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He has come back to America, in triumph, at the same time his autobiography traces a painful trip back to his youth--to birth and before. Because he legendarily spent nearly a year in his mother's womb, Charles and Lee-lee Chan's only child, Kong-sang, was nicknamed Pao-pao--Cantonese for cannonball, but also a sound effect from any Jackie Chan movie fight. Charles was a cook for a French diplomat in Hong Kong, and the family lived in a mansion on Victoria Peak. Not until Jackie was an adult did he learn that Charles had been married previously, had sired three sons and had lost his first family during the Japanese occupation of China. In Shandong he met Lee-lee, who had lost her spouse, and smuggled her out of the country to Hong Kong.

Lee-lee gave her son unconditional love; Charles pounded physical discipline into the boy's body. At seven he was placed in the China Drama Academy, a Peking Opera school run by Master Yu Jim-yuen. If one judges a school by its graduates, then this was Harvard, Oxford and the Sorbonne. In Jackie's class were at least a half-dozen future shapers of Hong Kong action cinema: Samo Hung, the tubby terror who starred with Jackie in 15 films, directed him in eight and is now the lead in Martial Law, a new hit series on American TV; cute, lithe Yuen Biao, another frequent Chan-Hung co-star; and comic villain extraordinaire Yuen Wah.

Out of respect for their old master, many of his students took his name. Jackie, known in school as Yuen Lo, did no such thing. At 17 he left the Academy to work in movies, yet the master haunts him still. This is the man who introduced Jackie to "that grand altar of communion between player and audience: center stage." This is the ghost he still needs to please and appease. "Charles Chan was the father of Chan Kong-sang," he writes, "but Yu Jim-yuen was the father of Jackie Chan." And at the end of the book, an invocation: "I hated you. I feared you. I love you, Master."

Kong-sang's parents had emigrated to Australia while he was at school. For a while, in his early 20s, he joined them, and picked up his English nickname on a construction site in Canberra; his Chinese screen name, Sing Lung ("already a dragon," a reference to his ambition to succeed dead superstar Bruce Lee, of Enter the Dragon fame) came from his longtime manager, wily Willie Chan. Jackie served a frustrating film apprenticeship with Lo Wei, who had directed Lee in Fist of Fury and tried to make Jackie a sullen carbon copy of Lee. It was not until he teamed with Yuen Woo-ping on the 1978 hits Snake in Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master that Jackie located his screen personality: the modest, smiling man of the people. He still is.

The book displays a more complicated fellow: one who reacted to his first stardom with too much swagger and a retinue of burly parasites. That Jackie was no apt suitor for Teresa Teng. "I loved her," he writes, "but I loved myself more. And no heart can ever serve two masters." (Teng died of asthma, at 43, in 1995.) Even today, the older, wiser Jackie knows who's boss. "I spent two-thirds of my time abroad," he says in the book, "and even when I'm in Hong Kong, my schedule is so full that I can barely find time to be with my wife and child." The man is a workaholic; career comes first. "I think each year: this will be the year I slow down to enjoy the important things in life. Some year. Sometime soon."

He can enjoy his new American eminence in the silly, thrilly Rush Hour--"the movie to me is like a toy," he says--and start planning the inevitable follow-up. "The last scene of Rush Hour has Chris Tucker and me on the airplane, headed for Asia," Chan notes. "We said, 'If the movie opens at $30 million, we'll land in Hong Kong. If it opens at $1 million, then let's say there was a plane explosion. No more sequel.' So yes, there is a sequel."

In this whirlwind, can he push the "important things in life" from his mind? That Rush Hour subplot of the kidnapped child must resonate in Chan. In the days when he denied he had a wife and son (with good cause: one Japanese fan threw herself in front of a subway train after reading a rumor of the marriage), Jackie's stuntman friends would take the boy out for a walk. "One day he saw a poster with my face," Chan recalls, "and started uttering, 'Dad!' And the stuntmen grabbed him away. Later they told me this, and I cried." And when the boy was 12 or 13, his father warned him about kidnappers. "Then my son said, 'Don't worry, I'll never tell people that you are my father.' Wow! I just sighed."