Born in Beijing, China in 1963, the youngest of five children, Jet Li (born Li Lian Jie) was a dutiful and dutiful son.
Tragedy would soon cloud his life. His father died when he was two years old, leaving only his mother to try to support his family.
Fearing for his safety, his mother did not allow the young Jet Li to engage in any activity that could be in the least bit dangerous. This included horseplay, bicycling, ice skating, etc. He was eight years old before he started school, a year older than everyone else.
His teachers took a special affection for the boy. He always did what he was told, he worked hard and always got high marks on his tests. Due to his studiousness, he was assigned the task of physical education monitor, directing the daily calisthenics required by the state.
During the month-long summer vacation, students from all schools would attend the Beijing Sports and Exercise School to practice their assigned sport for two and a half hours a day. The arbitrary assignment would be fortuitous for everyone. There were four possible sports: swimming, gymnastics, soccer, and wushu, with approximately a thousand students in each discipline, from first to sixth grade.
Wushu literally means Military Art and is a cultural tradition in China, which began as a matter of survival during war and later became a formal sport. Part fighting art and part performance art, athletes are judged on both their combat application and their aesthetics.
Li was assigned to wushu, under Wu Bin’s tutelage, and approached it with the same dedication with which he did all his school work.
At the end of the summer break, all but 20 of the wushu participants were told they no longer needed to attend training. The remaining 20 were told they had to come back every day after school. At the end of the additional three months, 16 of the 20 were told their services would no longer be needed.
Li soon earned the nickname Jet due to his speed and grace.
His first competition was also the first national wushu competition since the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. He was nine years old at the time. He won.
His next big performance was at the Pan Asian-African-Latin American Table Tennis Championships, the first international event held in China since the Revolution.
At twelve, he became the wushu champion, despite competing against twenty-year-old men.
Throughout his career, he won 15 gold medals and 1 silver in direct competition with adults.
He performed for Richard Nixon, who asked him to become his bodyguard. The young man replied that he was not interested in protecting an individual, but rather that he wanted to protect the billions of his compatriots.
At seventeen, the young man withdrew from wushu to pursue other interests.
The next phase of his life was that of a martial arts action hero.
It debuted in the Shaolin Temple in 1982.
It was after this that he was given the screen name Jet Li in the Philippines because his given name was deemed too difficult to pronounce.
He has appeared in more than 25 movies, mostly in China and Hollywood. He even won the Hong Kong Film Award for Best Actor for Warlords (2007).
He has also lent his voice and movements (via motion capture) to the video game Jet Li: Rise to Honor (2004).
