Cinema: No Cooling This Jet

Hong Kong action hero Jet Li gets a hip-hop-fueled shot at big-screen stardom in the U.S.

In 1974, when Li Lian-Jie first went to America, he was 11. As the star of the junior wushu team of the People's Republic of China, Li performed his martial artistry on the White House lawn for an audience that included Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. The boy's suspicious superiors back home had told him to beware of wiretaps, so in a hotel room he made a test. "I spoke to the flowers in Chinese: 'I like chocolate ice cream.' I said to the mirror, 'I like banana.' When I came back to the hotel, I opened the door, and everything...

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