secretly powerful old person who has been hiding in plain sight all along.
There was a sequel, Fearless Hyena 2, made by the studio that Jackie Chan left by breach of contract to join Golden Harvest. That departure got him in trouble with the triads—the Chinese mafia. It also caused his previous studio to make one of the worst, most nonsensical mashups of a film you cold imagine, using any stray footage they could find from various other movies they’d made with Jackie Chan, as well as a body double who lacks Jackie’s swishing Farrah Fawcett hair. Fearless Hyena 2 is terrible. Avoid!
I love the first round of training with his grandfather in the beginning of the movie using long bamboo sticks. they have the most hilarious names for different moves! And Jackie Chan's agility and athleticism is remarkable!