Bruce Lee: Sifu, Friend and Big Brother. Doug Palmer
surrendered and Hong Kong reverted back to being a British colony. When he started school, he was still a skinny kid. He was also near-sighted and wore thick glasses. He was often picked on, but fought back.7
By all accounts, the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong was brutal; the British, although less brutal, left no doubt as to who was in charge. Both periods left an imprint on his character.
He had no problem tapping into Chinese nationalist feelings in his movies. His second movie in Hong Kong after unsuccessfully trying to break into Hollywood, Fist of Fury, made in 1972 with Japanese martial artists as the primary villains, was set in Shanghai during the early 20th century. Sections of the city were then controlled by foreign powers. In one scene, he is denied entry to a park with a sign that declares “No Dogs or Chinese Allowed.” After being taunted by a Japanese man who tells him that if he behaves like a dog, he will be allowed in, he beats up the man and his friends and kicks the sign to smithereens.
Recent scholarship has cast doubt on whether or not signs with that exact wording ever existed, but their existence was unquestioned in the Chinese public mind as a symbol of Chinese humiliation by foreign powers. Bruce certainly believed that such signs were a reality in Hong Kong before the war and during the Japanese occupation.
But as much as the Japanese occupation left its mark on him, Bruce never evidenced any prejudice or ill will toward individual Japanese. His first serious girlfriend in Seattle, Amy Sanbo, to whom he proposed, was a Japanese-American, as was his good friend and assistant, Taky Kimura, who ran the Seattle gung fu school when Bruce later moved to California. When I introduced him to the woman I was to marry, Noriko Goto, a student from Japan, he was gracious and welcoming. There were also other Japanese from Japan that he befriended.
He was certainly aware of the history of the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, and undoubtedly heard stories from his parents and others, but probably had few direct memories of his own from that period. In any event, he seemed to have no problem in separating his views of individual Japanese from his views of Japan’s historical occupation of China and Hong Kong.
His attitudes toward the British, on the other hand, seemed more visceral, perhaps because he encountered them as real people as he was growing up, particularly in the form of sailors on leave in Hong Kong. On more than one occasion I heard him tell of run-ins with British sailors who were over-confident in facing what seemed like a skinny bespectacled Chinese kid much smaller than they. One of Bruce’s techniques, when the sailor raised his hands in a boxing stance, was to clap his hands and yell, to focus the sailor’s attention on his hands, followed quickly with a straight snapping kick to the groin. He and his posse also tangled with British students from another high school.
British sailors and students were not the only ones Bruce brawled with as a teenager. The Hong Kong streets were tough, and according to Bruce as well as his family he got in fights constantly. But although he had practiced some t’ai chi with his father, he wasn’t into it and hadn’t yet had any formal gung fu training when he first began getting into scrapes. His first formal lessons were from Yip Man, a well-known teacher of Wing Chun. Most accounts say he started with Yip Man in 1953, when he was thirteen, but one claims that it wasn’t until after getting kicked out of his first high school (Lasalle) and starting a new one (St. Francis Xavier) in September of 1956, when he was still fifteen.8
His main instructors at Yip Man’s school were apparently two older students, William Cheung and Wong Shun Leung. The reason for that may have been that some of his fellow students tried to get him expelled from the school (using the fact that he wasn’t “pure Chinese” as one of their arguments), and as a compromise Yip man had him study with Wong and avoid the main class for a while.9 Wong was an experienced and renowned street fighter who mentored Bruce, encouraging him to hone his classroom skills both on the streets and in bare knuckle matches on rooftops against other gung fu schools. Bruce’s fights did not slow down; if anything, they became more frequent.
By the time he was eighteen, his family had decided he needed a fresh start. In April of 1959 they literally shipped him off to the States on an ocean liner in third class with a grubstake of a hundred dollars, before he had even graduated from high school.
I have read various versions of the reason for his leaving so precipitously, including that he defeated the son of a triad leader in a fight and that he needed to leave town to avoid a contract that was out on him. In another more credible version,10 he beat up the son of a powerful family that complained to the police, who warned his parents that he would be arrested if he didn’t shape up. I never heard Bruce mention the exact reasons for him being packed off to the States, but he spoke often about his numerous fights and all accounts seem to agree that his family sent him off because he was constantly in trouble in Hong Kong. The fact that he was already an American citizen perhaps suggested the solution.
He was by then a well-known child movie actor, but that did not dissuade his parents from sending him away. In fact, his father had forbade him from acting in any movies for several years as a punishment for his misbehavior. Ironically, just as he was preparing to leave he was allowed to appear in one last film, The Orphan, which increased his popularity in Hong Kong as a star dramatically. But the die was already cast.
Three more matters of note occurred in the year or so prior to his departure. One was the proficiency he gained in the cha-cha, even winning a Hong Kong-wide cha-cha contest in 1958. He applied the same skill he did in mastering gung fu forms to choreographing his dance moves. The cha-cha was one of his few passions outside of the martial arts, and served as an ice-breaker in social situations. On the boat over to the States he gave lessons to passengers in upper-deck cabins, and he carried a card with his 108 different cha-cha moves in his wallet for many years.11
The second matter was his one foray into martial arts as modified for sport—an intermural boxing match he was persuaded to participate in by one of the teachers at his high school. Although Bruce won the bout handily, against an opponent who had won that weight division for the three previous years, knocking him down repeatedly, he was frustrated by the limitations of his punching power with boxing gloves and his inability to put his opponent down for the count.12 Although in later years he used modified boxing gloves and other equipment for sparring, the experience solidified his distaste for contests with restraining rules or gear. He forswore competing in any karate-style competitions where points were awarded for landing punches or kicks in circumscribed areas, and insisted in his real matches that they be full contact with no rules of engagement as to where or how one could strike.
Lastly, in the few months before his departure he learned some showier forms and techniques from a teacher of northern style gung fu, including a basic praying mantis set. He was already thinking of teaching gung fu in the States, to augment his income. He figured he could teach the northern styles to students who wanted showmanship, and Wing Chun to those who valued practicality.13
When it was time to leave, his family and friends saw him off at the dock. After an ocean voyage of more than two weeks, he landed in the city of his birth.
BRUCE STAYED IN San Francisco for the summer with a friend of his father. He lasted only a week as a waiter at a restaurant where his father’s friend got him a job, but made some pocket money teaching cha-cha in San Francisco Chinatown and across the Bay in Oakland.14
In early September of 1959, Bruce moved up to Seattle to finish high school. Fook Yeung, another old friend of his father, then a chef at a Seattle restaurant, drove down from Seattle to bring him up.15 From then until he went back to Hong Kong to visit his family in the spring of 1963, he lived at Ruby Chow’s Restaurant and worked there as a dishwasher, busboy and waiter. Fook Yeung was also a gung fu practitioner, mainly a devotee of the Praying Mantis school, and soon taught Bruce some of its forms. 16
Ruby Chow’s was an eponymous restaurant located in Seattle on the corner of Broadway and Jefferson, a short block or so away from the parking garage where Bruce later taught his classes. It