According to Mental Floss, Jackie Chan was born in Hong Kong in 1954, and his parents left him there while they went abroad to find jobs when he was only 7. While they worked at the American Embassy in Australia, he stayed at a boarding school, where he trained in martial and performance arts. Even though he grew up without his parents, he went on to become the high-kicking, building-jumping, comedic badass we all know and love today.

However, the story of Jackie Chan’s parents is actually much more intriguing than what it appeared to be for most of his life. As The Guardian reports, a documentary filmed in 2003 — but never released, neither in China or the United States — followed Jackie as he met his estranged father and learned more about their early lives. Despite her outward appearance as a normal housewife, his mother had been involved in Hong Kong’s underworld, a gambler and opium smuggler. His father had been a gang boss and a Nationalist spy during Communist Revolution of Mao Zedong in the 1940s. As of the publication of that article in The Guardian, Jackie had not even been able to sit through the entire film, due to the painful memories it brought up, both of his personal history and that of his home country’s.