Li was eight years old when his Physical Education teacher in the Changqiao Primary School of Beijing discovered the young boy's jumping, agility and grace. He sent Li to the Beijing Amateur Sports School for wushu training, where he fell under the tutelage of Coach Wu Bin. Attending classes during the day, the eight-year-old soon became one of the hardest working and most determined. Leg presses, bending and somersaults were only part of each evening's curriculum, and the young athlete went home tired, yet inspired, every night.
Perhaps Wu Bin became a kind of father figure to Jet Li, who lost his own father when he was only two, and as a wushu coach he certainly saw the potential of a future star, both in natural talent and in perseverance. He designed extra training for Li. Wu Bin was pleased with the speed and agility of his pupil, but found that Li lacked strength for kicking and striking. He visited the Li home and discovered that the family did not eat meat because at one time the grandmother has fallen ill and the doctor advised her to avoid it. The entire family followed in the habit, but Wu Bin told them that Lien Lie needed the protein to develop his strength, and he in fact continued to bring food to the struggling Li household for years.
Li's natural talent in gymnastics soon was wedded to a deepening love of the martial arts. In three years, his sophistication grew substantially. Many other children in the Beijing Amateur Sports school wushu program dropped out due to the mental and physical rigors. Li, instead, continued to practice punching and kicking, agility and flexibility, and swords and spears late into every night.
People often speak of Jet Li as a prodigy and a child wushu genius. Li himself answers this sharply in a short memoir where he writes: "I am not a prodigy and newspaper reports about my having consciously trained and practiced wushu since I was a child often annoyed me beyond measure. It was simply not true. Like everyone else, I came across numerous problems in the course of training and many a time I wavered and thought of dropping out. It was my coach Wu Bin who helped me steer clear of all obstacles and encourage me never to give up. His admonitions and his patience in guiding me along will always remain in my heart of hearts."
There are inevitably historical points of convergence, moments of those being in the right place at the right time. Luckily for wushu, both Jet Li and Wu Bin were joined in a vision that emerged as the Beijing Wushu Team. After three years of serious wushu training with Wu Bin, and becoming a national junior champion, Li became a member of Beijing's professional team in 1974. For many eleven-year-olds, the pressure might have been too much, but for Li it seemed to raise him to another level. For one thing, the physical training intensified greatly. For another, and perhaps more important, it broadened his vision of the martial arts. Running around a 350 meter track 20 times in 25 minutes took discipline, but studying the characteristics of different martial arts styles, and assimilating them, took both an artistic and a martial arts intelligence. Li began to blend free gymnastics exercise, boxing and weapons together with his own highly skilled jumping and speed. He was able to take advantage of many martial arts masters gathered in Beijing, and he studied their different points and qualities, soaking up all they had to offer.
Li looked for the essence of martial arts. And then at his first National Wushu Championships in 1974 he demonstrated his knowledge of it. As one writer noted, "His interpretation of the requirements set for the contest was based on a thorough study as well as a clever combination of the characteristics of various schools: the flowing Chanquan, the free Chanquan, the brisk and light Monkey Boxing, the graceful Tongbeiquan, the rhythmical and bombastic Gun Boxing, the inner energy of the Taichiquan, etc. Thus the most important thing, in his mind, was the integration of the forms of running, springing and leaping with a sense of beauty." Li took first in the compulsories, and then went on to win the highest marks in swordsplay, spearplay, routine boxing, Pu swordsplay and two men sparring, making him All-Around Champion.
The glamour of international travel and exhibition must certainly have punctuated those five years of relentless work, training and dedication that a champion had to maintain in order to win. The many stories of Wu Bin's hard discipline towards the team are perhaps underscored by Li's own remembrance:
One thing that set Li apart from other competitors was the creativity in his routines and the fact that he continued to set higher standards for himself each year. His "specialties," once performed, were no longer secrets, and as one observer remarked, "Judges all praised him for he was never content, for he was ever advancing, for he had brought the traditional art to a new high." Many others who knew him as a competitor corroborate this, and Li took every possible opportunity to gain experience from all the wushu masters he encountered, including Beijing opera actors and dancers. Having this insight into Li's kungfu epistemology again confronts the sometimes popular prejudice that "wushu" is mere performance, divorced from "real" martial arts and martial art history; instead, the high level contemporary wushu stylist's education is not unlike Bruce Lee's philosophy of taking what is useful from the different martial arts and finding your own way and your own individual expression.
The days of Jet Li's performance are long past, but for those curious of see the young competitor there is a kungfu documentary call Dragons of the Orient (available from Tai Seng). Despite the film's dubious narrative devices, it offers us a glimpse of Jet Li's style, both training and performing. There we see the White House lawn, as the eleven-year-old Li dressed in a bright red outfit performs a two man fighting set with his teammate Chu Shi Fai. He is also shown at twelve, practicing and competing, wielding a broadsword at lightning speed. Cut to Jet Li at nineteen, handsome, muscled and strong, with long hair in his face. He gives the camera a taste of the double broadsword, the whip chain, the three-section staff, the spear and the pu dao. This is no Jet Li of the movies with camera angles and special effects - bit it is equally engrossing, because it is real. The footage even becomes a bit surreal as we watch him celebrate his mother's fiftieth birthday party with dumplings and cake, and walk along the Great Wall where he used to practice as a child. The film's narrator is quick to tell us, "Don't think he is a rude guy. Besides competing in kungfu, he's good at literature and art, too," They then give us a poem Li composed, in what is most likely a terrible translation: "There is always a mountain/So there are always good fighters/Therefore one must know his strengths and weaknesses to become perfect."
