The Remarkable and Slightly Bonkers Saga of Jackie Chan’s Parents: Charles and Lee-Lee Chan
- dthholland
- 17 hours ago
- 8 min read
Before Jackie Chan jumped off buildings for a living, his parents dodged bullets, smuggled linen, flirted with espionage, and argued over opium at a Shanghai train station. This is their story – and honestly, it’s almost stranger than fiction.
The Accidental Action Hero: Charles Chan’s Real-Life Spy Thriller
If you’ve ever spotted an elderly gentleman making a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance in Police Story 2, congratulations – you’ve seen Charles Chan, Jackie’s father, in action. But Charles wasn’t just someone’s dad popping by for a novelty cameo. His life reads like an early draft of Mission: Impossible – if Ethan Hunt had been clumsy, stoic, and saddled with a penchant for linen smuggling.
Born on 18 December 1914 in He County, Anhui, China, Charles Chan began life as Fang Daolong (房道龍), the son of a respected family with ties to the Nationalist military elite. According to family lore (and with a healthy pinch of salt), he returned to Nanjing in his twenties where his father found him, let’s say, in need of some shaping up. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your view of military hierarchies) Charles’s grandfather was friends with General Gu Zhutong, a high-ranking officer in the National Revolutionary Army who later served under Chiang Kai-shek.
Impressed by Charles’s martial arts abilities, the general offered him a job as his personal orderly – effectively a cross between a bodyguard and a very fit personal assistant. It was here that Charles’s path took a turn for the explosive. During one unfortunate incident, while handling a new automatic rifle, he accidentally pulled the trigger, dropped the weapon in panic, and watched helplessly as it spun across the ground, firing rounds in all directions. The comedic timing was perfect; the embarrassment, eternal. Unsurprisingly, his military career took an abrupt pause.
Reinventing himself once again, Charles took up work on a Mitsubishi cargo ship in Wuhan, where he led a small group of maintenance workers. The crew, entrepreneurial to their core, ran a side hustle involving the trade of linen and salt – not exactly glamorous, but highly profitable in a time when basic goods were more precious than gold. Unfortunately, this proto-start-up venture caught the attention of the wrong people: Japanese authorities who suspected smuggling. Charles and his team were arrested.
Their imprisonment was grim. Hands tied behind their backs, they were paraded out to witness a public execution – a psychological tactic that Charles later recalled with visible trauma. “We became like zombies,” he said in the documentary Traces of a Dragon. The shock, fear, and malnutrition made them physically and emotionally numb. One week later, they were forced to watch another execution. Of the original seven men in the group, only five were eventually released, including Charles – thanks to the intervention of a relative with the right political connections.
Back on dry land, Charles wasn’t ready to throw in the towel. With civil war looming and a Japanese invasion underway, he returned to General Gu, who helped him join the Intelligence Bureau under the Nationalist government. Here, Charles became a secret agent assigned to the First War Zone – a job that sounded exciting but came with a tragic price tag. His status as a Nationalist made him a target, and he survived not one, but two assassination attempts. One bullet tore through his leg; another grazed his skull, taking a piece of scalp with it. His resilience would become something of a family trademark.
But the political winds were changing fast. As the Communists gained ground, Charles made the heartbreaking decision to abandon his two sons – Fang Shide and Fang Shisheng – in the city of Wuhu. Fearing for their safety if his presence endangered them, he disappeared overnight, never telling them where he was going. They awoke to find their father gone, vanished without a trace. It would be nearly four decades before they would see him again.
Lee-Lee Chan: From Widow to “Big Sister” of the Shanghai Underworld
Lee-Lee Chan (née Chen Yuerong, 陳月榮) was born around 1916 in Wuhan, in what was then the Republic of China. Her life, much like Charles’s, was shaped by war, loss, and an extraordinary capacity for adaptation. She married young, had two daughters – Yulan and Guilan – and found herself widowed by 1944 when Japanese air raids took her husband’s life. At just 28, she was a single mother in a city running on fear and rationing.
With few options and even fewer resources, she made the gut-wrenching decision to leave Wuhan in search of work. She told her daughters she’d be back soon – a white lie to soften the blow – and left them with their grandmother. Yulan, the eldest at 12, would soon be working in a child labour factory to help keep the household afloat. It was a hard world, and their mother was navigating the very worst of it alone.
Shanghai in the late 1940s was chaotic, a magnet for hustlers, traders, and desperate souls trying to rebuild their lives. Lee-Lee, needing money fast, took a gamble – literally and figuratively. She bought opium, planning to resell it at a profit. But her timing couldn’t have been worse. The port was under inspection, and the officer doing the checking was none other than Charles Chan, still operating under his Nationalist credentials.
He found the drugs. She expected arrest. But then Charles noticed the blue flower she wore in her hair – a signal in wartime China that a woman had lost her husband or child. Moved by her story and perhaps her quiet dignity, he chose to let her go. In what must be one of history’s most unconventional meet-cutes, he even returned the opium.
Thus began a strange and touching friendship that would evolve into something deeper. Meanwhile, Lee-Lee was carving out her own legend. In the bustling gambling dens of Shanghai, she became known as “Big Sister,” a woman with such consistent luck and bravado that people treated her with a mixture of awe and fear. For a time, she won big – until she didn’t. When fortune turned, she pawned everything she owned, clinging to survival with the same grit that had brought her this far.
