YOUNG MASTER IN LOVE [269 a 275]

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YOUNG MASTER IN LOVE

The next few weeks were the best of times. I renewed my friendship with Teresa, and it blossomed quickly into a full romance. We spent evenings together, eating at fine restaurants and attending fancy parties. The gossip columns buzzed with rumors about our relationship—“China’s most beloved pop singer seen with young action superstar! Could it be love?” 

It could have been. 

She was sweet, and smart, and funny, and beautiful. Her taste in fashion and food alike were wonderful; she never failed to choose precisely the right dress, the right accessories, and the right place to show them off. 

About the only bad decision she ever made was in her choice of men. 

The truth is, she was too good for me. 

Or at least for the me that I was at the time. 

She was a living, breathing symbol of class and elegance, and I was raw and rough, a boy living his dreams of being a man. I talked tough, lived fast, and strutted when I could have walked. I was still burning from my experiences in the U.S. and eager to show off in front of my adoring public. 

She would wear lovely designer dresses, cut exactly right. I would hit the town wearing short pants, a T-shirt, and as much gold as my wrists and neck could carry. 

She was a wonder of politeness, a miracle of manners. I thumbed my nose at authority, laughing in the faces of hotel managers and haughty waiters, putting my feet up on tables. 

And, while she was content to go out alone, with no one but me as her gentleman escort—not that I was much of a gentleman—I refused to be seen anywhere without my boys: a gang of stuntmen in sunglasses, taking my coat when I walked into restaurants, pulling out my chair when I decided to sit. 

I was young, rich, and spoiled by fame. 

I was making more money than any star in Hong Kong and spending like it was going out of style. 

I loved her, but I loved myself more. And no heart can ever serve two masters.

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“So you’re finally finishing the movie?” 

I was on the phone with Willie, lounging on a sofa in my hotel suite, watching my boys play cards and drink expensive scotch. 

Willie had gotten disgusted with my new way of life and had returned early to Hong Kong. He had better things to do than watch me act like a clown, he’d said. I wouldn’t take those kinds of words from anyone else, but Willie had earned the right to tell me anything. And besides, it wasn’t like I listened to him. 

“We wrapped shooting today,” I said, shouting over the sounds of the noisy game in progress. “Leonard can start breathing again.” 

Leonard had kept to his promise that I’d never have to get budget approval for my films, but Dragon Lord—the latest title for Young Master in Love—had set a new record for money spent and wasted. I’d hired dozens of stuntmen, partly because of my ambitious cinematic vision, and partly because everyone and his brother, lured by the sweet smell of money, was now asking to join my team. I’d shot entire sequences, only to change my mind about the story line at the last minute, sending miles of footage into the garbage bin. And for one scene alone—a martial arts contest that had dozens of stuntmen scrambling up a rickety pyramid, battling one another all the way to the top—I actually set a Guinness world record for the most takes used in a single film sequence: over 2,900!

“Well, will you be coming back to Hong Kong?” said Willie. “More important, will you be coming back to your senses?” 

I ignored Willie’s sarcasm. A fight had developed at the card table. “You guys shut up; I’m trying to talk here!” I yelled. “Yeah, I’ll be flying back tomorrow for editing and some reshoots.” 

On the other end of the line, Willie fell silent. 

Then, slowly and softly, he asked me a question that he’d obviously been thinking about for a while. “And will Teresa be coming back with you?” 

“What’s it to you?” I retorted. 

“Well, what’s it to you?” he said, matching my irritated tone. “Listen, Jackie, she’s not only a very nice girl, she’s also a very famous, very high-profile, and very well-liked entertainer. Now, recently, you’ve been letting my advice pass right through your head, but let me suggest a few thoughts you might consider: first, if you keep on treating her the way you do, you will hurt her. Second, if you hurt her, you stand a good chance to become one of the most unpopular individuals in Asia, not to mention wherever Chinese people are found around the globe. So please—try not to be a fool.”

My angry response was drowned out by the fight among my boys which was threatening to turn into an open brawl. Willie hung up on me.

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I swore, and tossed the phone onto the floor, wading into the melee and pulling the two wrestlers apart. “You idiots keep it up, and you’re all fired,” I shouted. The fighting stopped, as everyone put ingratiating smiles on their faces and began apologizing for their behavior. 

“Sorry, dai gaw,” said one. 

Dai gaw means “big brother.” It was what they called me, and I liked it.

“Don’t like cheating,” said another. 

“Who’s cheating? You’re cheating.” 

“Ah, shut up.” 

