Just over 50 years ago in 1973, Bruce Lee starred in his greatest and last completed movie, “Enter the Dragon.” It was appropriately titled, as Bruce Lee was born in the hour and the Year of the Dragon and took upon the nickname “Little Dragon.”
The story of his life reveals a real-life super-hero for all Americans. In this year of the Dragon, the Wooden dragon, Lee is the Little Dragon that inhabits all of us. He fights for all the little people and all the outcasts.
He was born as Lee Jun-fan to Lee Hoi-Chuen and Grace Ho on November 27, 1940, in San Francisco, California. He is as American as apple pie.
His parents had traveled to Chinatown in San Franciso as part of a Chinese opera troop. Bruce, as he was later named, in fact broke into the movies in “Golden Gate Girl,” shot in San Francisco and directed by Asian American director Esther Eng (Ng) and Kwan Man Ching. Eng later became a New Yorker living at 50 Bayard Street and died on January 25, 1970, in Lenox Hill Hospital. Lee played the baby in the film. (I can imagine him later wondering why did his parents have to show him in his diapers to the wide world! I felt akin to Lee right from the beginning because my parents shoved me into a television broadcast as a little boy wearing white underwear taking a bath in a white iron tub. Lee, of course, appeared in many more movies as a kid; my application to be a Disney Mouseketeer got lost.)
Lee’s parents returned to Hong Kong, but they deeply wished that their son would return to America, naming him with the reminder “Jun-Fan,” which is a homophone for “Return-Again.”
As a teenager, Bruce didn’t do too well in school, favoring the excitement of trouble in the streets and fights on the rooftops. He apprenticed to a disciple of Ip Man in order to learn the martial art style of Wing Chun so he could beat up kids harassing him. That seemed like a good idea, but it led to more attention to street fighting than to studies. So, his parents sent him off to a Catholic high school hoping that he would get a little discipline. At St. Xavier’s College (a high school) in Kowloon, Hong Kong, Lee got caught by Brother Edward Muss (1913-1975) fighting in the toilet, according to the school. Rather, than reporting Lee to get him kicked out of the school, the Catholic brother thought Lee had the right spirit for his boxing club.
Brother Muss had gotten out of Germany by entering the Marist Brothers in 1932, the year that the Nazis became the largest party in the German government’s congress, called the Reichstag. The brotherhood sent him to Italy and then off to China. When St Xavier’s College was forced out of Shanghai to Hong Kong, Brother Muss came along, the first Marist brother to teach there. The Marist Brothers were founded on Christian principles to help neglected youth from the downtrodden of any race, and Brother Edward provided boxing lessons along with life lessons.
Lee mixed his Wing Chun hand moves with the Western style of boxing, particularly its foot moves. Consequently, he led his boxing team into the interscholastic boxing match that started on March 29, 1958. It was the only official public fighting match in which he participated.
His eclectic style confused his opponents, and he won his first three fights by knockouts, according to the exhaustive biography of Richard Torres. Then in the championship, he came against another roughhouse fighter, a British boy named Gary Elms, the reigning champ.
It was a fairly brutal fight. Elms came out aggressively, backing Lee into the corners. Some say Elms even knocked Lee down, though that is uncertain. In the second round, Lee started mixing his Wing Chun style which specialized in moving close, blocking blows followed up by counter punches. Brother Edward said that these moves were predominant in Lee’s arsenal.
Lee pushed Elms’ shoves away and started knocking him down. But Elms was a tough kid and kept popping back up. In round three, Lee counterpunched Elms, giving him a thorough beating. The championship went to Lee by a clear decision. (Matthew Polly’s Bruce Lee: A Life discusses Elm’s life more fully.)
In that fight, Lee started to display and perfect his style that mixed the West into his Asian-style without the hint of superior racial preference. He was fighting racial prejudice on both sides. Elms came from the all-Western high-class school of King George’s High School while Lee was fighting a rearguard action against Chinese prejudice toward “outsiders.”
