No Roses Grow on a Sifu's Grave
by Stefan Hammond



Lam Ching Ying, the Hong Kong martial arts actor who passed away recently, was cast so often as a vampire-busting, chicken blood-slinging Taoist do-gooder that viewers may have eternal expectations of Lam setting up altars and cobbling together coin swords to hurl at gobbling hobgoblins. His steadfastness in these roles, and the stoic zeal which he displayed in hurling witches into umbrellas or sealing them in large clay pots with a large sheet of yellow paper scrawled with big red ghoul-controlling characters (and always with a stern admonition of watchfulness to his clue less earthly flunkies) was admirable; Mr Vampire(esp. parts 1 and 3), , Encounters of the Spooky Kind 2, etc, etc, are must-sees for Hong Kong affliction ados. But there was far more to the man and his career than vampiric victories and bottled-up beasties. The green-lit souls of the underworld may send up an unearthly howl from the pit o' hell to mourn the passing of the "eternal sifu", but earthly fans of action cinema in general and Hong Kong martial arts in particular add their voices to the primal yowl. Fortunately, we have videotape and film to preserve some of Mr Lam's highlights, and perhaps the following road map will guide you to a few scenic spots you may have overlooked.

Magic Cop(1990)...the title says it all. Who else besides LCY could play a police officer with nonpareil Taoist skills? The opening scene is a killer, as a passing child pauses to urinate on a burning pot of ghost-paper. Lam appears out of nowhere and whirls the whizzing tot around in a urinary arc: "Don't pee onto the burning pot," he advises via subtitle. A hapless granny douses the burning ashes, which rise vengefully out of the pot, prepared to kick human ass. Lam quickly rip-fashions a human silhouette out of yellow paper, stacks three cups and pours wine thus causing the image to bow before the ashes, bamboozles the ghost's effort to suck the crone into a nearby brick wall while narrowly escaping his own destruction...all in the first five minutes. How, when faced with completely inexplicable weird and wiggly supernatural phenomena, does he know exactly what to do and how to do it? Because, because...he's Lam Ching Ying, he's the man, he was duking it out with headless witches while you were playing in the sandbox. The rest of the flick is equally great, with Japanese crunch-princess Michiko Nishiwaki doing an extra-creepy number as a vixotic sorceress hell-bent on evil. Spin it.


[Cool Lam]
The Cool and Stylish Lam


Lam is terrific in a film with no ghosts and little action, playing a concerned police officer named Hoi in Ringo Lam's excellent School on Fire (1988). While SOF is a prescient and precious little buzz bomb for a myriad of reasons (including a really scary performance by teenage-fuzzy-cute Fennie Yuen Kit-ying as a schoolgirl in big, big trouble), one of the film's jagged edges is the interplay between hard-as-sharpened-ice triad toughie Brother Smart (played obsessively by Ringo's staple villain, lantern-jawed hard guy Roy Cheung Yiu-ying) and Lam's obstinate-though-he-knows-he-will-fail Hoi, from the RH KP. Lam just wants to save the innocents from the oogie oogie maelstrom of drugs, prostitution, triad bastards and modern despair, but...well, if you'd wondered what film noir done Hong Kong style looks like, check it.

But as we wax melancholy over the cruel fates, and if we want a single Lam Ching Ying movie to bring a tear to our eye as we stack another steamed chicken and fistful of smoldering incense sticks on the table, we need look no further than Alex Law's Painted Faces(1988) . Fans of Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung know this as the story of the Seven Little Fortunes: the performing troupe of somersaulting ragamuffins that spawned the likes of Jackie, Sammo, Yuen Biao, Yuen Wah and Corey Yuen Kwai. Sammo himself plays sifu Yuen, the grand master of the 7LF troupe (the real life sifu preceded Lam into the after world by a few short months). The film is a touchingly rendered slice of Hong Kong film history, and well worth watching. But it is Lam's performance which adds the bittersweet edge, as he portrays an aging Cantonese opera star whose battered body can no longer stand the strain of performing for the cameras. The kids experience the strain of onrushing pop culture clearing away the older traditional forms of entertainment, but they are flexible enough to adapt. Not so Mr. Lam, who, by film's end, has lost his marbles completely and is vaulting along the lighting framework atop the film set, performing Canto opera moves for real and waiting for the misstep which will send him crashing down onto the stage, breaking his neck and releasing him from this spinning painful world. In the film, Sammo climbs atop the ironwork and, matching Canto move for Canto move, talks his friend down safely. One only wishes that in real life, Sammo had been able to replicate the feat, and talk Lam into spending a few more years with us, and maybe make just a couple more films.


[Lam with Little Vampire]
Lam helping the little Vampire


But before we all dissolve into tears and drown the cockroaches feasting on the greasy gutter-blown takeout styropods of cha siu fan in a river of salt, let's muse on the cyclic nature of life. For after all, if anyone on this planet is first in line for reincarnation, it is Lam Ching Ying, who is down with the gods in a way that most of us cannot imagine. And I'm willing to bet my last HK$5 Queen's Head piece that at the precise moment of Lam's last breath, some newborn at a local hospital suddenly popped a big grin and sprouted a single, bushy eyebrow connected in the middle. And as the proud parents coddled the kid on the way home, he kept murmuring one of Lam's most hysterically-cracked quotes ever: "Suck the coffin mushroom now." Rest quiet In Peace.


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