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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJEK6exnaZE&NR
Millions flipping for 'ninja'
A gonzo stunt video starring an O.C. man is a Web site's 10th most-seen clip.
By PETER LARSEN
The Orange County Register
Xin Sarith Wuku, of Westminister, launches himself backwards off a 9-foot-high railing at the Liberty Park skate park while Jonathan Phan looks on.
BRUCE CHAMBERS, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
MORE PHOTOS
Video
Video of the urban ninjas
Video of the urban ninjas
More videos
The video of Xin that millions have viewed on the Internet
The E.M.C. Monkeys Web site
Clips from a reality show in development starring Xin
Xin's myspace.com site
WESTMINSTER - Years before Xin Sarith Wuku learned to leap off rooftops and run up walls, he was just a skinny 16-year-old who skipped school a lot and dreamed that one day he'd be a stuntman for Jackie Chan, the martial artist and movie star.
When Xin was a high school sophomore, two buddies ran into his bedroom one morning hollering: "Wake up! Jackie Chan's at Wal-Mart!" His first sleepy words to them were along the lines of, "Shut up!"
As in, shut up, no, he isn't!
And a second later: Shut up. Wait a minute, really?
And finally, shut up and let's go!
The line at the Wal-Mart on Beach Boulevard to get Chan's autograph on his just-published memoir snaked through the parking lot, and in the hour Xin waited, he thought and he thought about what to say when he finally stood before his idol.
"When I finally get up there, I say 'ni hao,' which means hello," Xin says. "And then I say, 'I want to be on the Jackie Chan stunt team.'"
What Jackie Chan did next changed Xin's life, giving drive and direction to a kid who needed some of both.
His quest after that would lead him to be an Evolved Monkey, an Urban Ninja and eventually, the star of an Internet video viewed by millions of people around the world.
• • •
"I started martial arts about 10 years ago," says Xin ? pronounced "Zin" - now 23. "I was going into high school, and all the gangs were big then, and so I took martial arts to protect my friends."
And he excelled at it from the start - karate, kung fu, tae kwan do, you name it.
"I was good, and thought I was good," he says. "Until I fought a kickboxer - he showed me I wasn't so good."
That pushed him into Muay Thai - Thai kickboxing - and then the shadowy world of cage matches and underground fights.
The kind of fights where you entered a ring in an abandoned warehouse and didn't get out until you'd won or been beaten unconscious, he says.
As one would imagine, that got old fast, so when Xin was a high school senior and was invited to perform in a live show ? a display of martial arts - it had immediate appeal. The group he performed with, Evolved Monkey Combat, did shows for weddings, college clubs, the Tet festival - and would have done a bar mitzvah if the 13-year-old's parents had allowed it.
The Orange County-based Evolved Monkeys trained at a Costa Mesa gym where they soon met a like-minded group from Long Beach that called itself Flung Dung.
"We just shared the passion," Xin says of the decision by the mostly Vietnamese- and Cambodian-American guys - his background includes both - to merge.
"And we figured we could get together and conquer Southern California and then the world."
Picking the more presentable handle, they were reborn as E.M.C. Monkeys - Martial Arts for Hire, and made plans for fame and glory.
• • •
Last summer, Xin spied an ad in Kung Fu magazine that seemed the answer to their dreams. "Are You the Next Martial Arts Superstar?" it asked, and announced auditions in Universal City for a proposed reality TV show.
"I said, 'Dude, I'm doing this!' and I told all the Monkeys to do it, too, lazy bums," Xin says.
He and the other guys - about nine in all - had made short films of themselves performing ninja-for-hire stunts. Xin decided to polish his before the audition and shot a few new stunts in places such as the Westminster Mall and Golden West College.
In the video, Xin does breathtaking jumps from rooftop to rooftop at a Westminster elementary school, turns eye-popping cartwheels from balcony railings to landings below, runs up walls ninja-style into back flips and scampers across the beams that connect the second-level walkways at Main Place in Santa Ana. There are also scenes of the Monkeys performing on stage and practicing routines at the gym.
We should note that much of the video falls into the category of Don't Try This At Home - and a good part is covered by the heading of Don't Try This In Public, Either.
The property owners where some stunts were shot gave no permission for Xin and his buddies to perform the stunts, and in fact, he's been permanently banned from both malls in the video.
"When they catch us in the act, it's an escort out," he says, showing how security guards hustle them off the property with a hand on their collars.
After posting their video online, it quickly became an Internet hit, popping up on dozens of Web sites.
On the popular youtube.com alone, more than 5 million viewers have seen it since September, making it the site's 10th-most viewed video of all time.One viewer yet to see it, though, is Xin's mom.
"No way am I going to show her that," he says, laughing. "She'd flip out.
"If one day I can buy her a car, maybe I'll tell her."
• • •
A thousand people showed up to audition for "The Next Martial Arts Superstar," the brainchild of David Krapes, a martial-arts champion with a background in show business.
Xin was the standout of the day, says Krapes, who quickly signed on as his manager.
"We've got a chance to take this kid all the way," says Krapes, who enrolled Xin in acting classes and found him a part in a Russell Wong movie that earned him $150 and a kick in the chest by the martial-arts star.
The E.M.C. Monkeys still train and perform - recently Xin and fellow Monkey Jonathan Phan, 21, of Santa Ana performed in Texas at a Vietnamese-American college event - and the show-biz buzz continues to build.
A month ago he shot a TV commercial for K-Swiss athletic shoes. He had a shot at joining Madonna's tour as backup performer until that part of her show was cut.
And according to both Xin and Krapes, he's up for a role in the soon-to-be-shot "Rush Hour 3," a movie in the Jackie Chan-Chris Tucker hit series.
"This is the young Jackie Chan," Krapes says.
Ah, yes. Jackie Chan. After Xin told his hero in September 1998 that he hoped to join his stunt team, this is what happened next.
"He looks at me, and then he looks at his bodyguards," Xin says. "And says, 'Hey, the kid wants to be on the stunt team!'
"And then they all start cracking up. And to my horror, Jackie Chan turns around and starts laughing at me, too! My heart's broken!"
The kid, as one might imagine, was crushed.
"But as I start walking away, I say: I'm going to train hard," Xin says. "I'm going to show Jackie Chan! And if I ever get to meet him, I'm going to tell him he laughed in my face and I showed him!
"In a way, it's messed-up that he laughed in my face. But it made me work harder. It kind of put me on the path." |
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发表于 2006-8-16 20:55:00
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