There are many ways to tell the story of Jackie Chan. He is the heir to Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, the comic grace of his movements leaving audiences in laughing wonder. He’s also the heir to Bruce Lee: If Lee broke old stereotypes about the Asian man being frail and craven, then Chan reinvented him once more, offering across dozens of movies a consistent character who was almost childlike in his cheerfulness, known as much for his winking smile as for the fury of his fists. Before 1995’s Rumble in the Bronx made him a household name in America, he was a filmmaker’s filmmaker, his elaborate fight sequences and death-enticing stunts the objects of devoted study by Steven Spielberg and James Cameron. And he helped bring martial arts into the Hollywood mainstream, so that nearly every American action hero, from Jason Bourne to the Black Panther, now boasts elements of karate or jujitsu in their repertoire of ass-kicking skills. The transfer was symbolically completed in 1999’s The Matrix, when Keanu Reeves, having downloaded a fighting program to his brain, opens his eyes and reverently whispers, “I know kung fu.”

These aspects of the Chan legend are all present in his new memoir, Never Grow Up, as the threads of an unlikely rags-to-riches story. The child of a cook and a maid—a “servant’s kid,” as he was derisively called—he rose from virtually nothing to become the most famous Chinese entertainer on earth. In the book’s introduction, his world-straddling triumph is represented by the lifetime achievement Oscar that he received in 2016, the only time it has ever been bestowed on a Chinese filmmaker. (The book’s jacket features him holding the golden statue with his eyes closed, as if he is saying a prayer to it.) And like all rags-to-riches stories—whether it’s Daddy Warbucks rescuing little orphan Annie, or an Indian slumdog becoming a millionaire—Chan’s is ultimately a tale about the place where he was born and raised and first made his mark: Hong Kong, which over the course of his lifetime went from being the last significant outpost of the British Empire to an ambiguous outlier of an ascendant China.

Never Grow Up, in mostly inadvertent ways, thus offers another way of telling Jackie Chan’s story. It’s about colonialism, capitalism, and the myths we construct to justify living under both.

When Chan was born in 1954, Hong Kong was fast becoming a haven for Chinese escaping communist rule on the mainland. This tiny city-state, some 400 square miles in total, had historically served as a foothold for European merchants seeking to gain access to the Chinese market, as the historian Jan Morris recounts in her book Hong Kong. After Mao and his gang took over in 1949, however, Western trade with China was shut off and Hong Kong became its own focal point, a center for both finance and industry, ultimately transforming into a mighty symbol of capitalism’s wealth-creating power on the very doorstep of the world’s most populous communist nation. As China suffered through famine and political upheaval and one miserable five-year-plan after another, Hong Kong sprouted an endless number of skyscrapers, which seemed to cast long, mocking shadows over its massive neighbor.

NEVER GROW UP by Jackie Chan (with Zhu Mo) Gallery Books, 352 pp., $26.00

Chan’s parents, fleeing political persecution and seeking work, were among the emigrant laborers who formed the backbone of the Hong Kong economy in the immediate postwar decades. The Chans landed in Victoria Peak, a posh neighborhood high in the hills that is home to the wealthy and foreign diplomats. (It is now best known as a tourist site where one can take in Hong Kong’s famous topography from above, a bristling bowl of concrete and glass poised on the edge of the harbor.) Hong Kong was so important to the Chans that it was embedded in the name they gave their only son: Chan Kong-Sang, which means “born in Hong Kong.”