How Bruce Lee transformed from martial arts star to enduring Asian American icon ...Middle East

The first step was easy.

A book editor, impressed by Jeff Chang‘s acclaimed 2005 cultural history of hip-hop, “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop,” asked if he’d consider writing a book on Bruce Lee, the martial arts icon and movie star.

The next 99 steps? Well, that’s something altogether different.

The editor who’d pitched the biography left the publishing industry. Chang had two books already under contract to finish. More editors came and went. Another book cut to the front of the line. A fourth editor dropped the book.

In 2021, nearly 15 years after Chang originally agreed to do the Lee project, the book went out to bid again – and quickly sold again – but Chang no longer knew what he wanted to do with it.

“You know, when you do a celebrity bio there’s a certain kind of format,” he says on a recent afternoon in a downtown Los Angeles bookstore, where outside at one point gunshots and police sirens interrupted the calm inside. “The mission is to dig up all the dirt you can. The essential narrative is, ‘This person wasn’t an angel.’

“That wasn’t what I was interested in.”

By then, it was the height of the pandemic and Chang, who lives in Oakland, was working long days at a racial justice institute as violence targeting Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders skyrocketed in the Bay Area and around the world.

“At the same time, the image of Bruce started appearing on the walls in Oakland Chinatown, San Francisco Chinatown, here in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York City,” says Chang, whose heritage is Chinese and native Hawaiian.

“I already had been pondering the question of why it is that Bruce Lee is a hero to people all around the world who feel like they’ve been stepped on,” he says. “So when he starts appearing on walls, I was like, ‘Oh, there’s a bigger story here, and he’s representing something new now to a new generation of Asian Americans.”

“Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America” is freshly arrived in bookstores, and while it contains the story of Lee’s life from his birth in San Francisco in 1940 to his death at 32 in 1973, it is a biography wrapped inside a cultural history, the story of both Lee and the multitudes who in him saw pieces of their own stories..

A symbol of strength

Lee remains the epitome of cool, and Chang says the martial arts star’s door-opening cachet made it easier for young Asian Americans to enter the world of hip-hop. “The image we made of Bruce was Bruce with dark glasses getting ready to rock two turntables,” he says.

“For this generation, it was Bruce as an image of strength, of pride, or unity,” Chang continues. “And also this desire for solidarity. Like, we need to stick together, but also we need folks to be able to see us.”

Bruce Lee wasn’t just a 2-dimensional mural on a brick wall or a poster in a bedroom, Chang realized. In many ways, he lived on.

“The rise of Bruce and the rise of Asian America, they almost mirror each other,” he says. “While Bruce is not an activist, he reflects a lot of the ambitions and desires of that particular generation that names themselves ‘Asian Americans’ for the first time.

“I thought, ‘Ah, that’s the story.’ The whole book changed to that particular point.”

Hero to all

As a boy growing up in Honolulu in the ’70s and ’80s, Chang says Lee was ever-present.

“Just like my kids never knew a time before hip-hop, Bruce was almost always there for us,” he says. “So on the playground, as soon as we were able to make those noises and jump around, that’s what we’re doing.

“We’re also the generation that discovered Bruce not in the movie theaters, but on TV,” Chang says. “It was the kind of thing where they’re having Saturday or Sunday afternoon kung fu movies on TV. I feel like they probably ran a cycle of the Bruce Lee movies at least once a year.”

When Lee’s son Brandon Lee seemed poised to take up his father’s mantle, Chang and his friends followed his rise as a young martial artist and action movie star.

“We come of age; we’re looking for heroes,” he says. But when Brandon Lee dies in an accident in 1993 while shooting “The Crow,” an eerie parallel to his father’s death during the production of “Enter the Dragon,” the younger hero soon fades.

“That’s really the moment at which Bruce comes back to be in our consciousness,” Chang says. “Because Brandon would have been our hero, probably.

“‘The Crow’ was his ‘Enter the Dragon,’ in a way,” he says of those films’ star-making potential. “He was on his way.”

The same year, Chang notes, was also the year the hip-hop collective Wu-Tang Clan, a group of young rappers raised on Bruce Lee and other kung fu movies, released its debut album, “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers).”

Crossing cultures

How did the Wu-Tang Clan, and other rappers and hip-hop groups, come to love Bruce Lee and martial arts movies? The answer, Chang says, lies in the success of director Melvin Van Peebles’ indie movie, “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” one of the first big Blaxploitation movies.

As the ’70s started, Hollywood was flailing and failing to figure out how to make movies for the youth audience. When Van Peebles’ movie was an inexpensive hit, the studios took notice. Soon, such films as “Shaft” and “Superfly” filled the screens in inner city cinemas, he says.

When Lee’s Hong Kong martial arts movies showed similar appeal, those same theaters got them, too.

“These audiences might be going in to see a Blaxploitation movie and they’re going, ‘Hey, what’s this kung fu stuff?’” Chang says. “They become enamored of the mythology because in so many ways it’s actually a parallel history.

“I uncover in the book the ways in which they really, literally, are like parallel histories. The links between Hong Kong and the Bronx, and the way that the youth culture becomes a popular culture.

“I’m drawn to these stories where these kids from nowhere, who are abandoned and forgotten, come in and their creativity creates these irresistible cultures that then change the whole world.

“That they should do that across generations, across cultures and around the world, it’s just an amazing story,” Chang says.

