Numerous previous biographies on Bruce Lee should obviate the need for yet another. The most recent was in 2019, while a year later the excellent documentary film on Lee’s life, Be Water, was released, featuring author Jeff Chang. The fact that Lee died in 1973 at just 32 makes it fair to ask – is there more to learn?
Chang’s account does not tell a dedicated Lee fan anything particularly new on the martial arts master, especially if you have read the best work on his life and philosophy, Fighting Spirit by Bruce Thomas. But what gives Chang’s enjoyable book its value is his focusing on Lee in the context of race and identity, especially with his becoming the first Asian American superstar in western culture. “In the States, no one who looked like him had ever been seen,” emphasises Chang.
Lee smashed racial prejudices, literally and metaphorically, although not in any true campaigning sense but in crashing through the enclosed walls of western culture, thereby creating senses of adulation and empowerment for Chang.
“I am part of the first generation after the advent of the Asian American, which was also the first generation After Bruce,” he writes. “Growing up, for me and many others, the idea of Asian Americans and the idea of Bruce Lee were inseparable. He made us real. Because of his image, we became flesh-and-blood.”
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If Lee was around today – he would have turned 85 last month – he certainly would have stood for multiculturalism. Consider some of the students at his kung fu school in the US at the beginning of the 1960s, that tumultuous decade of racial tensions: black men and Chinese Americans; Skip Ellsworth, who grew up white on a Native American reservation; Leroy Garcia, who was of Spanish, Mexican and Apache descent; Taky Kimura, a Japanese American, whose family were incarcerated during the second World War.
[ Lessons for the would-be writer: An aborted interview with Andy MillerOpens in new window ]
Lee married (and also taught) American Linda Emery in the same decade, when most white Americans disapproved of marriage between a white and a non-white person. And of course he was born in San Francisco to Chinese parents, and brought up in Hong Kong before returning to the US in his late teens to exercise his rights to American citizenship. Even in death, the bright gibbous moon of Lee’s life and ideas (not the finger!) lights a path on contemporary issues.