“Come on over here and make me.” 

“Quiet!” I said, slapping the heads of the two squabblers, who were about to go at each other again. “You want to fight, you fight somewhere else.” I picked up a bottle of cognac that had luckily managed not to be broken and handed it to the taller of the two. “You want to drink, drink to each other like brothers.” 

The party was just getting back into swing when my phone rang again. Probably Willie, calling to apologize for calling me names. Half of me wanted just to keep him hanging, letting the phone ring on and on until he gave up; the other half of me, the half that was feeling hurt at my friend’s harsh words, wanted to find a way of making up. 

The hurt half won out. “So you realized you were wrong, huh?” I said as I picked up the phone. 

“Wrong about what?” It was Teresa, sounding puzzled. 

I waved at the boys to quiet down; immediately guessing that it was Teresa, they began making rude faces and smooching gestures. 

“Nothing, nothing,” I said, throwing the guys a glare. “I thought it was someone else.” 

“All she does is call and dai gaw is like this,” one of them whispered, putting a hand on his head and pretending to faint. 

“Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you,” she said, sounding miffed. “I just wanted to come see you; I know you’re leaving for Hong Kong tomorrow, and I thought you might want to get together.”

I did want to see her, but the taunting of my boys had gotten me riled up. I knew it was immature, but I needed to act like a da nan ren, a big man.

“All right,” I said. “You want to come over, come over.” And then I hung up the phone. 

As soon as I did it, I thought to myself, What kind of a guy am I to be so rude to my girlfriend—especially when it’s possibly the last chance we’ll get to see each other for a while?

But the guys clearly were impressed at how cool I could be. Teresa was a big star and a beautiful woman, and I was dismissing her like she was just a girl off the street. That took guts!

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Guts—and an ice-cold heart. 

There was a soft knocking at the door. 

I knew it would have been the right thing to get up and answer the door, but the boys were looking at each other, expecting a big romantic scene. Instead, I just shouted, “It’s unlocked. Come in!” 

And she did... turning every head in the room. 

She looked incredible. She was dressed in a white silk dress and heels, and carried a small leather pocketbook. Accents of pearl and gold were at her neck, her ears, and wrists. Even the boys were too stunned to make rude comments and simply resumed playing in silence. 

Smiling, she walked over to the sofa where I sat with my feet up on a cushion. Gently pushing my feet onto the floor, she sat down next to me. 

“Hello, Jackie,” she said. “I thought we might go have dinner at that new French restaurant—a ‘bon voyage’ celebration.” 

I made a big show of groaning. “You always want to go to these places where I can’t read the menus,” I said. “I hate it! I don’t know what to order; I never know what color wine to choose. And they make you sit there for hours waiting for your food.” 

“Well, I think it would be nice to do something special,” she said, looking hurt. Guilt briefly overwhelmed my need to be macho. 

“Okay,” I said sulkily. “Let me just round up the guys.”

She threw her purse onto the ground. “What?” 

“The boys,” I said, pointing at my stuntmen, still playing cards and drinking. “Gotta let them know it’s time for dinner.” 

“We are not going out with the boys,” she said angrily. 

I threw up my hands in exasperation. “What do you mean? I don’t go anywhere without my boys.”

“It’s our last night together,” she shouted. “Don’t you want to be alone?” 

“We can be alone later,” I said. “Why do we have to be alone when we eat? Eating doesn’t require any privacy.” 

She looked at me with a blank expression, as if she were going over something in her mind. And then: “It’s either them or me,” she said. “If you want to spend the evening with your boys, fine. I’ll be leaving, then.” She stood up, and I put my feet back onto the cushion where she’d been sitting. 

I was annoyed that she was making a scene in front of my stunt guys. What did she expect me to do, anyway? Let her walk all over me in public? I wasn’t about to lose that kind of face. 

“Good-bye.”

“Good-bye.”

And she picked up her purse and left. 

The boys had stopped playing and gone quiet when they saw her head for the door alone. 

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I kept up my look of studied coolness, hoping that she’d turn around and come back.

Then one of the guys said, “Dai gaw, don’t you think you should walk her to the elevator?” 

I nodded and then slowly got up and walked into the hallway. Seeing it empty and the elevator door closed, I ran to the stairwell and bolted down ten flights at top speed. 

I burst out into the lobby, spinning around and looking everywhere for a petite white silhouette. Nothing. Without hesitating, I charged through the revolving door and out onto the sidewalk. 

