2003
During the course of editing my memoir, I decided to remove the following passage from the titular chapter…
The first girl that ever kissed me was someone who I met as I was heading into town because I had to be picked up my Kung Fu instructor, since he was travelling from Blackburn to Keighley via Colne. We didn’t have cell phones, so I didn’t exchange numbers with Carla. I don’t regret not getting into a relationship with her. Good looks aside, she was a chav who would end up getting pregnant by another chav in a matter of years. Back in 2003, we both turned 16.
During a shopping trip in Keighley circa late August, fortune smiled. I purchased four Hong Kong movies on video - Young & Dangerous 3, Prince of the Sun, City Cops and The Chinese Boxer. Cynthia Rothrock’s Prince of the Sun is a remake of The Golden Child à la Jackie Chan’s The Medallion except it was a nineties movie instead of an eighties or a noughties one. Of particular note is Prince of the Sun. It’s the best example of the importance regarding a fight choreographer using assistants. When I first saw it, I assumed that Corey Yuen was working by himself. The choice of angles and editing pace was recognizable but the choreography lacked intricacy if not imagination (as was the case with The Blonde Fury). It was only when I had read the final credit sequence that I learned about the stunt co-ordinator being his `90s assistant i.e. Yuen Tak (a.k.a. Richard Hung).
Like Magic Crystal, it’s a supernatural martial arts movie which also had Rothrock helping a child. Besides the fights, the movie was bad. There’s the dummy on Rothrock’s back that’s supposed to pass for a child, along with crude special effects and unfunny jokes. Too much time was spent on fish out of water comedy not involving Cynthia’s character. Sadly, even Prince of the Sun has less flaws than The Medallion despite having less talented people working on it. There’s a lexical ambiguity here. I don’t mean less talented people as in the number of people, but rather the actual volume of talent that was inherent in each individual (namely the stars, director and fight choreographer).
The Chinese Boxer is the oldest Kung Fu movie that I have ever seen (it was made in 1970). I only watched it once but not for the reason that you may think (i.e. primitive fight designs). When I watched it in 2003, I made myself keep a promise that I would never watch it again until I told someone: “The last time that I saw The Chinese Boxer, I heard my neighbours have sex.”
The neighbours were a bald working-class man and his slightly posh wife. I can always tell if a British woman is middle-class. There is a certain sophistication in the facial structure. Physiognomy is one of my strong suits. Going by the well-spoken accent of the British brunette, I was bang on the money. The brunette Brit worked as part of the town’s council. She could easily have lived in one of the more affluent areas, but she chose to live in ours because she was as much the eyes and ears of the people as she was the eyes and ears of the township, including the police. She got her fair share of gossip when she had her out-of-town meetings with her highfalutin friends.
She moved out a year later. Colne was just a pit-stop town for her. I have an underlying feeling that if she stuck around then she was going to suffer the same fate as the protagonists of Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars and Last Man Standing i.e. all three movies are about a man who walks into a town and gets pulverized for causing friction by naïvely pretending to be a member of two rival gangs. Anyway, I never caught her name. It’s strange that neighbours are devoid of self-awareness when they live in a terraced house. It’s a strange wall of sound when you’re sleeping in a room where you can simultaneously hear couples have sex from either side.
When I attended college, the most attractive girl in the college was best described as what if Christy Chung was a blonde-haired and blue-eyed Caucasian. Christy was one of the main actresses of a Jackie Chan movie which was released in August - Highbinders, albeit truncated and retitled like two Jet Li movies which were re-released on DVD as The Legend and The Legend 2 (they were ten years old in 2003). These movies, along with High Risk, would be aired many times on the Sky movie channels in England.
I can’t really say that I particularly enjoyed my experience at the first college. Most of the students were working-class Northerners who were so provincial that you could imagine them on an ITV’s Emmerdale, a soap drama which takes place in Yorkshire. I got along with most of the students, but I didn’t make a single friend in the sense of someone who I socialized with outside of college. Perhaps if I was white or maybe if I didn’t look Asian, I might have got further than I did. Racism can be as subtle as simply refusing to engage someone in conversation. It was like being a fly on the wall or watching a documentary where no-one talks to the camera.
