Bruce Lee: Sifu, Friend and Big Brother. Doug Palmer
Since at that time I was only a sophomore in high school, barely fifteen years old and not yet driving, I was compelled to rush home right after my fight. As a consequence, I missed the Chinese boxing/judo match, if that’s what it was. Otherwise, I may have tried to hook up with Bruce even sooner than I did. Knowing Bruce (and his flair for showmanship), and since the program lists Ed Chow, the son of his landlord Ping and Ruby Chow, as being the commentator, I suspect the demonstration was a highly orchestrated affair highlighting the differences between the two disciplines, with Bruce showcasing his “Chinese boxing” to advantage. Since the judoka showed up several months later on the side of a karate man who challenged Bruce, perhaps he was offended by the experience.
In any event, it was to be more than a year after that before I was destined to run across him again, in 1961. Watching his powerful demonstration of gung fu at the street fair in Chinatown (now called the International District, or Seattle Chinatown/ID), I was mesmerized by the revelation of a whole new world. I vowed to myself that I would find a way to meet Bruce, and to learn from him this exotic new fighting system.
It didn’t take long to figure out a line of approach. The high school I attended, Garfield, was in Seattle’s Central Area. The student body was black, white and Asian, roughly a third each. I had a number of Chinese friends, and began to ask around. As it turned out, the younger brother of a classmate, Jacquie Kay, was taking lessons from Bruce. Jacquie was also a friend of Ruby Chow’s daughter, and Bruce spent a lot of time at Jacquie’s house, enjoying her mom’s home-cooked meals, talking with her father and drawing with her younger brother. I asked her to arrange an introduction, but heard nothing further until Bon Odori.
BRUCE LEE WAS a revolutionary. He revolutionized the martial arts world, and the way martial arts were portrayed in film. He overturned our stereotype of the Asian male (as being subservient and asexual), and brought an appreciation of the martial arts to a mainstream audience. His approach to the martial arts, and to life, influenced many people in other disciplines as well.
He also had a major influence on my life. That time I first saw him on that stage, I was sixteen. He was only four years older than I was—still 20. Close enough in age to be a friend, yet older enough to be a teacher (sifu) and, in many ways, like an older brother. Over the next decade, including a summer spent with him and his family in Hong Kong, I learned from him not only martial arts, but also many valuable life lessons that stuck with me and served me many times in good stead.
Program for Seattle University Smoker, April 8, 1960 Courtesy of David Tadman
By the time of his death his name had gained international recognition; afterwards, his influence mushroomed exponentially into a planet-wide phenomenon. He had the huge impact he did not just because he was a genius and a physical prodigy. His physical attributes are well-known, including preternatural speed and coordination, and exceptional strength for his size. Those attributes drew others to him, myself included. But he also possessed a formidable array of other qualities that were equally important: determination, self-discipline, persistence to the point of being a perfectionist, self-confidence, open-mindedness to new ideas and people, a willingness to share, a flair for showmanship, a subtle sense of humor that could be self-deprecating, a personal character that combined loyalty, a sense of dignity, and a respect for others.
Because he sometimes seemed larger than life, his subtlety and complexity could be overlooked. Some of his positive attributes at times verged on excess, the yang overwhelming any trace of yin. His self-confidence could come across as arrogance, his single-mindedness as self-absorption. But he was constantly assessing, taking stock, tinkering, not just with his martial arts but with his own character. In the end, he eliminated the strains that held him back, honing his arsenal of abilities to their maximum effect.
In his family’s words, when Bruce left Hong Kong for the States at the age of eighteen he was a “good to above average” martial artist, and when he returned four years later he manifested a “very special talent that is rarely found on this earth.”3 When I first met him he was a work in progress, and he was still evolving the last time I saw him nine months before he died.
In the chapters that follow, I hope to share the Bruce I knew, to let you see the qualities that made him the person he was, that made him so special not only to the people whose lives he touched directly, but to those around the world for whom he became an inspiration.
ENDNOTES
1 I spell gung fu with a “g” (rather than kung fu, the spelling most are familiar with) because that was how Bruce usually spelled it. That spelling also more closely represents its actual pronunciation than kung fu, a spelling which is an artifact of a particular system for romanizing spoken Mandarin, now on the wane. In pinyin, the romanization system used in China, it is spelled gongfu. Bruce was a native Cantonese speaker, but it so happens that the term gung fu is pronounced more or less the same in both Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese.
2 The smoker and demo were on April 8, 1960. See the program for the event, shown in this chapter.
3 Lee Siu Loong: Memories of the Dragon, by Bruce’s siblings and compiled by David Tadman, p. 6.
Bruce and his car, Seattle, circa 1960 Courtesy of the Bruce Lee Family Archive
CHAPTER 2
The Road to Seattle
BRUCE’S FATHER WAS a well-known Cantonese opera and movie star. Toward the end of 1939, he went on an extended tour of Chinatowns across the United States. Bruce was born during the tour, in San Francisco, on November 27, 1940. It was not only the Year of the Dragon, but also the hour of the dragon in the Chinese zodiac, the dragon often considered the most propitious of the twelve zodiac signs.
His parents named him “Jun Fan” (spelled “Jun Fon” on his birth certificate) in Cantonese, which could be interpreted as “Shaking Up San Francisco.”4 The nickname he was given as a child by his family was “Mo Si Ting,” or “Never Sits Still,”5 because of his restlessness. But the name that he came to be known as later was “Siu Lung,” or “Little Dragon,” his stage name as a child actor in Hong Kong.
His mother, Grace Ho, was Eurasian. The extent and origin of her European blood is a matter of some uncertainty. Her father was a prominent Chinese business man who was ostensibly half Dutch, but may have been entirely Chinese. Her mother may have been a Eurasian concubine, or a secret mistress who was entirely English.6 Doing the math, that would mean that Bruce was anywhere from one-eighth to three-eighths Caucasian. He didn’t try to hide that, but I recall him only mentioning the fact that he was part white in passing. Throughout the time I knew him he proudly identified as Chinese.
When he was born, the Second Sino-Japanese War had been waging for several years. The Japanese occupied much of northern China and various coastal areas, including areas around Hong Kong, which was then a British Crown Colony. Some of his father’s opera colleagues chose to stay in the U.S., or were stranded there when war broke out between Japan and the U.S. One of those was Ping Chow, who eventually ended up in Seattle and with his wife Ruby opened a restaurant there, called “Ruby Chow’s.” Since Bruce’s parents had left their three older children in Hong Kong with his paternal grandmother, then 70, their choice to return was not really much of a choice.
Bruce and his parents left San Francisco to return to Hong Kong when Bruce was less than six months old, arriving by boat in May of 1941. He soon became dangerously ill and nearly died. Several months later, in December, several hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese invaded Hong Kong.