In the Hong Kong martial arts circles, a fierce racism prohibited the teaching of Asian fighting to anyone but Chinese. While Lee was under the guidance of the legendary Wang Chun master Ip Man, jealous opponents raised a howl that Lee wasn’t really Chinese but a low mixed-race “foreign devil.” They demanded that Lee be expelled from Chinese martial arts circles.
Lee’s grandmother on his father’s side was an English woman married to a Cantonese man. His mother’s side was a mix of Cantonese, Dutch, and, probably, Jewish ancestry. This made Lee more than 30% White.
Ip Man gave in to the pressure, but he wanted to introduce Wing Chun to a wider audience. So, while Lee was officially kicked out of Wing Chun, Ip Man allowed a disciple to quietly continue teaching the outcast.
Perhaps, Ip Man believed in a natural universalism originating out of Taoist beliefs. Lee certainly benefited from the Christian universalism of Brother Edward, whose Catholic order was dedicated to helping the outcasts.
The teenager continued to do street fights and that landed him into serious trouble. He beat up the son of a gang (Triad) leader and retaliation was likely. Lee was hustled back to San Francisco in April 1959 to live with his father’s older sister. Then, he settled in Seattle where he graduated from Edison Technical School and entered the University of Washington where he studied philosophy, psychology, and drama. Lee continued to stretch himself socially and in knowledge.
On August 17, 1964, he married a White American woman named Linda Emery, who grew up in the Baptist church. In the same year, the martial artist was introduced to the Long Beach International Karate Championship. There, he met Korean American Jhoon Goo Rhee, a karate master who had come from Korea to study at Southwest Texas State Teacher’s College and the University of Texas in Austin. Rhee was pioneering a new Korean form of martial arts that became known as Taekwondo.
Lee’s social philosophy was close to the liberty tradition of Christian and American culture in its denial of racial admission standards. His stand against racism in Chinese martial arts created a crisis in the winter of 1964.
He had opened a martial arts school in Oakland, California that took students of all races. However, the San Francisco Bay area was in the throes of racial conflict. The Martin Luther King idea that God wants all of God’s children to play and sit together was being challenged by the radicals on the Right and the Left. In the Deep South, the White racists were bombing churches and killing civil rights workers. There was some of this in California also. Agri-business relied on plantation-like systems fueled by cheap, malleable migrant laborers, mainly Mexicans.
On the Left, Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco were the center of radical race division ideas and derision of Reverend King as an Uncle Tom. In Oakland, the Black Panthers talked about killing White policemen, and the Black Muslims opened a temple to teach their version of a war between the races. A small number of Asian Americans at the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco State University blamed all their problems on Whites and promulgated the myth that the concept of Asian Americans as the “model minority” was the product of a White conspiracy to lock Asian Americans in a box while using their successes and quietness to suppress Black calls for civil rights. They idolized Mao and the Cultural Revolution, even holding Red Guard demonstrations in Chinatown.
It seemed like the equalitarian middle was going to be destroyed by racist separatism and unequal treatment. A real fight for the future of America was taking place.
Into this caldron, “the Little Dragon” leaped with his cross-racial, integrationist message. The reaction was fierce.
The San Francisco Bay area martial arts network demanded that Lee close his martial arts center and stop teaching non-Chinese. Lee refused to do that and challenged them to put up a champion to duel over which vision would win out. Lee practiced the proverb, “The accomplished man or woman has equanimity in the face of conflict, equality in the face of division.”
His opponents chose Wong Jack Man to fight Lee.
The accounts of the fight are contradictory. Did Lee knock out Wong Jack Man in one minute? Or did the fighting continue after a pause to let Wong recover? Yet, the result seems to indicate that Lee won decisively. He didn’t have to close his martial arts studio and could allow anyone to study there. Even Wong eventually started training non-Chinese.
Lee notably trained Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Chuck Norris, and Steve McQueen. He continued to develop his integrationist style into his Jeet Kun Do. His book on that style was published by his good friend, the Japanese American Mitoshi Uyehara. Lee’s fight against racists continued and wasn’t finished. But he set the example.
As a Chinese American superhero, the “Little Dragon” defeated the racist tradition and fought for all of us. His proverb reverberates now, “The only limitation is that there is no limitation.”
This is the best New Year’s gift in this Year of the Dragon.
