Word: li
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...about 6 o'clock on Thursday evening, near what used to be quitting time for the day shift at the He Jun toy factory in Dongguan, China, 40-year-old Wei Dong Li made his way to the factory's front entrance, his 3-year-old son Qian Jie tugging at his sleeve. The factory is now closed; a few security guards stand inside the locked gate. Posted each evening at the front entrance is a sheaf of documents, the latest rulings from a local court on compensation claims filed by many of He Jun's 4,000 workers...
...Li has made five films - Born to Defence (1986), The Master (1989), Once Upon a Time in China (1991), Fist of Legend (1994) and Fearless (2006) - in which he protects his countrymen from cruel and rapacious foreigners, mostly Americans. In 1994's The New Legend of Shaolin, he is a Han Chinese rebel fighting against Qing (or Manchu, and thus foreign) rule. In Hero (2002), Li is an assassin who, to his own detriment, abstains from an attempt on the life of the Qin King, who goes on to become the venerated Qin Shi Huangdi, the first Emperor of China...
...films, Li considers the most important to be Hero, Fearless and 2005's Danny the Dog, in which he plays a senseless brute, trained to savage anyone running foul of his loan-shark master. "Everything I want to say is in those three movies," he declares. "The message of Hero is that your personal suffering is not as important as the suffering of your country. The point of Danny the Dog is that violence is not a solution. Fearless is actually about personal growth - about a guy who decides that in the end his greatest enemy is himself...
...That is the thing about Li. He has spent more than two decades as a superior practitioner of on-screen violence, so all he wants to talk about now is oneness and universal concord. "The strongest weapon is a smile and the best power is love" is typical of the beatific remarks he ventures to anyone within earshot. The conventional explanation for this is that after a horrific near-drowning in the 2004 Asian tsunami, Li experienced a Siddhartha-style bolt of enlightenment and decided to abandon Hollywood venality for a life of good works. It makes great press...
...Life After Life Seven years before, at the age of 34 - when he stood upon the summit of the Chinese film world but had yet to venture into international markets - Li was already having existential ruminations. "I started thinking about life," he says. "I started wondering what it is people want. Is it money, power or fame? Is it to see yourself in TIME?" Over the next seven years his fame increased exponentially, but he was unable to completely enjoy it and ended up engaging over 20 different Buddhist teachers. "The main idea taught by the different kinds of Buddhism...