Bruce Lee: Renaissance Man

A fighter-philosopher who integrated cultures and defied convention

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I’m no longer in my “Bruce Lee phase,” though it lasted quite a while. Back when I was limber enough to train six days a week and spar for hours with teens and twenty-somethings, I admired Lee for his athleticism and martial arts skill – his stunning speed, explosive power, and fluid grace were at once devastatingly effective and surprisingly beautiful.

Lee soared to international fame in the early 1970s as a cross-cultural film sensation, becoming a cult hero after his unexpected death in 1973 at age 32. But he was much more than just a martial artist or a movie star. He was a Renaissance man, a fighter-philosopher who challenged treasured traditions, revolutionized his field, and shattered racial stereotypes. With his expansive sense of human possibility and the courage to rethink convention, Lee embodied the protest spirit of his times. If you think of Lee as just another actor with a ripped physique, I invite you to think again.

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As Kato in The Green Hornet, Lee cultivated a devoted fan base, particularly in Hong Kong. Source: ABC Television

Li Jun Fan was born American but grew up Chinese. His father, a successful opera singer and film star, married a daughter of Hong Kong’s prominent, multiethnic Ho-Tung clan. Jun Fan was born in San Francisco in November 1940 (in the hour and Year of the Dragon) while his parents were on a U.S. tour, making him an American citizen. His parents gave him an additional, American name: Bruce. The tour ended, and the family returned to Hong Kong when Bruce was four months old.

Bruce’s racial heritage was always a bit of a mystery. British Hong Kong was a cosmopolitan polyglot, and interracial marriages were frowned upon but not uncommon. His mother was biracial, though whether her ancestors were German (as his wife later claimed) or of Dutch Jewish ancestry (as others insisted) is unclear. Bruce grew up speaking both Cantonese and English, with an accent that reflected both his native tongue and British influence.

Hyperactive and mischievous (today he likely would be heavily medicated), Lee struggled in school, disappointing his father. Neighborhood bullies swarmed around the slightly-built, mixed-race kid with one leg shorter than the other. So he turned to martial arts, studying wing chun gung fu with Master Ip Man indirectly because racial customs prohibited instructors from teaching traditional Chinese martial arts to foreigners or multiracial students. With fanatical devotion, Lee channeled his prodigious energies into fighting and dancing – he won Hong Kong’s cha-cha championship, a source of pride throughout his life – and earned respect in the island’s scrappy, Fight Club-esque culture of street fighting.

After one too many rooftop fights and run-ins with the cops, Lee’s parents shipped the 18-year-old back to the United States, where they hoped he would finish his education. Lee saw his return to America as a chance to reinvent himself. Vowing to “become famous in America,” he spent the three-week journey reading, thinking, and planning his future. He believed in America as a place where anyone from anywhere could change the world, and he wanted to be a bridge between the land of his birth and the land of his heritage. “I would like to let the world know about the greatness of Chinese martial arts,” he told his godfather on his first day back in the U.S. In the course of barely more than a decade, he did just that.

Lee settled first in Seattle, where he completed high school, studied drama and philosophy at the University of Washington, and opened a small martial arts school – something that a young, biracial, relatively inexperienced martial artist could never have done back home. Still seething about how he had been excluded from martial arts training because of his biracial heritage, he had little interest in perpetuating such racial separation or ethnocentrism in his new school. He opened his doors to all comers, and he attracted many Black and blue-collar White students. He also met his future wife, Linda Emery, a blond American with dreams of becoming a teacher. The two eloped in 1964, over her parents’ objections.

The couple moved to Oakland, where Lee established himself as a revolutionary martial artist. Just 5 foot 7 and 140 pounds, Lee may not have looked particularly intimidating, but he had remarkable confidence, a swagger that infuriated traditionalists within the martial arts community. Bold and brash, he openly challenged the old guard: “These old tigers, they have no teeth!” But he backed up his incendiary rhetoric, sometimes in bloody confrontations, and attracted a diverse and devoted set of students.

