Triads and Other Villains in HK's Babylon, Part 5

[Todd]

Archived on the web page *Hong Kong Cinema*
(http://egret0.stanford.edu/hk/):

Reprinted from:

The New Yorker
August 7, 1995
Onward and Upward with the Arts, pg. 30

Scanned in by Uncle Prawn (dime...@tiac.com).

HONG KONG BABYLON
The cult of Hong Kong movies is growing. Why are they so
outrageous and violent? It may have something to do with the
industry that produces them.

By Fredric Dannen
[CONTINUED]

In Hong Kong, movie stars are refreshingly businesslike and
unpampered, and movie publicists don't even exist. But
because gangsters exert so much control, those who work in
the industry face problems that are far more
complicated--and potentially lethal--than any faced by their
American counterparts. Perhaps the closest the film industry
comes to a temperamental actress is Anita Mui, with whom
Jackie Chan has been linked romantically. Mui, who is
full-lipped and sultry, is sometimes called the Madonna of
Hong Kong, because besides being an actress she is a
platinum-selling Cantonese-pop singer who likes to get down
and dirty in her concerts and videos.
In the early morning hours of May 4, 1992, Mui found herself
in serious trouble. She and some friends were giving a
birthday party for her assistant in a private room at Take
One, a karaoke club in Kowloon, where many movie industry
people have their offices. It was prime time for Mui--a
night owl, she is notoriously difficult to roust for a
daytime shoot--but she should probably have known better
than to show up at a karaoke bar, since they are popular
hangouts for triads. (The word ``triad'' is used to denote
both a member of a Chinese criminal society and the society
itself.) As it happened, a man named Wong Long-wai, who was
both a triad and a movie producer--not an unusual
combination in Hong Kong--was in another part of the club
that morning, with his wife and at least one business
associate. Wong Long-wai was no one to trifle with. The
triad to which he belonged, the 14K, was a powerful one, and
he was the head of a particularly violent faction.
Sometime that morning, Wong learned that Mui was at the
club, and he evidently asked her to have a drink with him
and sing a song. A social encounter between a film star and
a triad is likely to have bad consequences. The next day,
the triad calls the star's manager with the news that the
star has promised to appear in the triad's new film. Actors
have reputedly been kidnapped and actresses raped for
refusing to work for triads. Mui declined Wong's invitation,
but, according to testimony from one of Wong's employees,
she declined rudely--and in English. ``Don't speak to me in
English. I don't understand,'' Wong said, to which Mui
responded, in English, ``So what?'' Wong slapped her.
The incident should have ended there, but other Hong Kong
triads besides the 14K had an interest in the movie
business, and perhaps not all of them were inclined to
overlook an assault on a movie star. The following evening,
Wong Long-wai was leaving a restaurant in the Wan Chai
district of Hong Kong when he was confronted by three men,
one of whom claimed to be Andely Chan, also known as the
Tiger of Wan Chai. The Tiger was a race-car driver in his
early thirties who had many friends in the movie
industry--including, it was said, Anita Mui. He was also a
triad. According to testimony in a subsequent trial, one of
the Tiger's men slashed Wong Long-wai's arm with a knife,
and the Tiger struck Wong in the face with a mobile phone.
Wong was hospitalized for the knife wound. Two days later,
someone slipped into Wong's hospital ward and shot him
fatally in the head. Anita Mui immediately fled Hong Kong.
Many people were quick to criticize Mui, including Jackie
Chan, her old boyfriend; he said he had repeatedly warned
her to stay away from night clubs. Chan is virtually the
only movie star in Hong Kong who is immune to triad
pressure--partly because he has the backing of a major,
legitimate company, Golden Harvest, and partly because his
movies are expensive and take a long time to make, whereas
most triads want a fast buck. Willie Chan, Jackie's manager,
has had grievous problems with triads, however. Managers in
the Hong Kong movie industry perform a role akin to that of
Hollywood agents, except that they rarely have multiple
clients; there are no Mike Ovitzes in Hong Kong. Willie Chan
was once the sole exception. In 1986, the top actress Maggie
Cheung--who plays Jackie's long-suffering girlfriend in the
