Martial artist and legendary actor Jackie Chan said in a 2015 interview, which just recently resurfaced, that he was “forced to marry” his wife of 35 years, Joan Lin Feng-jiao, after she got pregnant in 1982.
“It was an accident which conceived Jaycee [his first son]. I have never thought of getting married, but I felt it was akin to being forced to get married,” Chan told the China Press, according to AsiaOne.
He admitted that he only married Lin for the sake of their child’s future.
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The 63-year-old also revealed that he “had many girlfriends” in his youth, and that the romance between him and Lin started to fizzle out a long time ago.
One of those women was former beauty queen Elaine Ng, who gave birth to Chan’s daughter, Etta Ng, in 1999, according to Shanghaiist.
He admitted that his affair with Ng was a mistake, saying that he had “only committed a fault that many men in the world commit.”
On the other hand, Etta said she and Chan never really had a father-daughter relationship, and dubbed him as “just a stranger” in a 2015 interview.
Chan was recently involved in a controversy surrounding his teen daughter, who checked into Hong Kong hospital earlier in April after a suspected suicide attempt.
In March, Elaine Ng was arrested for criminal intimidation following an argument with her daughter, claiming that she stumbled upon a packet of sedatives in her daughter’s room.
She was also arrested in 2015 for child abuse following talks about a drinking problem.
