The deeper meaning of Bruce Lee

In Like Water: A Cultural History of Bruce Lee, Daryl Joji Maeda tells the story of how Bruce Lee, the child actor and intermediate Wing Chun student, became Bruce Lee, the international phenomenon. There have been several biographies of Lee over the years — the best is Matthew Polly’s Bruce Lee: A Life — but Maeda’s focus is wider.

Lee was an exceptional person — energetic, charismatic, and driven, with a gift for kinesthetic learning (in addition to excelling at martial arts, he was a champion cha-cha dancer). He was also the product of a cultural exchange between the U.S. and China that had been going on since the late 19th century when Cantonese opera companies began visiting the U.S. Maeda argues that Lee’s films, which combined elements of Spaghetti Westerns, James Bond films, and Cantonese opera, were equally the result of the vision of one man, who also lived between worlds, and the cultural and economic exchange that took place in the 20th century following World War II.

Lee was born in San Francisco on Nov. 27, 1940. His mother, Grace, was a descendant of the wealthy, mixed-race Ho family, and his father was a successful Cantonese opera performer. Lee grew up in Hong Kong and was an active and headstrong boy who often got into fights and enjoyed acting, appearing in nearly 20 films. When he turned 14, he began studying Wing Chun kung fu under Yip Man, with whom he would study for two to four years, accounts vary. Undisciplined at school, Lee became obsessed with kung fu and would spend his free time on the streets with his friends, looking for fights, or on the film set in the early hours of the day.

When he turned 18, his parents decided to send him to the U.S. According to some accounts, Lee may have become too involved in gang fighting and, as Maeda notes, “fled to escape retribution from the underground criminal organizations known as the triads.” Or perhaps his parents “simply thought he needed a fresh start.” In any case, Lee boarded the SS President Wilson in late April 1959 and arrived in San Francisco two weeks later before moving to Seattle, where he would stay with a friend of his father, Ping Chow, and his wife, Ruby, who owned and ran one of Seattle’s most popular Chinese restaurants.

Lee worked at Ruby Chow’s restaurant and enrolled at Edison Technical School to improve his English before matriculating at the University of Washington to study philosophy. In Seattle, he began teaching kung fu and became increasingly involved in the martial arts scene. Maeda notes that U.S. servicemen who had learned karate or judo overseas were keen to continue their training when they returned home. This led to an increasing demand for martial arts schools in the U.S.

Lee attracted a hodgepodge of students in Seattle and then in Oakland, California, where he moved in the summer of 1964. These included former boxers, wrestlers, A-list actors, and Chinese Americans such as Leo Fong, a Methodist minister, who would drive to Oakland regularly from Sacramento, where his church was located, to train with Lee.

His big break came when he competed in the Long Beach International Karate Tournament in August 1964. Among the attendees was Jay Sebring, hairdresser to the stars, who five years later was killed in the Manson Family murders. Sebring knew that producer William Dozier was looking for an Asian actor to play a part in a new TV series he was planning. Impressed by Lee’s performance at the tournament, Sebring told Dozier about Lee, and he was brought into the office for a screen test at 20th Century Fox. As Maeda notes, the screen test showed Lee to be “a natural performer … with a charismatic presence who exuded confidence in front of the camera.”

Lee had worked hard to make it in Hollywood but had only managed to land minor roles. He was eventually cast as Kato in The Green Hornet and tried, unsuccessfully, to make his character less stereotypically Asian. The show bombed in the U.S., and while Lee’s opportunities dried up, he learned on a trip to Hong Kong in 1970 that The Green Hornet had become a huge hit there. He signed a contract with Raymond Chow’s newly formed production company Golden Harvest to make two films, which became The Big Boss and Fist of Fury.

If Maeda occasionally takes Lee’s films too seriously, he nevertheless shows that they were partly the result of the intercultural exchanges that marked the second half of the 20th century. Lee mixed kung fu styles, anathema to traditionalists, in his films, which he had been doing since his time in the U.S., and created action scenes that were simple and direct, drawing from Cantonese opera. His third film, The Way of the Dragon, opens in Rome and clearly borrows from Sergio Leone’s Italian-produced Westerns. The plot of Enter the Dragon is a page ripped straight out of the James Bond films of the 1960s. (Lee would sometimes refer to himself as “China James Bond.”)

Maeda’s point is that without cultural exchange there would have been no Bruce Lee. People, Maeda writes, “are inevitably influenced by the cultures they encounter and adapt to their new circumstances by melding their old practices with the ones surrounding them.” If at times unnecessarily academic, Maeda’s study of Lee reminds us that without cultural appropriation there would be no culture.

Micah Mattix is a professor of English at Regent University.