Chan admits mistakes in memoir
Jackie Chan has opened up about cheating on his wife in his memoir Never Grow Up.
The Rush Hour star acknowledges that he was unfaithful to his wife, Joan Lin, with 1990’s Miss Asia, Elaine Ng Yi Lei — an affair that resulted in Chan’s daughter Etta.
“In 1999, I made a serious mistake. When the news broke about an affair I’d had that resulted in a child, the media frenzy was like a bomb going off ... I wanted to phone Joan but I didn’t know what to say. I wouldn’t be able to explain this,” he wrote, revealing how guilty he felt and how Lin, whom he married in 1982, stuck by him.
“She is a strong woman, stronger than I am in many ways,” he added.
The star also confessed that he once punished his son Jaycee, his child with Lin, by throwing him across the room when he was two years old.
“I picked him up with one hand and flung him across the room, and he crashed into the sofa. With the amount of force I used, if he’d hit the back or armrests, it could have been quite serious,” the 64-yearold admitted, according to CNN.
Chan said he regretted his actions “immediately” and vowed never to repeat them, adding, “I take my promises seriously, and I’m a man of my word. I never threw him again or hit him.”
Elsewhere in the memoir, Chan admitted he had “a big chip on my shoulder” and was a “nasty jerk” after he found international fame, as he was often drunk and couldn’t control his spending — wasting money on gambling and prostitutes.
“I drunk-drove all the time. In the morning, I’d crash my Porsche, then in the evening, I’d total a Mercedes-Benz. All day long, I went around in a haze,” he revealed, adding that he would threaten to punch any photographers trying to take pictures of the crash scene.
Never Grow Up, a followup to 1998 book I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action, was first released in Chinese in 2015 and its English translation was published Tuesday.