*Police Story* series--asked Willie to represent her, and
when he agreed many other actors followed suit. ``At my
peak, I managed about forty-four artists,'' Willie told me.
``But then the pressure from the triads became too great.
They just said, `I don't care what you do--I want this girl
or this guy.' So a few years ago I decided to give up most
of my artists. Maybe Jackie alone is good enough.'' He
refused to say more, and his agitation had become visible.
Tony Deakin, a Detective Chief Inspector of the Royal Hong
Kong Police, says, ``We were informed that a gun was pointed
at Willie's head for release of the actor Andy Lau. Willie
denies the incident, but I think the possibility of its
being true is quite genuine.''
Fortunately for Willie, he had never manages Anita Mui. In
the months that followed Wong's murder, Mui lay low, in the
United States, Europe, and Japan. A grisly rumor circulated
that the 14K wanted her leg as in retribution, though there
was no evidence that she had conspired in Wong's knifing or
shooting, nor was she ever charged in connection with either
offense. The Tiger, meanwhile, had been arrested in Macao as
a suspect in the murder, and then released for lack of
evidence, but he was scheduled to stand trial for the
knifing.
On November 20, 1993, the Tiger finished second in the Macao
Grand Prix, and was almost immediately disqualified when his
car was found to have illegal modifications. As he stepped
out of a hotel in Macao around three o'clock the following
morning, he was shot dead by three men wearing motorcycle
helmets. After that, the matter seemed to be settled. No
convictions resulted from either the Tiger's murder or
Wong's, or from the knife attack on Wong. Anita Mui, who had
returned to Hong Kong, kept quiet about the entire affair,
except for complaining in a Singapore newspaper, ``Which man
would want to marry a woman who has so much trouble?''
While Golden Harvest, the movie conglomerate that produces
Jackie Chan's films, remains the industry leader, in recent
years a company called Win's Group has come on strong. Win's
has access to a large number of top stars, and it has
produced so many hit movies that Golden Harvest, once a
direct competitor, has agreed to distribute many of them
through an affiliate. Win's is controlled by two brothers
named Heung Wah-keung and Heung Wah-sing, who are also known
as Charles and Jimmy Heung. Next to Raymond Chow of Golden
Harvest, the Heung brothers are probably the most powerful
people in the Hong Kong movie business today.
Charles and Jimmy Heung are, respectively, the tenth and
thirteenth children of the late Heung Chin, who, in 1919,
founded the Sun Yee On, by far the largest triad in Hong
Kong. In 1988, the eldest brother of Charles and Jimmy, a
law clerk named Heung Wah-yim, was convicted in Hong Kong of
being the Dragon Head, or boss, of the Sun Yee On, but the
conviction was reversed on appeal in Great Britain. Charles
and Jimmy have repeatedly denied being triads, and, as far
as I was able to discern, neither of them has a criminal
record. Earlier this year, the United States Attorney's
Office in Brooklyn won a racketeering case against a
Chinatown businessman with alleged ties to the Sun Yee On.
One of the key witnesses claimed to have been in the Sun Yee
On, and identified five of the Heung brothers, including
Charles and Jimmy, as ``top guys''.
The Hong Kong police seem to view the Heung brothers as
omnipotent. ``No one in Hong Kong will talk to us about the
Heungs unless he is willing to emigrate to Nigeria
afterwards,'' Tony Deakin says. One afternoon, I visited
Charles Heung in his office, in Tsim Sha Tsui, at the
southern end of Kowloon. It is pointless to ask someone in
Hong Kong if he belongs to the triad, because membership
alone is a crime. I raised the subject indelicately enough
for Heung to catch on, however. He spoke at length, in
Cantonese to one of his employees, and she then told me,
``Since you are curious to know the background of Mr. Heung,
his family, to be honest, they do have a mafia background,
because his father was one of the heads. But the father died
when Mr. Heung was very small, and he had very little
knowledge of what was going on. Over the years, Mr. Heung
has had to work even harder to overcome the effects of his
family name.''
Heung, who is a handsome man in his mid-forties, with
close-cropped hair and a face that suggests vulnerability,
has acted in a few of his company's films. In *Return of God