Lee embodied the spirit of protest of his times. At a time when young Baby Boomers were attacking American traditions – civil rights protestors sitting in against racial segregation, Free Speech Movement activists pushing for intellectual freedom, young women questioning sexism — Lee challenged both the racial exclusivity of traditional martial arts and the nature of the arts themselves. Though rooted in the classical style of wing chun, he believed that traditional styles were impractical and ineffective, ossified by their reliance on rote repetition and static forms. An experienced street fighter, he knew what worked and what didn’t work in an actual fight. The “classical mess,” as he called it, was outdated, stultifying, stagnant. He proposed something radically different: Jeet Kune Do, “the way of the intercepting fist.”

Jeet Kune Do was the martial arts manifestation of Lee’s approach to life. Lee aimed to develop a “style of no style” that could free martial artists to develop their own strengths. He saw flaws in his own fighting and worked feverishly to overcome them, constantly learning, adapting, refining, and applying new ideas. Himself an amalgam of East and West, Lee was an intellectual sponge who voraciously sought knowledge from a wide variety of traditions, including Korean kicking arts, Greco-Roman wrestling, and Western boxing. He particularly admired another trash-talking iconoclast, Muhammad Ali, whose quick jabs and deft footwork became a hallmark of Jeet Kune Do. (Lee also loved Ali’s proud defiance. “I don’t have to be who you want me to be,” Ali once said. “I’m free to be who I want.”)

A digression: One day I was marveling about Lee to a new workout partner, and he scoffed, “Bruce Lee would get destroyed in modern martial arts today — guys are so much better than in his day.” Maybe. But that’s like saying that Albert Einstein couldn’t get a physics job in academia today because we know so much more about physics now than he did back then. Einstein was a pioneer! Without his discoveries, modern physics wouldn’t exist. Similarly, Lee pioneered an approach to martial arts that opened the door to today’s mixed martial arts.

Lee saw Jeet Kune Do as more than a fighting style: it was a way of life. He penned a philosophical manifesto, The Tao of Jeet Kune Do (my dog-eared copy sits on my bedside table to this day) that offered short, Zen-like nuggets encouraging readers to see the value of simplicity (“Hack away the unessential”), fluidity (“Be water, my friend”), and self-awareness (“All knowledge ultimately is self-knowledge”). Whether studying martial arts or medicine or any vocation, we must own that knowledge for ourselves, not simply replicate what has been passed down to us.

“Research your own experience.
Absorb what is useful.
Discard what is not.
Add what is uniquely your own.”

Lee knew that even something as innovative and free-flowing as Jeet Kune Do could one day harden into rigid orthodoxy. He closed his book with one more piece of advice to those who would fetishize or lionize him or his work. “If people say Jeet Kune Do is different from ‘this’ or ‘that,’ then let the name of Jeet Kune Do be wiped out, for that is what it is, just a name. Please don’t fuss over it.”

My own dog-eared copy of The Tao of Jeet Kune Do sits on my bedside table.

Lee’s athletic good looks, magnetic personality, and martial arts prowess attracted admirers, and soon Hollywood came calling. Cast as Kato in The Green Hornet, he electrified TV audiences, but could not break through the traditional side-kick roles assigned to Asian men. He refused to play an obsequious, emasculated, buffoonish foil to White actors. Frustrated, he returned to Hong Kong, where he starred in several major hits before returning to the U.S. as a full-fledged phenom in the early 1970s. His movies grossed millions and solidified martial arts as a profitable film genre. He became the most recognized Asian-American in the country, an attractive, muscular rejection of traditional stereotypes.

His time atop the world’s stage was tragically brief. In July 1973, just days before the release of what would be his defining film, “Enter the Dragon,” Lee died of a brain edema, leaving behind his wife Linda and two young children, Brandon and Shannon.

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Proudly Chinese and proudly American, Bruce Lee believed in the power of cultural integration. “Oriental culture and Occidental culture are not mutually exclusive, but mutually dependent,” he wrote. “Neither would be remarkable if it were not for the existence of the other.” An eclectic thinker with the physical confidence and moral courage to defy convention, he overcame racism from both Chinese and Americans to pioneer a new approach to martial arts and life itself.

Lee and his family in the early 1970s. Source: Lee Family Archive.

Sources

· Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Ohara Publications, 1975)

· Bruce Lee and M. Uyehara, Bruce Lee’s Fighting Method (Ohara Publications, 1977)

· John Little, The Warrior Within (Contemporary Books, 1996)

· Charles Russo, Striking Distance: Bruce Lee and the Dawn of Martial Arts in America (University of Nebraska Press, 2016)