Am out-of-context viral clip that mistakes a tender moment in a movie between legendary action star Jackie Chan and his onscreen daughter has highlighted some troubling issues between Chan and his real-life children. He’s being accused of disowning his daughter because she’s a lesbian, a tidbit made all the more toxic due to his admitted mistreatment of his own son. However, the truth is a little more nuanced than that.
Earlier this week, someone tweeted a supposed scene between Chan and his daughter watching old clips of him from past movies. The tender scene shows Chan and his “daughter” embracing in tears as she tells him she’s very proud of him.
In the scene, the “daughter” is actually actress Liu Haocun, and the “scene” is from a movie called Ride On, where Chan faces off against debt collectors. Here’s the offending tweet:
Someone else decided to set the record straight and claimed that Chan disowned his real daughter, Etta Ng Chok Lam, for being a lesbian.
The truth is that Chan got his daughter’s mother pregnant out of wedlock, and he’s actually never been involved in her life. He even held a press conference at the time and said: “I’m not a saint. I’ve done something wrong. I’ve done something that many men in the world have done. Maybe it was a moment of playfulness.”
This brings us to his son Jaycee Chan. Part of the reason these allegations about his daughter were so easy to believe was because of how he’s treated Jaycee in the past. In his book Jackie Chan: Never Grow Up, Only Get Older, Chan admitted that his son was not a planned birth.
“It was an accident which conceived Jaycee,” Jackie said. “I have never thought of getting married, but I felt it was akin to being forced to get married.”
He also spoke about his views on disciplining children. They are, well, “outdated” is the best word I can come up with.
“I’ve always believed kids need to be smacked to be disciplined. Parents discipline kids in the hope they can avoid making more mistakes, especially those I’ve made when I was young. If you only speak to a kid about it, he won’t listen.”
He admitted to smacking Jaycee around when the child was “very young.”
“I beat him hard once; I picked him up and threw him on the couch. His mother and he were really scared. I also regretted it, and so I made a promise not to beat him anymore… When he was a kid, he could only see me around 2 a.m. I’m not a good dad, but I’m a responsible dad. I will be very strict in good times, support him to pull through in bad times when he is punished and aware of his mistakes.”
While the two appeared in the film 1911 together, their relationship took a bad turn when Jaycee was arrested in a drug bust in 2014, a circumstance exacerbated by the fact that Chan was serving as an anti-drug ambassador at the time.
Chan apologized for his son’s behavior and said he was “extremely furious” at him. They were estranged until after Jaycee got out of prison.
“I hadn’t seen him for too long. I feel he’s matured this time. We didn’t talk about unhappy things. It was all family chat. We talked into the night and didn’t sleep.”
Chan has also famously said that his son won’t inherit any of his money.
“If he is capable, he can make his own money. If he is not, then he will just be wasting my money,” Chan said, adding that his fortune will be donated to charity.
All of this has helped to make the revelations about his daughter more believable. His daughter, by the way, told E! News in 2015 that Chan is not a part of her life.
“He is my biological father but he is not in my life. He never existed in my life. I will never regard him as a father. As long as I have my mother with me, I don’t need my father.”
The homeless angle comes from Etta Ng Chok Lam herself, who claimed in a deleted video that she and her girlfriend were “homeless for a month due to homophobic parents.”
Etta’s mother pushed back against that, saying that if the couple has “no money, they should go find work. They shouldn’t film a clip telling others they are broke and who Etta’s father is. People all over the world work hard and don’t rely on someone else’s fame to get money.”
If there is a moral to this whole thing, it’s got to be that sensational stories are always a bit more nuanced than a splashy headline. Oh, and that Chan is a tough dad.
Published: Jul 5, 2023 12:59 pm