She was just stepping into her private car, a big black Cadillac. I shouted out her name, but either she didn’t hear me or she didn’t care. The car door closed, and she drove out of the driveway, leaving me standing alone in a puff of exhaust. 

Later on, after my boys had left for the evening, I called her on the phone. I was ready to throw myself at her mercy. She had none to give. 

“I’m sorry, Teresa,” I said. “I acted like a jerk.” 

“What do you have to be sorry about?” she said. “When we were together in Los Angeles, we had no one but each other. Now you have your friends, your boys. You don’t need me anymore. And I don’t need you.”

And she hung up the phone. 

I listened to the dead line in shock. I’d been dumped. Of course, I deserved it, and worse. But for her to walk out of my life, just as Oh Chang had—no, worse than Oh Chang had, because Teresa was making her own decision...

Didn’t she know I loved her? 

Then again, how could she? When had I ever shown her what was in my heart, or told her what I really felt? 

The truth was that I was not capable of treating her, or any woman, the way she deserved. I had so little experience with romance, and I was so driven by the need to prove myself to others—to my fans, to the Hong Kong movie industry, to the world. 

A quarter of a century later, I wonder how much I’ve changed. 

Maybe a lot. 

Maybe not so much.

I don’t have anything to prove anymore. I’ve accomplished just about everything I’ve ever wanted to, and more. But I say this as someone who knows from experience: the farther you run in a certain direction, the harder it is to go back and start over. 

I wonder to myself sometimes, if I could turn back the clock, whether I’d make different choices in my life. Would I spend more time and energy with my loved ones, my family?

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Or would I follow the path I took—the one that led me here, fulfilling my hopes and dreams, at the expense of my heart? 

I’m married. I have a teenage son. But working as I do, I haven’t ever been able to fulfill my duty as a father or as a husband. I spend two-thirds of my time abroad, and even when I’m in Hong Kong, my schedule is so full that I can barely find time to be with my wife and child. They understand—but I know they wish I could be with them, and I know my son would have loved to have had his father with him growing up. I’ve been able to provide for them well, but I know I owe them so much more. 

I’ve always tried to live my life without regrets. 

I’ve done what I set out to do, and I’ve had to make sacrifices to get there. 

But still—sometimes I wonder. 

There’s a sad postscript to the story of my brief romance with Teresa. If you’re a fan of Teresa’s, and she had many millions of fans, then you already know what I’m about to say. 

On May 8, 1995, while on a trip to Thailand, Teresa suffered a sudden asthma attack and passed away, without warning. 

She was still beautiful, still popular, and still beloved by Chinese people throughout the world. 

She was only forty-three years old. 

We’d gotten to be friends, some years after our romance. Her heart was too big to stay angry at me, and one day she’d called me, out of the blue. Her excuse for telephoning was that she was looking for a health club in Hong Kong and needed my advice. I think she just wanted to speak to me, to let me know that she forgave me for the way I’d treated her. 

From then on, we talked every so often, and when she came into town, we’d have dinner—and I always let her choose the restaurant, and I never complained. 

On the day she died, her secretary called me with the news even before it was released to the media. I was shocked, because she was so vibrant, so alive, and because I’d never even known about her condition. 

In some ways, it was just another example of how little I’d gotten to know her. Then again, I guess she kept it hidden from everyone. To her fans, she was Little Teng, the bright and innocent flower of China, and they wanted her to be perfect, especially in a time when China itself was having so many troubles. 

Teresa is buried in a large and peaceful garden, in the beautiful region of Taipei County known as West Lake Village, on Chinpao Mountain, overlooking Hsi Shih Lake. Throughout the memorial are monuments that celebrate her, as a person and as a musician. At the entrance to the

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park is a CD machine that automatically plays one of her songs—in Mandarin, English, Japanese, Cantonese, or Taiwanese—as soon as a visitor steps through the gates. At the center of the park is an enormous piano keyboard that plays musical notes when stepped on.

Even though it has been several years since her death, her grave is visited by hundreds of mourners a day, many of them bringing gifts and tokens of their affection. It’s a tribute to how much she was loved and always will be loved. 

I wasn’t able to attend her funeral. I was away shooting a film, and it might not have been appropriate for me to be there anyway. 

But I did find a way to remember her, in my own way. When I had some quiet time to myself—the kind of time that, in our brief period together, I might have shared with her—I put on one of her old albums and listened again to her voice, singing the song that some  consider to be her masterpiece: “When Will You Come Back Again?” The lyrics of the song include the following lines:

Missing you brings tears to my eyes...

When will you come back again? 

You will never be forgotten, Teresa.