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Please start out by explaining how you got to be “Jackie Chan” and how you got involved with writing his autobiography, I Am Jackie Chan.1 It’s a funny thing, because being Jackie Chan sounds a bit like Being John Malkovich [1999], doesn’t it? You step through a little door and appear in his head. I suppose that, figuratively, I did step through a little door, and I ended up in a very strange environment. In many ways, Jackie has to get up in the morning and decide to be Jackie Chan. So much of what he does in his daily life is the aggregate of years of construction. People expect him to be a Jackie Chan of a certain type, and he adopts that Jackie Chan every morning and puts it on like a face, and he does a fantastic job of it. Nobody could be a better Jackie Chan than he—including myself. That was a challenge for me, too, because, in accepting the assignment, I had to decide, or I had to be told, whether the book was meant to be from the position of Jackie Chan or “Jackie Chan.” Am I writing as Jackie Chan or am I writing as the “Jackie Chan” that Jackie Chan has decided to be, has created for himself, and that his fans have created for him? The book ultimately ended up being somewhere in between the two, somewhere between the simulacrum and the real. How it all started: I had been writing for the Village Voice while simultaneously publishing aMagazine[: Inside Asian America], and at aMagazine, we had done a book called Eastern Standard Time,2 which was sort of a compendium of different ways American or Western culture has looked at Asia. I received this call from a woman named Ling Lucas, who said she was a literary agent scouting on behalf of Ballantine Books. The phone call was very mysterious. She said, “Hi. My name is Ling Lucas. You don’t know who I am, but I’ve heard of you. I think there’s a project that would be ideal for you. I’d like to bring you Interview with Jeff Yang (New York City, July 2002) 60 Chapter 2 in for it, but I can’t tell you what it is right now. I just know that it’s something that you would very much like to do.” My response was, “This is the beginning of every bad spy movie.” I was intrigued enough to go “take a meeting,” as they say, and showed up at a conference room at Ballantine. As it turned out, they had acquired Jackie Chan’s autobiography. Do you mean by that a Chinese version of it, or do you mean a commitment from him for an oral history? It was like they’d bought into the franchise. They had a commitment from him to do his autobiography and to use his identity, his brand, and his story. However, they also knew that he neither had the time nor the wherewithal to write a book in English of this length. So, they wanted to find somebody who would be the appropriate amanuensis for him. They had been looking at a range of different people, but they did not want somebody to write a biography of Jackie Chan. They wanted an autobiography, which meant that they wanted somebody who was not only willing to put in the time and energy of keeping up with the Energizer Bunny but somebody who, in some ways, could take a step back and adopt the “Jackie Chan” identity and voice as much as possible. Since I’m a Chinese male, I have a certain facility for the culture—even though I was born and raised in New York. I was immersed in Hong Kong cinema and Chinese popular culture long before it became hip here in the United States. As a result, the publishers felt that it would be easier for me to pick up on some of the nuances and to understand where Jackie was coming from. For example, I could relate to things like being a young Asian boy dealing with parents of a certain generation, growing up in an environment of a certain type, with certain expectations. Now, granted, I did not grow up in a Peking Opera School. I did not receive daily beatings. Yet there is a lot in his story that a lot of Asian American men can...

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