of Gamblers* (the movie that will open the Hong Kong Film
Festival at Cinema Village on August 11th) he plays a
sensitive bodyguard. The movie's director, Wong Jing, a
squirrelly man with large glasses, makes most of his films
for the Heungs, and is one of the most successful directors
and producers in Hong Kong. He is sometimes called the
Cantonese Roger Corman, because, even in a cinema known for
its exploitation films, he stands out. (*Naked Killer*, a
movie he wrote and produced, features a team of emasculating
lesbian assassins in hot pants.) One day last November, at
about three in the afternoon, as Wong was about to enter his
office in Kowloon three men jumped him from behind and
bashed his teeth in. Wong has a reputation for being
talkative, but when the police questioned him about the
assault--after his dental surgery--he was mum. ``We firmly
believe he got beaten up for something he said, because his
attackers concentrated on his mouth,'' Tony Deakin told me.
``Maybe he was talking about certain people behind their
backs.'' I asked Charles Heung for his reaction to the
assault. ``We will leave it to the police to solve,'' he
said. Then he laughed.
The assault on Wong Jing did not appear to upset the movie
industry--he is not terribly well liked by his peers. The
Heungs, on the other hand, are surprisingly popular. Movie
people make a distinction between ``bad'' triads and
``good'' triads, and when they complain about the
involvement of gangsters in the film industry, they are
usually referring to the ones who rape and kidnap and use
other coercive means to get actors and actresses to sign
contracts. The Heungs are never accused of anything like
that. Both brothers are considered to be knowledgeable and
creative filmmakers; Win's group, their company, makes a lot
of good movies and pays competitive salaries. Moreover, if
you work for the Heungs there is a considerable bonus: the
bad triads tend to leave you alone. These days, Charles
Heung told me, smiling, ``the most famous stars in Hong Kong
have contract with us.''
The martial arts star Jet Li, for example, began making
movies for Win's in 1993. The previous year, he lost his
manager, Jim Choi, to two gun-wielding assassins dressed as
security guards: Choi was shot down as he stepped out of an
elevator in the building where he worked, shortly after he
had argued on the phone with a bad triad who wanted to use
Jet Li in a movie. Andy Lau, who is both the biggest pop
singer in Southeast Asia and a popular romantic leading man,
is also in business with the Heungs. Before he struck up
this arrangement, he had terrible problems with bad triads.
In November, 1993, his assistant, a twenty-six-tear-old
woman, wound up in the hospital after her apartment was
firebombed. ``There is lots of movie that is made by the
gangster, and it was hard for me to reject that kind of
project, so I just take it with a smiling face,'' he said.
In the past few years, one man has emerged in the eyes of
the movie industry as particularly bad. His name is Chan
Chi-ming. The South China Morning Post has suggested that
Chan is connected to a mainland Chinese brotherhood called
the Big Circle, though he has never been convicted as such.
``We believe he's been behind a lot of the violence in
getting actors for films,'' Tony Deakin says, adding, ``We
have absolutely no proof.'' Recently, Chan Chi-ming sent a
script to the film star Chow Yun-fat, and when Chow didn't
respond someone threw a cat's head into his courtyard. Chan
is former professional boxer in his early thirties, married,
with three children. He is superstitious, and is said to
have gone in to the movie business on the advice of a
fortune-teller. A portrait of Chairman Mao hangs in his
office. He produced his first movie, *Hong Kong Godfather*,
in 1991. It starred Andy Lau.
Chan Chi-ming wanted Leslie Cheung, the star of *Farewell My
Concubine*, to appear in his next project, but Cheung's
movie company, Mandarin Films, refused to lend him out. The
actor was busy completing Mandarin's release for the 1992
Lunar New Year, a comedy entitled *All's Well, Ends Well*.
The first week of the Lunar New Year is the time of peak
movie attendance in the Chinese-speaking world, equivalent
to our summer and Christmas seasons combined. On January 9,
1992, a month before the scheduled release of *All's Well,
Ends Well*, five masked men armed with pistols and knives
burst in Mandarin's film laboratory in Kowloon and demanded
the negatives. One of the thieves was tried and convicted;
