I went to Hong Kong in '97 to witness the handover after graduating university, and then I was gonna backpack around Asia and then come back here and look for a job.
If you're down to 6% body fat, which I've done before, you burn out really quickly. Like, in a couple hours, you're pretty much done, and then you're useless.
Because my master was this renaissance man, I wasn't just learning a fighting style, I was learning how kung fu permeates all aspects of life, from eating to healthy living to mental state.
In my 20s, it was easy. In your 40s, it's a lot more challenging. You have to look at it like you're an actor, but you're also a professional athlete. You have to train.
I've built a career in Asia for 18 years, playing roles that had nothing to do with my race because everybody's Chinese in the films.
I ended up falling in love with the whole movie-making experience.
We'll see what I do after 'Badlands' to show audiences that I have more in my repertoire besides martial arts.
It's not at all my objective to become an Asian-American star.
Asian Americans haven't had as many opportunities as other people to build their careers in Hollywood, just because there hasn't been that much of an interest, especially in Asian American males.
I've been lucky enough to build a career outside of America, where I got 18 years and over 60 films of experience.
In my 20s, I could just power through stuff and be fine, but now, in your 40s? It's kind of like Kobe Bryant. He plays basketball a little bit differently than he did when he first started out.
I really want to take time and be in the moment with my kid for at least the first year. I know she's not going to remember that, but it's really for the family chemistry.
At Diversion, we want to do genres that people are not doing - or, if we're doing genres that people are doing, to do them in a fresh way.
What we did with 'Tai Chi Zero' and 'Tai Chi Hero' was break down the martial-arts genre and make it younger, hipper, and kind of cooler for the younger kids.
I really feel that Hong Kong is my home, and Hong Kong is my identity as an actor.
After working on 'Europa,' I found it incredibly freeing to speak English in a film, so it kind of sparked an interest in me as an artist to improve my acting.
I really dislike the fact that Asian males are constantly emasculated, whether it's American TV or films. You see it all the time, and it's so weird that they don't see sexuality in Asian men.
I wanted to try every style available to me - large productions, small productions, studio films, low-budget. You just can't sit around and wait for every big-budget film to come along.
For most normal people, deadlifts stretch your hamstrings, but in my case, it tightened them, because I was already very flexible.
For Mandarin scripts, there's software now where you can just insert the Chinese script, and it comes out all in pinyin.