A number of excellent period pieces followed this success, including The Legend of Fong Sai Yuk, Swordsman 2, and especially The Tai Chi Master, which ranks as one of the top martial arts film classics of all time. Directed by Yuen Woo Ping, and co-starring Yuen Biao and Michelle Yeoh, the film imagines the early years of Zhang San Feng and his creative development of taichi. Li's kungfu and acting are both dynamic and elegant, used to their greatest potential by the director. The design of the martial arts choreography is complex, shifting from one style to another, with a pace that builds to the emotional climax of the film.
Hollywood continues to prove itself an unknown quantity to Hong Kong stars and filmmakers. Li is now in the middle of shooting Lethal Weapon 4, playing the head villain. Certainly this role is a departure for the man who we have never imagined as anything but a hero, but it also offers him a new thespian challenge, not to mention huge exposure in a mainstream American action film, and quite possibly, some good fun. If the media plays it right, they'll trot out that old White House lawn newsreel and show the public once again the real kungfu of Jet Li. Quentin Tarantino, a huge Jet Li fan, has bought the rights to several of Li's best Hong Kong films and Miramax will be distributing them later this year. Like Chow Yun Fat, Li has worked hard on his English to help Americans with that peculiar accent block which prevents us from enjoying a fuller spectrum of global acting talent. But most important, Jet Li is fluent in that universal language of action and emotion, and especially in the vernacular of martial arts that speaks to our collective imagination. Jet Li continues his tour as ambassador of wushu, this time not to the White House but to Hollywood, and Eastern hero on his journey to the West.
"What my teammates did once in training session I did thrice. To make the most of my time, I worked in the gym even on Sundays, when everybody else was resting.
"My coach, however, didn't seem to appreciate my efforts. He was always kind and patient when he explained the essentials of all the movements to my teammates and pointed out the them where they went wrong. When he saw they were too tired, he advised them to take a break. But he seemed to be quite another person when he talked to me. Often he would snap at me, 'Do you think that's the correct movement?' How come the more you practice the worse you become?' and so forth.
"To be frank, I didn't quite like the way he treated me. But now I understand he did it all for my good. Whenever he took on a new trainee, the first thing he did was get to know his character so he could deal with him accordingly. Seeing that I was a bit 'ambitious' and proved a willing trainee, he applied the rigorous method of training towards me. This was described by him as: "A resounding drum must be struck with a heavy hammer."
Depth is what characterizes Jet Li's wushu. The combination of abstract mental understanding coupled with a fluid, powerful physical interpretation makes his performances compelling. But the beauty and grace inherent in his wushu finally comes from the soul. What sets apart genius from mere intelligence? Perhaps nothing we can measure in a quantitative sense. But when you watch Li perform there is an extra dimension to his wushu which does set him apart, a spirit which created life in the form itself.
Li the master becomes Li the student as the camera captures him learning and refining taiji elements from the 97-year-old Wu Tu Nan, and then Paqua Fist from the equally sage Li Si Min. Then watch a series of Li's training, and a dynamic exercise done hanging from a pine tree developing "Paqua legs," which is described, "like a dragon on a tree, kicking hard." Finally we see Li training with a device of his own invention doing an exercise called "Beating Stars." Surrounded by a group of soccer balls suspended between trees with taut ropes, Li strikes the different balls as they rebound and created a surrounding web of continuation motion. In this way, "one attacks from all four sides and protects from four sides too. It practices the hands, eyes, body and feet to be swift and fast, turning and responding."
Finally, the last shots of Li capture him doing a drunken sword form. In a sunlit, open field, surrounded by pine trees, Li's movements are strong and subtle, stylized to perfection, exuding the grace and beauty that has become his signature.
Li's acting, by this point, was fully mature, and he had spent quite a bit of time in the Hong Kong film industry. Still looking for the right modern day kungfu movie, he finally scored with two gems showing off his contemporary style. Bodyguard from Beijing, a re-make of the American Kevin Costner film, sweetly combined romance with action. And then My Father is a Hero, co-starring Anita Mui, took the usual undercover cop story and combined it with the kungfu kid motif to create fun and suspense, yet maintaining the Jet Li hero trademark of inner struggle.
1995 presented Li with a new challenge with Fist of Legend. a remake of Bruce Lee's Fist of Fury, Li was playing the Ching Woo hero Chen Zhen, but in the shadow of another martial arts hero of Bruce Lee himself. Li told Logan, "(Bruce Lee) Li Shao Lung is a hero over there (Mainland China), just like everywhere else. Many young Chinese admire him and want to be like him. I'm not doing this film to say: 'Hey look, here is the new Bruce Lee!' No, it's to show my respect for his memory. Like the American movie Dragon." It was essential that the martial arts in this film be outstanding, and with Yuen WooPing choreographing them, it was. Li's own homage to Bruce Lee combined the right amounts of humor and seriousness, and the dramatic buildup of the fighting to the film's climax is completely compelling. The film received critical and box office success in Hong Kong, and Yuen Woo Ping reports that the martial arts in it was also a popular hit with the local kungfu cognoscenti.
