In 1974, when Li Lian-jie first came to America, he was 11, and China and the U.S. had just begun an uneasy detente. As the star of the People's Republic's junior wushu team, young Li performed his martial artistry on the White House lawn for an audience including 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,'" he recalled recently while sitting in a Beverly Hills restaurant. "I said to the mirror, 'I like banana.' When I came back to the hotel the next day, I opened the door and I was scared: everything I'd said was on the table, as if I'd ordered it. 'It's true,' I thought. 'They are listening!'"

That was nearly a quarter century ago. In the intervening years, Li became the mainland's first martial-arts movie idol. He moved to Hong Kong, picked up the English moniker Jet Li and starred in a score of hits during the colony's Golden Age of action cinema. Then he gazed longingly across the Pacific, like so many other Hong Kong actors and directors--and like so many of the characters he played. "Everyone wears dark glasses in America," he is told in the 1991 Once Upon a Time in China, "because the gold the streets are paved with is so bright." In Once Upon a Time 3, he is taught to say "Beautiful!" in English. In last year's sixth installment of the series, he gets to America--and gets another English lesson. The only words he'll ever need, he is told, are "Yeah?" and "Yeah!"

Now 35, Jet Li lives in Southern California, where, to the astonishment of Asian film aficionados, people make entire action pictures without anyone getting kicked. But after Li's smashing major-studio debut in Lethal Weapon 4, movie people are paying as much attention to him as the U.S. Secret Service did when he was a kid. And when directors are asked if he can make it in Hollywood, their answer is Yeah! "He's delightful and disciplined," says Richard Donner, director of all four Lethal Weapon films. "I knew I was getting a genius in martial arts, but I also got a really sensational young actor. He's extremely bright, and he has a delightful sense of humor. There's a good chance this guy will be around for a long time. I think he'll deliver."

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