HELLO, BIG BROTHER [157 a 162]

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HELLO, BIG BROTHER

In a lot of ways, these were the good times for me, maybe even the best times. I worked hard, but I got to keep (and spend) what I earned. I tried not to think about Oh Chang. 

Somehow I got by.

Once in a while, I’d see my brothers, people I knew from school, but despite the bond we’d had, once we were on the outside, we had different lives to lead. A lot of them were stuntmen, too. None of them were doing better than I was, although we heard stories now and then about our older brothers—Yuen Wah, who’d become one of the most sought-after stunts doubles, simply because he could see a fighting style once and copy it almost perfectly; Biggest Brother Yuen Lung, who’d fulfilled his vow to become a big man, succeeding a stuntman despite his bulk. 

As for Yuen Biao, after the school finally shut its doors, he’d decided to try his luck abroad, moving to Los Angeles with Master and his family. 

I didn’t know it then, but I should have taken his decision as an omen and a warning.

The good times weren’t going to last forever. In fact, they were just about over. 

The closing of the opera schools meant that a flood of raw, young, death-defying talent was coming onto the scene, and even though the movie business was doing as well as ever, a deadly struggle for jobs was just about to begin. 

The real world was showing its teeth. Work became scarce, and for us freelance stuntmen, money got tight. 

I began to get worried when I started showing up for one of the dozens of stunt jobs available at the usual studios, and saw hundreds of guys as young—or younger—than me, all squatting in the shade, all waiting for the call. I was a hard worker; I’d do double shifts it they were available. But more and more, they weren’t. 

Often, after half a day of useless waiting, I’d leave the studio and head back home, knowing that even the most senior guys were just hoping for the chance to play a corpse or fill out a crowd scene. How could I compete?

And so I slept and ate as much as I wanted, and found ways to waste 

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time. I didn’t have the money to gamble anyone, and no one else did, either, so borrowing money was out of the question. Sometimes I even thought about making the call I’d never intended to make, admitting to Mom and Dad across an international line that I had no future in this business, and that I would join them down under, if they’d only send me a ticket. 

Once in a while, I hung around outside of Oh Chang’s school, half hoping I’d bump into her accidentally. I never did. 

Since I couldn’t make them anymore, when I had nothing else to do, I watched movies—scraping together the cash to see anything that landed at the local theaters, from Hollywood films to the latest Hong Kong releases. Do you know what my favorite film was? The Sound of Music, with Julie Andrews. As the slow months passed, I saw it seven times. 

Then, one evening, I went down to the old bar where my stuntmen used to hang out—most of them were working late, if they were working at all, so the place was almost empty.

I bought a beer and grabbed a cue from the warped and dusty rack, setting up the balls for a solo game of billiards.  

Click. Clack. My luck at pool was no better than my luck at finding jobs.

And then I heard the sound of a familiar voice. 

“Well, if it isn’t the prince,” the voice said with a sly and hearty laugh. The sudden recognition broke my concentration again, and I blew my shot.

I turned around, to see none other than Yuen Lung. My Biggest Brother. I nearly dropped the cue.

Yuen Lung tweaked the stick out of my hand, bent his heavy frame over the table, and coolly sank a ball. 

“How’ve you been, Little Brother?” he asked. 

I shrugged, trying to make it seem like meeting him was nothing. “Not bad. Busy.”

He looked at me pointedly. “You don’t look too busy.” He sank another ball and called for a beer.

What could I say?

“Listen, don’t you remember what I told you when I left the school?” he said. “If you needed work, you should have let me know. After all, what’s a Big Brother for?”

I gulped. I hadn’t known what to expect from Yuen Lung—gloating, maybe, or sarcasm—but certainly not a genuine offer of help. I wanted to believe that the nemesis who’d helped make a decade of my life a living hell had suddenly turned into a nice guy. I couldn’t help but be suspicious. 

“Why would you help me out?”

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Yuen Lung scowled and shot another ball. “Hey, I’m trying to do you a favor, okay?” Clack-clunk. “Don’t give me any shit. It’s heng dai.”

Heng dai is a Cantonese phrase that describes the relationship that is traditionally supposed to exist between older students and younger ones. As my senior, Yuen Lung deserved my respect and obedience. As his junior, I could expect his support and assistance—when he wasn’t running roughshod over me, anyway. 

Begrudgingly, I apologized for being ungrateful. 

“That’s okay,” he said, smirking. “You got plenty of time to learn how to behave toward your betters. Here’s the deal: I’m in good with this stunt coordinator—I’ve saved his ass plenty of times; he owes me. So I get work whenever I want. And anyone I send to him gets work, see? You just mention my name, and you’re in.”

Even though I knew that Biggest Brother relished being the big man, handing out favors to nobodies like me, I was grateful. I was at the end of my rope, almost out of cash, and just about ready to abandon my Hong Kong dreams. 

“Thanks, Yuen Lung,” I said, properly humble. 

Biggest Brother rolled his eyes. “Don’t call me that,” he said. “I’m a real stuntman now, not some schoolkid. The guys gave me a nickname; Samo, that’s my name now.”

I laughed into my beer, and even Biggest Brother—Samo—looked a little sheepish. See, Samo is the name of a fat little cartoon character who was really popular back then. (“Samo” comes from the fact that this character had just three hairs, sticking out of the top of his head—sam mo, “three hairs.”) So Mr. Big Man’s stunt nickname was as if a U.S. actor were to call himself, say, Snoopy. Or Garfield.

But it made sense, in a way. Biggest Brother had left the school because of his weight; it was something that embarrassed him, something he hated. The only way he could survive, with his ego, was to lose the fat, or turn it around—make it something he was proud of, something he joked about.

I guess it was easier to change his name than to diet. 