Digging deep

Research for “Water Mirror Echo” began even before Chang had mapped out the narrative of the book. Lee’s life provided plenty of breadcrumbs to follow.

Born in San Francisco, his family moved home to Hong Kong when he was an infant. As a boy, he was a child star in Hong Kong cinema. In 1959, his parents sent him to San Francisco and then Seattle to finish his high school education and study at the University of Washington.

By the mid-’60s, Lee was back in California. At a Long Beach karate tournament, he impressed onlookers, including celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring, who later mentioned Lee’s talent to TV director William Dozier. In time, that led to Lee being cast as Kato in the TV series “Green Hornet.”

By the late ’60s, Lee had grown frustrated with Hollywood, opening his own martial arts studio in Los Angeles Chinatown. He developed his own style, which he named Jeet Kune Do, which mixed various martial artis and fighting techniques into one.

Disappointed after his pitch for a kung fu TV series was rejected, Lee returned to Hong Kong, where he embarked on a short run of influential martial arts movies that included “The Big Boss,” “Fist of Fury,” and “The Way of the Dragon.” He recaptured the interest and money of Hollywood studios for his final few projects.

From Lee’s return to the United States in 1959 to his death in Hong Kong in 1973, his life and career were well-documented in journals and letters. Magazines covered his career at the Jeet Kune Do studio and his personal library. Martial arts magazines wrote about him often after he opened his studio in Los Angeles, many of them with interview transcripts that Chang mined for contemporaneous commentary.

The Wing Luke Museum in Seattle has most of Lee’s library of books, which Chang mined for the notes in the margins and passages he’d underlined with a ruler and a red or blue pen.

Notes in Chinese, for which Chang worked with an interpreter, “gave a good sense of what his inner life was like,” he says. “Because these were notes he’d written just to himself, or to his family in letters that may have never been sent during periods in which he was feeling most vulnerable.”

Old friends and memories

Interviews with old friends and family members, including Lee’s widow Linda Lee Cadwell and daughter Shannon Lee, also revealed lesser-known truths about the man behind the image.

“You come in from the outside and you’re like, ‘Bruce is invulnerable, like, he must have always had this thing in him,” Chang says. “But it was, for me, really moving, poignant,  and something I wanted to lean into to find out about all his foibles and vulnerabilities.

“To talk to people who knew him, say in Seattle, and ask them what he was like when he got excited. They’d be like, ‘Sometimes he had so much he wanted to say and he couldn’t express it, so he would just shake.”

A key early interview arrived with Amy Sanbo, a fellow student at the University of Washington, and Lee’s first big love in the United States.

“Bruce is just completely head over heels for her, but she didn’t really think that he was all that,” Chang says of Sanbo’s first impression. “She thought he was kind of immature.

“Bruce is a kid, not six months off the boat,” he says. “To talk to his University of Washington fellow students, who are like, ‘This guy was annoying.’ He came on the one hand, with all this confidence, and on the other hand, with all this awkwardness.

“To hear people say, ‘You’re strange,’ it’s pretty funny, and it’s also not a picture of Bruce that I had read in other biographies.”

From Lee to here

Fifty years after the death of the first Asian superstar, how have things changed for Asian American figures in pop culture? Chang, who concludes the book with a chapter on just this, has thought about it a lot.

Before Lee, actress Anna May Wong might have been the biggest Chinese-American star in Hollywood. Yet she was limited to stereotypical roles and excluded from the chance to play a Chinese character in the 1937 adaptation of Pearl S. Buck’s “The Good Earth.” Instead, the German-born Luise Rainer got the part and won an Oscar for playing an Asian.

Lee fought to break free of the stereotypical roles offered to Asian actors, but as Kato, he was still a servant, cook and driver for the titular Green Hornet.

He fought, and won, the right to make “Enter the Dragon” his way, Chang says, but he died before that film was released.

“Then it takes another generation before to get to ‘Dragon’ [a Bruce Lee biopic], to get to Brandon Lee, to get to ‘All-American Girl’ [Margaret Cho’s sitcom], to get to ‘The Joy Luck Club,’” Chang says. “It takes another generation almost for us to get to ‘Crazy Rich Asians,’ ‘Fresh Off the Boat,’

“The crowning thing of this is ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once,’” Chang says of the 2022 film, which won seven Academy Awards, including best picture, best actress and best supporting actor and actress.

“It’s natural to say that you have this multi-racial [entertainment] like we see all day, every day right now,” Chang says. “It’s a big deal to see that on the screen.

“What history tells us is that we have to go back into hibernation and wait another generation for something to happen before we can do that,” he says. “I hope not, but that’s sort of the long shadow of Bruce.

“There’s a lot of movement forward in the last five years, and then the tide may be going out now,” Chang says. “I don’t want to think that. We’re all still here, and we’re all making work.

“But who knows? It’s part of a larger story of America right now that’s still being written.”

Related Articles

Hence then, the article about how bruce lee transformed from martial arts star to enduring asian american icon was published today ( Wednesday 15/10/2025 - 07:47 PM ) and is available on The Orange County Register ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.

Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( How Bruce Lee transformed from martial arts star to enduring Asian American icon )

Also on site :

• Education technology on rise in Japan to ease teachers' burden
• Xerox set to reduce its workforce after acquiring the company Lexmark
• Russia to test all labor migrants for hepatitis