WATER MIRROR ECHO: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America, by Jeff Chang
One of the promises of a biography is to go beyond the sheen of celebrity: You may be familiar with the icon, the biographer says, but here is the vulnerable human underneath. For the martial artist and action star Bruce Lee, iconography and vulnerability were entwined. Lee was an avid reader of Taoist philosophy and American self-help, using both to bolster his inner confidence and his public image. In 1969, he wrote a note to himself specifying his “Definite Chief Aim”: “I, Bruce Lee, will be the first highest paid Oriental super star in the United States.”
As Jeff Chang puts it in “Water Mirror Echo,” his exuberant new book about Lee as both a celebrity and an Asian American, the restless actor oscillated between “follow-the-flow Zen surrender” and “sunset-chasing American ambition.” Chang gets his title from a portion of a Taoist classic, “The Liezi,” that Lee found striking enough to transcribe:
If nothing within you stays rigid,
Outward things will disclose themselves.
Moving, be like water.
Still, be like a mirror.
Respond like an echo.
Sound advice, but for an Asian American trying to break into Hollywood, maintaining such equanimity was easier said than done. Chang, whose books include “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop,” a history of hip-hop’s early years, has written a capacious and entertaining account of Lee’s life and times. Lee, who was 32 when he suddenly died, was hard to pin down, in all senses of the word. Chang has rummaged through the archives and interviewed Lee’s surviving family members and friends; he writes with the diligence of a scholar and the propulsive energy of a fan.
Lee’s short life began in 1940 in San Francisco, where he was born to Chinese parents who had arrived in the United States the year before, lured by the promise of work. (The irreverent title of Chang’s first chapter is “Anchor Baby.”) Lee’s father was a Cantonese opera performer, and a great-grandfather on his mother’s side was a Dutch-Jewish merchant. The family returned to Hong Kong when Lee was an infant. As a child Lee started acting in Hong Kong’s fledgling film industry, often playing a scrappy street urchin. Always on the move, he acquired nicknames like Tiny Phoenix and the One Who Can’t Be Stopped.
A core element of Lee’s character was taking shape: impatient, occasionally reckless and brimming with aspirations. Filipino friends taught him how to dance the cha-cha. Meanwhile, he was also learning a form of gung fu called Wing Chun. (The spelling “kung fu,” with a k, came later, when a martial arts instructor tried to market the practice to Americans by emphasizing the alliteration with “karate.”) Lee, who was both bullied and a bully, became a teenage brawler. When he was 18, his parents sent him back to the United States to exercise his American citizenship.
Chang guides us through the life in a bustling narrative filled with vibrant anecdotes, historical context and chatty asides, alongside numerous photos of Lee that include high-contrast film stills and grainy, casual shots from the family archive. Back in the United States, living in Seattle and the Bay Area, Lee studied philosophy and drama and taught martial arts, developing a system he would come to call Jeet Kune Do. Instead of the spectacular gestures associated with classical fighting styles, Lee encouraged power, focus and speed. The idea was to respond quickly, without deliberation. He described Jeet Kune Do as “simply the direct expression of one’s feelings with the minimum of movements and energy.”
Hollywood, though, still felt like a closed fortress. Chang notes that Asian American characters were mostly limited to the cartoonishly polite Charlie Chan or the cartoonishly evil Fu Man Chu, played by white actors in yellowface. Lee eventually got his big break when he was cast in a new TV series as Kato, or what the producer, in a letter to Lee, called “the Orientalish right-hand man of the Green Hornet.” (This was presumably meant to sound enticing.)
Actors like Steve McQueen and Julie Andrews paid Lee lots of money for private martial arts lessons. But “The Green Hornet” was canceled after one season. For Lee, who struggled to sustain backers for his film scripts featuring Asian American heroes, real stardom was still elusive.
So in 1970 he returned to Hong Kong to make movies. By then he was married, with two children. Lee was too individualistic and self-regarding to be an activist, but Chang links Lee’s ambitions to the recognition that Asian American activists were demanding at the time. In a presentation pitching an Asian-led series, Lee closed with, “This is a revolutionary idea and definitely very commercial.”
In the end, Lee would be proved right, even if he didn’t live to see just how commercially successful such a revolution would be. On July 20, 1973, he died from cerebral edema — a lethal reaction to an over-the-counter painkiller — a month before “Enter the Dragon,” starring Lee as a martial arts instructor on an undercover mission to nab a drug lord, premiered in Los Angeles.
Chang reflects on how a “Bruce Lee economy” filled the vacuum almost immediately, including an endless stream of “Bruceploitation” movies that featured phony Bruces wearing Bruce-like clothes and doing Bruce-like things. But Lee’s legacy extends beyond the world of celebrity and entertainment, Chang says. Even if it would be a stretch to call Lee’s onscreen presence the same thing as freedom and justice, it was perhaps a start: “In the States, no one who looked like him had ever been seen.”
WATER MIRROR ECHO: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America | By Jeff Chang | Mariner | 540 pp. | $36
Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times.
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