Martial arts icon Bruce Lee remains relevant 80 years after birth in S.F.
Martial arts icon is still relevant 80 years after his birth in S.F.
Bruce Lee seems like he’s frozen in time, forever young, like other cultural icons who died in their prime and beautiful — James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and John Lennon among them.
On what would have been the San Francisco native’s 80th birthday, Lee seems as fresh and relevant today as he was in 1973, when he died at 32.
“In a way, there’s a renaissance of looking at Bruce Lee that’s been going on for a long time,” said Bao Nguyen, the director of the featurelength documentary “Be Water,” which premiered at Sundance in January and aired as part of ESPN’s “30 for 30” series in June and will be streamed for free at 5 p.m. Friday, Nov. 27, which is Lee’s birthday.
Nguyen will participate in a discussion after the documentary streams with Lee’s daughter, Shannon Lee; Ford Foundation film grants officer Chihui Yang; culture writer Phil Yu (Angry Asian Man blog); and celebrity chef and “Ugly Delicious” host Dave Chang. A simultaneous drivein screening at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco has sold out. The documentary is also available on ESPN Plus.
Other media events in 2020 include a Criterion Collection boxed set, “Bruce Lee’s Greatest Hits,” which was released in July, and a book by Shannon Lee, “Be Water, My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee,” published in October by Flatiron Books.
“People saw him through a narrow lens of being a martial arts icon or just as a film star,” Nguyen said from Los Angeles, “and I think given what’s going on in 2020, his story, what he stood for, has a lot of relevance today, given the pandemic this year and certain government officials pushing the idea of the ‘kung flu’ or the ‘China virus.’
“The Bruce Lee story is a reminder that American stories cover a wide range of faces and nationalities, of races and perspectives and experiences.”
Although he wasn’t known as a part of the civil rights or Asian American movements of the 1960s, Lee was a social justice warrior, fighting a battle with Hollywood over Asian representation not with kicks and punches, but with ideas. And many of those ideas were forged in the Bay Area, where he was born on Nov. 27, 1940, at the Chinese Hospital in San Francisco.
Auspiciously, the Year of the Dragon on the Chinese zodiac.
“The idea that there was a Chinese hospital specifically for Chinese and his mom wasn’t able to give birth in the general hospital in San Francisco because of her race was very telling about race in America at that time,” Nguyen said.
Lee moved to Hong Kong with his parents as an infant and became a child and teen star in the 1940s and ’50s. But when he started down a path of juvenile delinquency, his father sent him back to San Francisco in 1958 to live with his older sister. He later relocated to Seattle, where he completed high school, entered the University of Washington, started teaching martial arts and married.
But he dropped out of college in the early 1960s and moved to Oakland to start the Jun Fan martial arts studio. And it was in Oakland that he experienced a great awakening.
“Even though he was in the Bay for such a short amount of time, his experiences there informed a lot of what he thought about America,” Nguyen said. “Obviously, Oakland was a very multicultural, diverse city in the 1960s — still is, of course.”
Lee’s message of inclusion in the martial arts world caused blowback in a traditional Chinese martial arts
culture, the leaders of which demanded that he stop teaching nonChinese students. He even had a legendary fight over the issue in Oakland’s Chinatown.
After going to Hollywood and winning the colead role of Kato in the shortlived ABC series “The Green Hornet,” he started teaching martial arts there to students including Steve McQueen, James Coburn and Kareem AbdulJabbar, with whom he would famously fight in the 1970s film “Game of Death.”
But that inclusion was supposed to cut both ways. He demanded a seat at the table and pushed for better Asian representation in Hollywood. He pushed for more equal footing on “The Green Hornet” with costar Van Williams. Frustrated by Hollywood — after the cancellation of “The Green Hornet,” he was to star in ABC’s “Kung Fu,” but white actor David Carradine was cast instead — he headed back to Hong Kong to make his mark in a series of action films that not only featured groundbreaking martial arts choreography but also emphasized the Asian man as, Nguyen said, “a symbol of strength, of confidence, of masculinity.”
After “The Big Boss,” “Fists of Fury” and “The Way of the Dragon,” his HollywoodHong Kong coproduction “Enter the Dragon” — costarring white actor John Saxon and Black actor Jim Kelly — was supposed to pave the way for a return to Hollywood and a series of films in which Asians would be on equal footing.
Sadly, he died at age 32 on July 20, 1973, just a month before “Enter the Dragon” was to premiere in cinemas all over the world — and make him a superstar.
What if he had survived? What would Bruce Lee have been like at 80?
“I’m sure he would have been an advocate of Asian American representation, not just in film but in all aspects of American society,” Nguyen said. “Bruce Lee could have done what
Robert De Niro has done for Italian Americans in a way — show them in all kinds of different roles. Sidney Poitier or Denzel Washington for Black Americans. There would have been so many more opportunities and stories and universes that Bruce Lee could have shown that Asian Americans belong in. And sadly, that’s one of the greatest tragedies of his early death.”
Nevertheless, Nguyen said, “It’s a very beautiful legacy that Bruce Lee left.”