Bruce Lee: Sifu, Friend and Big Brother. Doug Palmer
the customers were non-Chinese, including local political figures.
The restaurant building was an old Seattle wood-frame mansion that had been retro-fitted into a restaurant with boarding rooms upstairs. Bruce lived on the second floor in a room that was more like a walk-in closet, located partly underneath a stairway leading up to the third floor. I never saw his room, but by all accounts it was sparsely furnished, with the bathroom down the hall. According to Skip Ellsworth, one of Bruce’s early students, Bruce slept on a mattress directly under the sloped ceiling on the underside of the stairway, with his clothes neatly folded and stacked alongside. A wooden fruit-box served as a desk; a single naked light-bulb hung down on a wire from the ceiling, above the fruit-box.17
Ruby was a formidable woman with a beehive hairdo and a strong personality, a powerhouse in Seattle’s Chinese community who later became the first Asian-American elected to the King County Council. Ruby expected Bruce to work for his keep and put up with the high-handed behavior which some of her customers displayed. To say that Ruby and Bruce had a personality clash would be understating it. No doubt she thought of him as a young whipper-snapper, an ungrateful freeloader who expected to be treated as a pampered houseguest.
Bruce in front of Ruby Chow’s, Seattle, circa 1960 Courtesy of the Bruce Lee Family Archive
Ed Chow, Ruby Chow’s eldest son, a year-and-a-half older than Bruce, was the commentator for the “Chinese boxing—judo demonstration” at the Seattle University fraternity smoker the following April given by Bruce and a Japanese judoka. I don’t know if Ed was attending Seattle University at the time, but the campus was practically next door to the restaurant. Perhaps some students or faculty were customers at the restaurant and came across Bruce there.
Bruce was also well-known for his sense of humor and corny jokes. One of his favorite jokes perhaps resonated with him because of his experience at Ruby Chow’s, straining to keep his temper in check when he was treated poorly by a boorish customer. As told by Bruce with his distinctive panache, an American walks into a Chinese restaurant, sits down and orders fried rice. The Chinese waiter replies, “OK, one fly lice.” The American laughs and says, “No, Charlie, it’s not ‘fly lice’—it’s ‘fried rice.’” After that, every time the American would come into the restaurant he would tease the waiter and yell out, “Hey Charlie, get me some ‘fly lice!’” The waiter grew very annoyed at this, so he began practicing the correct pronunciation at home. Bruce would imitate the waiter practicing at home in front of a mirror, gradually improving his pronunciation until he could say “fried rice” perfectly. The waiter could barely contain himself until the next time the American walks into the restaurant and calls out, “Hey Charlie, get me some ‘fly lice!’” Whereupon the waiter marches over and draws himself up proudly to confront the American. “It’s not ‘fly lice’—it’s ‘fried rice,’” the waiter says, enunciating slowly and carefully. “You Amelican plick!” Bruce would deliver the last line with gusto in a stereotypical Chinese accent and then crack himself up.
In any event, Bruce spent as little time as possible at the restaurant, and I got the distinct sense that he was counting the days until he could move out on his own. But he put up with it for nearly four years, until he returned to Seattle from a visit back to Hong Kong in 1963. I sometimes wonder if he needed to get the blessing of his father to move out, since his father had arranged for him to stay with Ping and Ruby in the first place. Most likely, it took a while for him to build up the confidence that he could make it on his own, teaching gung fu classes. By the time he went back to Hong Kong he was earning enough money that he could make the move.
Soon after arriving in Seattle he also enrolled at Edison Technical School to get his high school diploma. The building where Edison was housed, on Broadway in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, is now part of the Seattle Central Community College campus. His first gung fu students were fellow students at Edison.
In addition to working at Ruby Chow’s and going to school, he continued his gung fu training. He had a wooden dummy shipped from Hong Kong, which he would pound away at to practice his chi sau and strengthen his forearms.18 He also began to participate in demonstrations, including with Fook Yeung.19
BRUCE WAS STREET-WISE in Hong Kong, but was still learning the way things worked in America. So it was not surprising that he was drawn to some of his fellow students at Edison, who were older and packed full of hard-earned street smarts from this side of the ocean, and who became his first students.
The first one was Jesse Glover, a husky black man with a brown belt in judo. Jesse was then twenty-six, six years older than Bruce. He first saw Bruce in a demo in which Bruce appeared with the Chinese Youth Club, following a cha-cha performance which Bruce put on. Jesse had recently returned from California, in an unsuccessful attempt to find a gung fu teacher, so he was excited when he learned of the upcoming gung fu demo in his back yard. Jesse was impressed with what he saw, and vowed he was going to learn to move the same way. 20
Jesse has written that he started learning gung fu from Bruce in 1959 after seeing Bruce in a summer Seafair exhibition.21 But Bruce didn’t arrive in Seattle until September of 1959, long after the summer Seafair events were over. And his diary suggests that it wasn’t until January of the following year that he first met Jesse and began teaching him. His entry for Friday, January 8, 196022 reads:
To day after school, a negro came and ask me to teach him Kung Fu. He is a brown belt holder of judo and weighs 180 lb. However, I think he is kind of clumsy. If he practice under my instruction, I’m sure he can achieve distinction.
Two days later, on Sunday, he made another diary entry:
To day I went to the negro’s house and teach him a few tricks on Kung Fu and ask him not to use it on Chinese! Tonight I couldn’t go to sleep.
Jesse quickly realized that Bruce had some unique skills and started working out with him, initially one on one in Jesse’s apartment and at school and other odd locations when they could grab the time.23 Ruby didn’t like Bruce teaching non-Chinese, so they couldn’t practice at the restaurant.24
At that time, Bruce was still developing his own style, experimenting with techniques from other gung fu schools. He taught Jesse different ways to attack and defend so he could practice against them. As Jesse put it, “the only reason that I learned what I did was because at the time he needed a live dummy to train on.” A lot of the techniques were ones Bruce discarded, or simply filed away without passing them on when he later started teaching formal classes.25
Jesse also tells that when they first met, Bruce thought of his own skill level as being little more than an advanced beginner. He made trips up to Vancouver, B.C.’s Chinatown to buy books on different gung fu styles, then devoured them once back in Seattle; his dream was to learn the secrets of the masters of the various styles and combine them into a “super system.” For a while he was a strong believer in forms, but within a year changed his mind and discounted any system that emphasized forms.26
Bruce also trained a few others who were introduced by Jesse. The second student was Ed Hart, also a judo man and formidable street fighter, who roomed with Jesse. Howard Hall, another Edison student, and Pat Hooks, Skip Ellsworth and Charlie Woo, all judo men, soon joined. By then, the group had outgrown Jesse’s apartment.
By early February 1960 Bruce had met Taky Kimura through Jesse. Taky was a black belt in judo and Bruce spent hours working out with Taky in judo at the YMCA.27 After a while Bruce incorporated his new students into his demonstrations, but I believe that was after the April 1960 demo at the Seattle U smoker. By September LeRoy Garcia, whose wife went to Edison and had seen one of Bruce’s demos, had joined the group.
At first, it was Bruce and his fellow students exchanging martial arts techniques