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Pag. 145

The voice was silent. "Oh Chang is not home,” it said, and the line went dead.

I stood there with the receiver in my hand, horrified and shaken. Obviously, her father—the voice couldn’t have been anyone else’s—knew she was dating me. And just as clearly, he didn’t approve.

I had to talk to her. I had to find out what she thought for herself—about me, about us, about any kind of future we might have together.

It was then that the building manager’s granddaughter came calling to visit, a bright young girl who was very kind to her elderly grandfather. It didn’t take much convincing to get her to make a phone call for me; she could tell I was hurting, and her romantic schoolgirl’s heart had mercy on me.

She dialed the number and spoke in her soft girl’s voice, and all of a sudden, Oh Chang was home and available to talk. With a wink , the girl handed me the phone.

“Good luck,” she whispered, and ran to join her grandfather outside.

I put the receiver to my ear.

“Who’s this?” I head, and the voice was sad, sweet, and familiar.

“Oh Chang, it’s me, Yuen Lo” I said.

She said nothing.

“You have to tell me what’s going on”, I pleaded. “How can you just walk away? How can you end things this way?”

The line stayed silent.

“Oh Chang…” I said. “At least—see me one more time. Tonight. One last time.”

I could hear her holding back a sob. “Okay,” she whispered. “Tonight.”

And without saying good-bye, she hung up the phone.

The rest of the day passed in agony. I attempted to fix one of my hand-made pieces of furniture, a chair whose legs were uneven, and ended up smashing it to pieces instead, releasing the anger that I’d bottled up in-side. Not at Oh Chang, whom I could never hate even if she spat in my face. Not even at her father, who was just doing his duty as a Chinese dad, protecting his girl from bad decisions.

I was angry at the world, which made rich people and poor ones, and kept them apart. I was angry, maybe, at myself, for being who I was.

I had never really wanted to be rich before, or even famous; suddenly, I wanted to be both. I could imagine the conversation in my head, Oh Chang in tears, caught sneaking back into the house after midnight by her father. He accuses her of being a loose woman, of acting like a “flower girl”; she denies it, telling him that it was just one boy she ran out to see, and that we did nothing but talk, sit together, and hold hands. He asks, his voice harsh and his face wooden, the name and background of

Pag. 146

this boy, the boy who has stolen away his daughter. She tells him who I am, what I do, how hard I work, how promising I am. A junior stuntman! he shouts. Just a ragged boy trying to learn a dangerous trade. How could he provide for a family? How could he compare to the wealthy young admirers who came to Oh Chang’s performances, left bouquets of flowers and rich gifts at her doorstep, and constantly, always, asked for her hand?

The answers to these questions were obvious, but still I had to hear them from her lips. And so, at the usual time, I waited in the usual place. The sky was gray and overcast, and the moon—our moon—was hidden behind an ugly yellow haze. At ten o’clock, the gate opened, and she stepped out onto the street, looking at me with eyes reddened from crying. Without speaking, she stepped forward and put her thin arms around me, squeezing me tight, wetting my cheek and shoulder with her tears.

I held her a moment, then pulled away, talking her hand and walking with her to the park, to our bench and our view of the sky.

“Why?”  I asked, knowing what she would say.

“My father,” she said, and my suspicions were confirmed. And then: “I have… I have a letter for you.” And she pulled a folded piece of delicate paper from under her coat, still warm from her body and smelling faintly of her sweet perfume.

I took it from her and opened it up. The characters, neatly drawn in her feminine hand, were like so much chicken scratch to me; my reading ability—reading was not seen as an important skill at our school—allowed me to understand street signs and restaurant menus, but not the words of an educated girl’s good-bye letter. And I, I who hadn’t cried since my first month at the opera academy, who had stood up to beatings and backbreaking workouts and the abuse of boys twice my size without shedding a tear, I began to howl, my body shaking with the force of my crying.

This is the last way I wanted her to see me, but there was nothing I could do. To be given this letter and know that it, like her, was closed to me, was the final blow.

“Yuen Lo…” she said, her voice breaking. “I’m sorry.”

I swiped my face with my shirtsleeve, willing myself to stop crying. To breathe and relax. “I understand, Oh Chang,” I said. I turned my face to stone. “We are from two different worlds, and I don’t belong in yours any more than you could survive in mine.”

I helped her up and began walking back toward her house. She trailed me, as if reluctant to leave, but I had to get away, as soon as possible, before my will broke down and I begged her to stay with me.

Pulling her close, I bit down on my lower lip, finding the strength to push her away. “Good-bye,” I sad.

Pag. 147

She nodded, tears streaming down her face. “Good-bye,” she said. “Will I ever see you again?”

Stuffing my hands in my pockets, I turned away and began to walk. “No,” I said, my voice flat. “Not like this.”

Not the way I am today, I thought to myself, as I turned the corner and began to run. When you see me again—if you see me again—it will not be as Yuen Lo, the poor stunt boy.

I hated Yuen Lo. I had nothing but contempt for him—lazy, good-for-nothing, loser Yuen Lo. He would have to die, I realized. For me to be what I wanted to be, I would have to kill Yuen Lo.

And become someone else.

Pag. 148

A DIRTY JOB

In my short career in the movies, I’d already met a lot of famous actors and directors. I was never very impressed; they were pretty, or handsome, or (in the case of the directors) loud and domineering. But none of them could do what I could do: fight, and fly, and fall, and get up and do it—even if I was broken or hurt. I couldn’t really understand what made them so great.  But the senior stuntmen were something else. They were a wild and rugged bunch, living one minute at a time because they knew that every day they spent in their profession could be their last. They smoke, drank and gambled, spending every penny of each evening’s pay by the time the sun rose the next day. Words didn’t mean anything to them; if you wanted to make a statement, you did it with your body—jumping higher, tumbling faster, falling farther. With Oh Chang out of my life, I began to hang out with the senior guys after shooting wrapped. Every night, we’d brush off the dust of the day’s work and find ways of laughing at the injuries that we or our brothers had suffered— “we get paid in scars and bruises,” one older stuntman told me, only half joking. Of course, every small injury was just a reminder that the next one around the corner could be the big one that might cripple or kill; and so we drank, and we smoked, and we played, partly to celebrate surviving one more day, partly to forget that when the sun rose again we’d be facing the same giant risk for the same small rewards.    

The senior stuntmen had a phrase that described their philosophy, as well as the men who were fearless and crazy enough to follow it: lung fu mo shi. It literally meant “dragon tiger” –power on top of power, strength on top of strength, bravery  on  top of bravery. If you were lung fu mo shi, you laughed at life, before swallowing it whole. One way of being lung fu mo shi was to do and amazing stunt, earning shouts and applause from the sidelines. An even better way was to try an amazing stunt, fail, and get up smiling, ready to try it again. “Wah! Lung fu mo shi!” they’d shout, and you’d know that your drinks would be paid for all night.

For us, especially us junior guys, to be lung fu mo shi was the highest compliment we could imagine. And so I threw myself into my work, putting every last bit of energy into proving that I had the spirit of dragons