Charles, now a close friend, noticed her decline and quietly bought back her belongings. He belonged to the “Shandong Gang” – a street-based brotherhood of fellow migrants from his home province – and he used his connections to help her recover her footing. Lee-Lee never gambled again.
From Secret Agents to Servants: A Hong Kong Household Like No Other
By the late 1940s, China had dramatically changed. With the Communist victory in the civil war, the People’s Republic of China was officially established in 1949. For Charles Chan, a former Nationalist spy with a suspicious number of bullet wounds and a history of smuggling, the new political climate was less than welcoming. He fled to Hong Kong, adopting a safer and more inconspicuous name: Chan Zhiping. It just so happened that “Chan” was also Lee-Lee’s surname – an accidental convenience that would help them blend in.
Charles found work at the French Consulate doing odds and ends – gardening, cleaning, carrying the odd diplomatic crate. The pay wasn’t great, but it was safe. Eventually, sensing that he could do better than scrubbing floors, Charles asked to be taught how to cook. He soon became a chef at the French Embassy. Whether by natural talent or sheer determination not to chop off a finger, he rose through the ranks and earned a significantly better wage.
Lee-Lee, who joined him in Hong Kong in 1951, also found work at the embassy as a maid. It was here, in 1954, that their most famous creation arrived: a bouncing baby boy named Kong-sang Chan – better known to the world as Jackie Chan. “Kong-sang” literally means “born in Hong Kong,” which is perhaps the most literal name one could give a baby unless they’d named him “Screaming Tiny Human No. 3.”
The young family lived in the servants’ quarters of the French Embassy. Life was modest, but stable. Jackie, however, was no quiet child. From a young age, he had boundless energy and very little interest in anything resembling formal education. The Chans made the bold decision to enrol him at the China Drama Academy – a place known less for its nurturing environment and more for its ironclad discipline under the fearsome Master Yu Jim-Yuen. There, Jackie spent ten years learning martial arts, acrobatics, and traditional Chinese opera, essentially preparing to be a stuntman before he could grow a full moustache.
G’Day, Canberra: From Embassies to Emigration
The 1960s were not easy years in Hong Kong. Opportunities were few, inflation was high, and even as Jackie’s skills grew, the family remained in financial hardship. So when Charles was offered a position as chef at the US Embassy in Canberra, Australia, by the Marshal of the French Embassy, Charles Greene, he accepted without hesitation. He went ahead first, working long hours to save money for an airline ticket for Lee-Lee.
When she eventually joined him in Canberra, both Charles and Lee-Lee found stable work with the US Embassy. Their work was appreciated and their living conditions far better than anything they’d known during the chaotic war years. But this migration came at a personal cost. Jackie, still a young performer in Hong Kong, was left behind in the care of Master Yu.
Years later, after Jackie had begun building his career in Hong Kong cinema, Charles scraped together all the money he and Lee-Lee had – plus every tip they’d earned – to buy Jackie an apartment. For years, Jackie had harboured some resentment towards his parents for “abandoning” him, but the act of self-sacrifice helped him understand how hard they’d been working, not for themselves, but for him.
A Reunion 40 Years in the Making
By 1985, Charles, then in his seventies, had one great personal quest left. With the help of a friend at the Chinese Embassy in Australia, he was able to track down his long-lost sons from his first marriage. Shide and Shisheng, now middle-aged, were living in Wuhan – one a postman, the other working on a pig farm.
The reunion took place in Guangzhou and, as you might imagine, was tearful, awkward, and profoundly moving. The sons, who had grown up assuming their father had died or simply abandoned them, were stunned to see him again. They spoke of hardship, of years lost, of survival without explanation. Charles wept, overcome with guilt and relief. A family once scattered by history was now, at least partially, reunited.
Charles later visited their ancestral home in Anhui, where he funded renovations of the family hall and updated the genealogical records to include Jackie’s Chinese name: 房仕龍 (Fáng Shìlóng). The Fang clan had come full circle.
Interestingly, Jackie himself hadn’t yet met his half-brothers at the time of the 2003 documentary Traces of a Dragon, although he had met his half-sisters (Lee-Lee’s daughters) on several occasions. It’s a reminder that while cinematic universes may wrap up neatly, real families take time – and patience – to knit back together.
Lights, Camera, Dad!
In his later years, Charles enjoyed a brief flirtation with stardom – or at least a spotlight adjacent to it. Apart from his blink-and-you-miss-it role in Police Story 2, he starred in a low-budget film that was, to no one's surprise, advertised as a “Jackie Chan film” in the hope that audiences wouldn’t read the fine print. If that’s not a classic dad move, what is?
Even as age caught up with him, Charles continued to visit his sons in China, travelling back and forth between Australia and Anhui into his late eighties. He passed away on 26 February 2008 in Hong Kong at the age of 93, surrounded by family. Lee-Lee had passed six years earlier, in 2002. Both are buried side by side at the Gungahlin Cemetery in Canberra, far from the war-torn China of their youth.