in a confession--later recanted--he said he had committed
the robbery for Chan Chi-ming, but Chan was never charged.
*All's Well, Ends Well* opened as planned. ``They stole the
wrong negatives,'' Leslie Cheung told me.
The Mandarin Films robbery was more than the movie industry
could tolerate. Five days later, during the morning rush
hour, more than three hundred actors, directors, cameramen,
screenwriters, and production-crew members marched on Police
Headquarters in the business district of Hong Kong. Jackie
Chan was at the head of the parade, wearing a yellow
armband. Among those marching beside him were Andy Lau, the
comedy star Stephen Chow, and the busty soft-porn star Amy
Yip, whose movies include *Robotrix* and *Sex and Zen*. The
protesters carried a large banner that read ``Show Business
Against Violence,'' and handed the police a petition urging
that the movie industry be protected from extortion. The
march came to be known as a demonstration against triads,
though in fact it was a demonstration against bad triads.
The following year, Chan Chi-ming's career in motion
pictures was interrupted when, during a business trip to
Shenzhen, a city in south China, he was jailed for unlawful
sexual intercourse with a Chinese resident. (It is widely
believed that the Heungs lured Chan to Shenzhen and used
their influence to arrange his arrest. When I asked Charles
Heung if this was true, he laughed and said, ``Of course not
true. I am not so big power!'') After a year of
incarceration, Chan Chi-ming returned to Hong Kong and, to
the amazement of the movie industry, relocated his film
company, Wang Fat Film Production, directly across the
street from the office of Charles Heung. On a recent
afternoon, he agreed to speak with me about his career. Chan
has a dark complexion and large, sensual lips, and he was
dressed, improbably, in a herringbone jacket, a floral tie,
and tortoiseshell glasses. I quickly discovered that Chan
defies interviewing. Mostly, he giggled or made cryptic
pronouncements, such as ``The movie business is like a
flying dragon.'' I asked how he had managed to get a big
star like Andy Lau to act in his first movie. ``It was
fate,'' Chan said.
For all the problems the industry has had with triads, its
movies tend to make them heroic. Perhaps the blame lies with
John Woo, the acknowledged master of the Hong Kong gangster
film. Woo, who was born in Canton in extreme poverty in 1946
and now lives and works in Los Angeles, has achieved the
recognition from the American movie industry that continues
to elude Jackie Chan. He is fascinated with the themes of
loyalty and brotherhood, and the triads in his movies are
modern, gun-toting versions of honorable Chinese swordsmen.
Woo has them slaughter one another with operatic grandeur.
His first gunplay picture, *A Better Tomorrow*, released in
1986, spawned scores of imitations, and set off a fashion
craze for the trenchcoat and sunglasses worn in the film by
the actor Chow Yun-fat. (This was no small accomplishment,
since Hong Kong is too humid for trenchcoats.)
I met Woo not long ago on the lot of Twentieth Century Fox,
where he is now at work on *Broken Arrow*, a movie about a
stolen nuclear missile, starring Christian Slater and John
Travolta. He was dressed in black, down to a pair of
zippered boots. A short, modest man, he greets visitors with
a bow. Woo has found working in Hollywood a sobering
experience. In Hong Kong, the director is king; when Woo
made his movies there, he said, ``even the boss from the
studio is not allowed to see my footage. Every day, I can
shoot based on my instinct, and I can put the new stuff in
any minute. I only need to deliver the final print.'' Within
reason, this is the norm. Even directors who work for
triads--a fate that Woo avoided--never complain of creative
interference. As the director Wong Kar-wai puts it, ``it's
better to deal wit h a godfather than an accountant.''
*Hard Target*, Woo's first American movie, starring
Jean-Claude Van Damme, involved a lot of accountants. ``I
just didn't get used to the system here,'' Woo said, shaking
his head. ``Too many meeting, too many politic. So many
people get their input in the script. The people have so
much worry and fear, and sometimes they are afraid to make
any decision. So you have to deal with them, and waste time
and energy on those kind of things...In Hong Kong, I feel I
work like a painter. In Hollywood, I also work like a
painter, but somehow my hand is tied up by rope.'' He
