Jackie Chan cried after uncovering secret lives of drug smuggling mum and spy dad

Jackie Chan is one of the most beloved movie stars in the world, best known for his action-packed roles in films like Rush Hour and The Karate Kid.

But little is known about the actor’s personal life and that’s because for a long time, he didn’t know much about it himself either.

That was until he did some digging and discovered his real life was far more like the Hollywood movies he stars in than he ever could have imagined.

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Chan, 68, was born in Hong Kong after his parents fled mainland China when the communists rose to power in 1949.

The family migrated to Canberra, Australia in the early 60s but Chan ended up returning to Hong Kong to study at the China Drama Academy — where he established his skills in martial arts and acrobatics.

But what Chan didn’t know for most of his life is when his parents fled China, they left their other children behind.

Chan’s father, whose first wife died in 1947, had two other sons, while his mother, whose first husband was killed in a Japanese bombing raid, had two daughters.

For years no one knew what happened to the children but after rumours began swirling that Chan had been adopted and wasn’t using his real name, the actor decided to commission a documentary to delve into his family history.

While filming the 2003 documentary, Traces of the Dragon: Jackie Chan and His Lost Family, Chan discovered not only did he have siblings who were abandoned, but his own mother was once a legendary gambler and drug smuggler in the Shanghai underworld and his father had been a Nationalist spy and gangland boss.

In a tale that could easily be mistaken for the plotline of one of Chan’s blockbusters, Chan’s father revealed he first met the actor’s mother when he arrested her for smuggling opium.

Chan also discovered two of his brothers were still alive and had been living impoverished lives in mainland China.

Director Mabel Cheung, told The Guardian when the documentary was released that the family’s past shocked Chan.

She said: “The fact that his mother was an opium smuggler, a gambler and a big sister in the underworld was a big shock to Jackie and also to us.

“Everybody in Hong Kong knew that his mother was like a common housewife, very kind, very gentle.”

But these weren’t the only revaluations the crew uncovered after travelling to Australia to speak with Jackie’s father, who he knew as Chan Chi-Long.

His dad revealed Chan actually wasn’t his real name and he was really called Fang Daolang.

Fang soon became guarded and irritated around his son and the documentary crew, with Cheung saying: “He got very angry. He said, ‘If you know everything, why didn’t you ask me? You can find out from somebody else.’ Jackie had to intercede. He said, ‘I invited these guys to come. You’ve got to talk more.'”

But after being coaxed into opening up by karaoke and dancing with the crew, he began talking to them again and reluctantly told them about his wife’s opium smuggling past.

The documentary even captured Fang returning to mainland China to reunite with his two other sons, Shide and Shishen.

However, Fang, who died five years after the documentary aired, didn’t want his famous son to meet his two half-brothers and revealed their relationship with Chan was kept secret from their neighbours because he believed it would cause too much upheaval.

It might seem outlandish to Westerners, but Cheung said Chan’s story wasn’t uncommon in China.

“Every single Chinese family has a story more or less like this,” she said.

She revealed Chan cried several times when watching the rough cut of the documentary, which included footage of massacres and executions during 20th-century life in China, but he couldn’t bring himself to watch the completed film.

She suspects it may have been too painful for him to see, especially because it contains some of the last footage of his mother, who died in 2001.

“He was visualising for the first time how it must have been for his parents to survive during the wars. When you’re listening to the story, you don’t visualise that much, but when you see the actual footage, he actually got very emotional. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why he doesn’t want to see it again,” she said.

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Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk