张 洁（译） 朱 斌

周星驰：你的孤独，虽败犹荣

Stephen Chow:The undefeatable glory and solitude

张 洁1（译） 朱 斌2

It’s high time to talk about the so-called “Two Chow One Cheng”.Let’s start from the Hong Kong “King of Comedy”: Stephen Chow, or Chow Sing Chi. Proud as he is, he is also of a kindly disposition; keeping a low prof i le for years, while he is always praised by hundreds of thousands. Just as fi re fl y in the dark, an excellent idol like Chow would surely be outstanding and distinctive wherever he is.

After her father, a judger, was put into jail in 1957, Lin Bou Yee, Chow’s mother, with a label of “Five-Black Type”, roamed to Hong Kong for employment from Guangdong Province. In order to be employed, she must had a warrantor; thus she then married with Chow Yi Shang, a pauper of Kowloon, Hong Kong, and born one after another three kids, including two daughters, namely Chow Men Gai and Chow Sing Ha, and a son, Stephen Chow. Chow Yi Shang lived a dissolute life, and the marriage was dominated by wrangles. When Stephen Chow was 7 years old, the unbearable hardship in the marriage drove Lin Bou Yi to divorce and raise the three kids all by her own. As she remembered, the kid Stephen Chow did not speak much; instead, he often stood by the window and gazed the streets. In 1971, Stephen Chow, in 9 years old, was taken by his mother to cinema for the first time for the well-known Bruce Lee’s Kung Fu movie The Big Boss. “The cinema was shabby, but I was totally fascinated by the movie. Feeling my heart was beating right out of my chest, I burst into tears at a moment. Bruce Lee is so amazing!” said Chow.

Since then Bruce Lee became Chow’s idol. To be a martial art master, or a movie star like Bruce Lee, were what Chow dreamed of then; for which he learned Wing Chun and Iron Palm. “Chow developed interest in Chinese martial arts when we were together in the high school. He practiced a lot, and for many times I served as his ‘flesh target’. He hit really hard sometimes, but I never complained,”recalled Lee Gin-Yam, one of Chow’s classmates. Chow worked as an off i ce assistant in a shipping company for two months after graduated from high school, during which he asked Liang Chaowei, or better known as Tony Leung, to accompanied him for a TVB acting school audition. As everybody knows, Chow, the one who set his mind to enter the school, was turned down while Tony Leung, the companion, was enrolled.

Fortunately, Chow got a nice neighbor, whose sister, Qi Meizheng, was then a student in another class of TVB acting school. Qi recommended Chow to Liu Fang-gang, the director of TVB school, and Liu accepted. Therefore, in 1982, Chow was enrolled in the 11thTVB acting school, and started his rise to stardom. Every TVB actor starts from playing walk-on roles, and Chow made no exception. In the TV series Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils (1982), Chow played a Qidan (an Liu ancient nationality in China) soldier standing beside Liang Jia-Reng (a leading role player), thus unveiling his walk-on year.

In that year the most famous TV show he played was The Legend of the Condor Heroes (1983), in which the several roles he played are still, repeatedly, being dug, verif i ed and discussed by mainland fans.

In an episode (of The Legend of the Condor Heroes), Chow was captured by Yang Kang, and Yang decided to send him to Mei Chaofeng (a female monster) as a gift for skill practice. Chow once recalled, “Director’s plan was that I would be killed by one single blow, but I thought it was not real enough, so I designed another plot: I block the fi rst blow and then killed by the second.

I went to discuss with the Assistant Director, and the reply was ‘Just stop talking and go back to work.’ He thought it was a waste of time. So, in addition to the criticism, I also got a NG.”

“I thought acting was so interesting a work then, really. Although my opinion was rejected, I felt happy to speak out. Later on, I still raise my suggestions frequently, but turned down frequently as well.”After the walking-on year, Chow was arranged to host a kid’s television show, “430 Space Shuttle” (1983). His predecessor, Tony Leung hosted it for merely 4 months, but Chow did for 5 years.

He thought that 5 years as nothing more than torturing:“I’m not saying that hosting a kid’s show is bad, but, you know, as one who aspires to acting, I felt it was too bad, because it wasn’t what I wanted to do. That was really hard, depressing.”

In 1987, after hosting the kid’s show for 5 years, Chow was eventually included into TVB’s acting crew. Pretty lucky, he got a critical role at the very onset: the younger brother of Alex Man (Wan Ziliang) in TV series The Journey Of Life, and Man offered great helps and advices to Chow, both in life and acting. To the helps and advices given by Man, Chow’s mother once said gratefully: “At the beginning of Chow’s acting career, Man offered a lot of helps, to which I want to say thanks. After they shot all night, he often drove Chow home and bought him foods.”

Chow starred in three movies in 1988: He Who Chases After The Wind, co-starred with Alex Man and ElizabethLee (Li Meifeng); Faithfully Yours, co-starred with Jacky Cheung (Zhang Xueyou) and Max Mok (Mo Shaocong); and the most important, Final Justice, with Danny Lee (Li Xiuxian), which earned him a career turning point. In the Final Justice, Chow played a kind carnapper. His excellent interpretation to this role won him multiple nominations and fi nally the Award for Best Supporting Actor at Taiwan’s 25th Annual Film Awards. Sitting in the audience, he had hard time to believe that it was his name being read, to the extent that he asked the one next to him, “is it me? Are you sure?”

The award caused Chow to draw much attention from both movie and TV fields, marking by that he appeared in a TVB series The Final Combat in 1989. The show was underwhelming, but Chow’s unique acting style impressed audience so much that his catch phrase in the show “Sit down, drink a tea, eat a Bun” became a faddish phrase.

Together with Alex Man, Chow starred The Just Of Life (1989), a TVB anniversary show, which broke TVB’s rating record. Not only his “Mo Lei Tau” style in the show was hot in the town, but he also developed close partnership with Ng Man Tai (Wu Mengda), pacing a solid ground for the two’s future cooperation.

In 1990, Chow‘s TVB career drew to an end, and his splendid film career, an era of Chow, set out. It was in this year Chow departed from TVB and broke into fi lm industry. Cooperated with 10 fi lm companies including Golden Harvest and Win’s Movie, he starred 11 movies, such as My Hero, All For The Winner, God Of Gamblers II, When Fortune Smiles, etc.

Among the 11 movies in 1990, the My Hero directed by Ka-Yan Leung (Liang Jiaren) was hailed as the very movie in which Chow’s “Mo Lei Tau” style takes shape. With the All For The Winner, directed by Corey Yuan (Yuan Kui) and Jeffrey Law (Liu Zhenwei), Chow bounded into fame with a box office myth, and the “Star Grandpa”, Chow’s nickname in the movie, was spread so far ever since. All For The Winner was a comedy tailored for Chow. It harvested a box office record of some HK$40 million in one month, not only the highest of the year, but also Hong Kong’s top-grossing fi lm of all time.

What’s more, three in the box office top 10 Hong Kong movies of 1990 were starred by Chow. Apart from the All For The Winner, When Fortune Smiles ranked the tenth with HK$ 18.79 million, and God Of Gamblers II ranked the second by HK$ 40.34 million. A craze of Stephen Chow swept Hong Kong. Everyone was talking about Chow, and the City Entertainment Magazine invited several critics to discuss the “Chow Phenomenon”. Views were different, but there was one common point: Chow infused Hong Kong movie with much “freshness”.

Chow starred 8 movies in 1991, among which 3 ranked among the box office top 10 list once again. The Fight Back to School crowned with HK$43.82 million, breaking both the record of All For The Winner and the Hong Kong record.

Also in this year, to repay Danny Lee, Chow starred two movies produced by Lee: Legend of the Dragon, and The Magnificent Scoundrels. Comparing to others, The Magnif i cent Scoundrels was of medium quality and box off i ce. The 1992 witnessed Chow’s movie dominating Hong Kong for 3 years in a row, manifesting by that the first five among the top 10 box office Hong Kong movie were Chow movie, an unprecedented record without latecomers. For half of the year Hong Kongers were bathed in Chow’s movies, so much so that the media named this year as the “Year of Chow”. The fi ve movies were: 1st, Justice My Foot, HK$ 49.88 million; 2nd, All’s Well, Ends Well, HK$ 48.99 million; 3rd, Royal Tramp, HK$ 40.86 million; 4th, King of Beggars, HK$ 37.41 million; 5th, Royal Tramp II, HK$ 31.58 million.

1993 was a year when Hong Kong movie went slack, but the Flirting Scholar starred by Chow still topped the yearly list by HK$ 40.17 million; by contrast, however, his The Mad Monk was disfavored in both public praise and in box office. Seems that it was not always wines and roses, and the craze of Chow was ebbing. Chow’s Out of the Dark and Sixty Million Dollar Man in 1995 were regarded as parody of Hollywood movies, and the media claimed that Chow was in decline. As a response, in the 1996, Chow’s The God Of Cookery and Forbidden City Cop, with box off i ce respectively HK$ 40.86 million and HK$ 36 million, ranked 2nd and 3rd in the yearly box office list. Someone did a calculation: from 1990 to 1996, movies starred by Chow yielded a box office revenue of some HK$ 1 billion and 4 million, and the total box office of all Hong Kong movies in this 7 years was HK$ 6.7 billion and 34.60 million, indicating that the Chow’s accounts for 15% of the total market and an average of HK$ 27.89 million, a strikingly spectacular achievement. When it comes to 1999, when Hong Kong movie was in slump, Chow, by The King Of Comedy, wrote, directed and starred by himself, put the top-grossing movie title in his bag with a box off i ce of HK$ 29.85 million. In 2001, his Shaolin Soccer, banned in mainland for so-called “getting out of line”, swept the Hong Kong market with some HK$ 60.73 million, making it not only a breaker of Jackie Chan’s record, HK$ 57.51 million, by Police Stroy IV - First Strike, but also Hong Kong’s greatest box off i ce success to date.

（作者单位：1.首都师范大学；2.广州启帆信息技术有限公司）