PROLOGUE: TAKING FLIGHT [1 a 2]

Pag. 01

PROLOGUE: TAKING FLIGHT

I’m standing in the sky on the roof of a glass and steel office tower in Rotterdam, Holland. There are twenty-one floors of air between me and the concrete pavement below. I am about to do what I do best.

My stuntmen tell me that the fall is safe—well, not safe, but maybe a little less than deadly. Of course, they’ve only tried the jump from the sixteenth floor…and, as I watched the test footage late last night, alone in our production offices, I realized that a sixteen-floor fall was too predictable.

Too... possible.

After all, my producer has been bragging to reporters that this will be the world’s most dangerous stunt. And who would I be if I didn’t live up to my press?

Not Jackie Chan.

So, against the advice of my director and my costars and the executives at the studio, I have decided to add five stories to the stunt.

That’s sixty more feet of very thin air through which my forty-five-year-old body will be sliding.

A few more seconds of excitement for the cameras.

A few more screams from an audience starving for adrenaline.

The formula is simple: the more terrified my friends and family are, the more satisfied my fans will be. And they mean everything to me. They come to the theaters hungry for a hero, for someone who can laugh at disaster, who can make funny faces at death. Someone who can show them for real that the only thing to fear is fear itself. 

But whoever said that never stood on a roof in Rotterdam. He never looked down over the edge of a skyscraper to see a foam target 250 feet below. From here, the mattress looks like a postage stamp. When I hold out both hands in front of my face, I can just about cover it entirely.

Sorry to contradict you, Mr. Whoever, but the only things to fear are fear itself, and hitting the ground at one hundred miles per hour with nothing between you and the emergency room but a few inches of foam rubber.

I’m tired.

Pag. 02

My heart feels like a rock in my chest.

My body screams at me about the abuse I’ve put it though over the last four decades. Parts of me I can’t even pronounce are complaining about how badly I’ve treated them. And despite the mob of extras milling around the base of the building—hundreds of Dutch marines and fire-fighters and police, looking nervously up at the sky—I think to myself: Is this jump really necessary?

But the answer is there as soon as I ask the question: Yes.

Because this jump is special.

It isn’t just for the fans and the critics and the box office charts.

This one is for the man who made it possible for me to stand here today, aching and shivering in the spotlight.

This is for my master, Yu Jim-yuen, who was buried a week ago in Los Angeles.

My trip from Holland to California for funeral brought production to a grinding stop, costing Golden Harvest nearly a quarter of a million dollars. They knew better than to tell me not to go, even if for them every wasted dollar is like a drop of spilled blood.

I remember a frightened seven-year-old walking into the dark and musty halls of the China Drama Academy, holding his father’s hand. Inside, he sees young boys and girls leaping and tumbling and screaming. Paradise—

“How long do you want to stay here, Jackie?”

“Forever!” answer the boy, his eyes bright and wide. And he lets go of his father to clutch at the hem of his master’s robe…

For the next ten years, I sweated and cried and bled under Master’s hands. I cursed his name when I went to sleep at night, and I swallowed my fear and hatred of him when I woke in the morning. He asked for everything we had, and we gave it to him, under pain of injury, or even death.

But when we came of age, we realized he’d given it all back. With interest.

It was Master Yu Jim-yuen who created Jackie Chan, and I do what do today—I am what I am today—because of him. And so this leap is in his memory, a final act of gratitude. A last gesture of defiance.

Someone slaps me on the back, asks me if I’m ready. I nod, barely understanding. Another voice calls for quiet on the set, and  suddenly the only sound is the wind and the blood rushing in my ears and my heart beginning to pound like a giant drum.

“Camera!”

“Rolling!”

“Action!”

And I suck in my churning stomach. Launch myself into the sky.

I fly.

I remember…