Somehow, hearing his new name broke the ice between us. We didn’t talk about the past or share any old memories. We were starting over. And the two of us drank, and laughed, and played pool late into the night. Something after midnight, we fell asleep at the bar—a tradition we’d keep up many loud, late nights in the future, At dawn, we were woken up by the owner—just in time to head out to Movie Town, to make the day’s casting call.

Samo and I spent many evenings together this way in the months that followed. I grew to understand things about him that I’d never seen when we were together at the school. He was brash, and rude, and a

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rough customer—his temper would go from jolly to mean in the blink of an eye, and he wasn’t afraid to use his fighting skills to back up his mouth. “You want to take me on, bring an army,” he’d brag, pointing to the half-moon scar on his upper lip. He’d gotten that in a brawl over a girl at a nightclub. The beating he received from the girl’s boyfriend—who slashed Samo with broken bottle, the coward—disfigured him for life. But in return, Samo had knocked the boyfriend unconscious, and left two of the guy’s friends bleeding in the gutter. 

“And I woulda gone back for the girl, too, if it wasn’t for this little cut,” he boasted. 

With his tough-guy example to follow, the other stuntmen and I who hung out in his circle often found ourselves in bad scrapes. One time, drunk and rowdy, we stole a motorcycle and took turns taking joyrides until we were noticed by cops; the luckless kid who was on the bike at the time ended up getting taken down to the lockup, but we raised the bail for him between us, and managed to “convince” the owner of the motorcycle not to press charges. After all, we’d only borrowed the bike.

We even gave him money for gas. 

But what I hadn’t realized before, when we were younger, was that under all of Samo’s gruffness and bluster was a surprisingly sensitive heart. Usually the sensitivity was directed inward; no one was more aware of Samo’s flaws than he was. Sometimes, though, his feelings showed through his big body. He was good to his friends and generous. But he expected in return a total gratitude and loyalty that most of the young people in his circle were willing to give. 

It was harder for me. I don’t like kissing anyone’s ass, and Samo’s was a particularly big one to have to kiss. To him, he’d always be Biggest Brother, and I’d be “the kid.” 

Sooner or later, I had to be my own man. 

I had to stand alone.

About a month after our reunion, we had another surprise member of our family join us—Yuen Biao, who had returned from America having failed miserably at breaking into Hollywood. 

“No luck with the foreign devils, huh, Yuen Biao?” I said, as we celebrated his return the usual way, drinking and shooting pool. 

“You don’t get it, Yuen Lo,” he said, pushing up the thick black spectacles he’d had to wear ever since he hit adolescence. “When we go over there, we’re the foreign devils. I can do this,” and he hopped off his stool and flipped backward onto his hands, walking upside down with easy grace, before softly dropping back to his feet. “But my hair is like this, and my eyes are like this, and my tongue is like this. There’s no place for a Chinese man in the American movies.”

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“Ah, stupid, they just haven’t seen me yet,” yelled Samo, beating on his chest. “Just you wait, America, I’ll be your big hero!”

“Big is right,” I snorted. “I don’t know if America has screens big enough to fit you and your ego, Brother.” 

More than ten years after we first met, and Samo still wasn’t fast enough to catch me when I had a running start.

After Yuen Biao returned, we had many evenings like that one. We’d drink and joke through the night, fall asleep on one another’s shoulders in the small hours of the morning, and then slap ourselves awake at sunrise, ready for another day of risking life and limb. 

Sometimes, on days when work was slow, the three of us would even ditch the studio and go to the park, where we’d eat, nap, and kick around a soccer ball, enjoying as teenagers the childhood we’d missed while we were at the school. As we lay on the grass in the sun, someone would usually bring up the subject of movies, setting off talk about the actors we knew (talentless), the directors we’d worked for (stupid and overbearing), and the things we’d do if we were in charge (turn the Hong Kong film industry upside down—and get rich in the process, of course). 

“Okay, you wanna know the problem with the movies?” asked Samo one afternoon, as we lay on our backs looking up at a blue sky flecked with little white clouds. 

Yuen Biao snorted and rolled over on his side. “If we said no, would it stop you from telling us?”

Samo ignored him. “The movies stink because the action ain’t real,” he said. “You got actors pretending to be martial artists who couldn’t punch their way through a loaf of bread. You got people flying around on wires, jumping twenty feet into the air, and knocking people over houses with one punch. Who wants to see that crap? A fight oughta be a fight, is what I say.”

I pushed myself up onto my elbows. “Heroes are supposed to be like that. Better than regular people.” 

“I said it’s crap. A hero should be a real guy, not some fake pretty boy,” retorted Samo.

“Yeah, a hero should be ugly, like you,” mocked Yuen Biao. “That’d be something to see. The Amazing Adventures of fat Guy.”

“Ah, look who’s talking, four-eyes.” Samo leaned over and thumped Yuen Biao in the stomach, and the two began wrestling, half seriously. 

Watching the clouds drift across the sky, I decided that Samo had a point. After a while, all the martial arts movies were the same—the heroes were invincible and handsome, the bad guys evil and hideous, and the fights weren’t like real fights at all. They were more like dancing: staged and gimmicky. 

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“I bet any of us could do a better job than the guys making movies now.” I said. “I could, anyway.”

“That’s even better: Fat Guy Meets Super Nose,” piped Yuen Biao, gasping as Samo sat on his chest.

Soon all three of us were rolling around, punching and kicking. But when we finished our play-brawl, we made a promise that if any of us ever got the chance to make a movie, we’d find our brothers—and make it together. 

Back then, we thought we were joking. After all, we were just stuntmen—the bottom of the movie barrel. 

We didn’t know what the future would bring. And the idea that someday we could be stars—well, that was crazy.