sighed. ``But I still think I can do something here.''
At the end of *Super Cop*, Jackie Chan's Hong Kong police
officer jokes to Michelle Yeoh's Chinese inspector that it
doesn't matter which government gets the bad guys' loot,
since 1997 is just around the corner. That is about the most
daring political reference I've seen in a Hong Kong film--an
art form that scrupulously avoids overt political content.
The Hong Kong censorship board is far less interested in sex
and violence than in references that might offend China. The
director Ann Hui told me, ``I have a subject I really want
to do. It's imperative we make a film about Hong Kong people
in the period of June 4th''--the day in 1989 when the
Tiananmen Square massacre took place. ``I spent the last two
years trying to get money to make this film, and I was
treated like someone with leprosy.''
Filmmakers have every reason to be worried about the coming
reunification. Under the terms of the Sino-British Joint
Declaration, Hong Kong will be permitted to preserve its
laws and its free-enterprise system for fifty years after
its accession to China--provided, of course, that China
keeps its word. ``Who knows? The Chinese government, their
policy can change every day,'' the director Stanley Kwan
says. Kwan's most recent movie, *Red Rose White Rose*, was
filmed in Shanghai, and the experience left him shaken. He
discovered that the mainland government's policy is to
confiscate all negatives and, after a review by censors with
an eye to political and sexual content, allow the director
to take home no more than ten thousand feet of film--about
two hours' worth--for postproduction. ``So that mean if you
have a new idea after you get the final censor cut, no way
can you do it,'' he said. One of the love scenes in Kwan's
movie did not meet China's stringent anti-pornography
standards, and had to be smuggled out. As a penalty for the
smuggling, Kwan will not be allowed to film on the mainland
again for to years.
Even after the reunification, it may be financially risky
for Hong Kong movies to appear pro-China in sentiment,
because that might offend Taiwan. It was only a decade ago
that Taiwan blackballed Hong Kong filmmakers or actors who
so much as shot on location in China. (Tony Leung, the star
of Jean-Jacques Annaud's *The Lover*, was unable to get
acting work for years for this reason.) Taiwan remains the
largest export market for Hong Kong movies, and ticket sales
there can cover as much as twenty per cent of a movie's
budget.
The mainland has historically provided little or no income
to the Hong Kong movie business, and what's worse is that
the Communist government has condoned, and even profited
from, the piracy of Hong Kong films. There is no guarantee
that China will become a significant source of revenue for
Hong Kong filmmakers after 1997, though the potential
rewards of tapping into a hitherto closed market of a
billion two hundred million people could be tremendous.
``The China market is our future,'' Charles Heung told me
confidently. In August, 1993, the Heung brothers entered
into a joint-venture agreement with a Chinese corporation to
build theatres and video-rental outlets across China and a
film studio in Shenzhen. Two months after the deal was
signed, Golden Harvest followed suit by making a similar
agreement. The Heungs and Golden Harvest now have
distribution rights in China for all non-pirated Hong Kong
videos and laser disks. ``There will be a lot of teething
problems,'' Raymond Chow said, sounding rather less
confidant than Heung. ``But it is a very important step in
the right direction.''
One added benefit of Golden Harvest's joint-venture deal is
that Jackie Chan's recent films are now officially
sanctioned in China. Meanwhile, his popularity in the rest
of Asia is undiminished, His latest movie, *Thunderbolt*,
scheduled to open in Hong Kong on August 8th, is far and
away the most expensive Hong Kong movie ever made--it cost
more than twenty million dollars. Chan plays an
internationally famous race-car driver who befriends a group
of teen-age Hong Kong hot-rodders and helps them overcome
some nasty triads; in the process, he crashes a few cars and
sets himself on fire. When I asked Chan if he has made
preparations for 1997, I was not surprised by his answer.
``I never think tomorrow--I think what I'm doing today,'' he
said. ``People ask me, `You don't scare 1997?' I say, `I
don't know I still alive in 1997.' ''

--Fredric Dannen, "Hong Kong Babylon", in *The New Yorker*,
issue of August 7, 1995