Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. There is a good chance you've been running around preparing your Thanksgiving celebration. If you need some inspiration, we got you. Deb Pearlman joined us yesterday to talk about some great side dishes. Tomorrow, Sommelier Aldo Sohm joins us to talk about how to come up with inspired wine pairings for your big meal. Later this hour, we'll speak with Pyet DeSpain. Her debut cookbook is called Rooted in Fire: A Celebration of Native American and Mexican Cooking. Now let's get this hour started with a conversation about the life of Bruce Lee.

[music]

Alison Stewart: Full Bio is our book series where we spend a few days with the author of a deeply researched biography to get a fuller understanding of the subject. We are speaking with Jeff Chang, the author of Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America. Bruce Lee was a martial artist, an actor, and cultural icon. Yesterday, we learned that Bruce was born in 1940 in San Francisco, but grew up in Hong Kong in a showbiz family. As a kid, he was in Chinese film. He wasn't great at school, but he grew to love martial arts. This was a good and a bad thing for Lee because he often got into fights.

One confrontation was so bad that he was almost arrested. His family thought America would be a chance to start over. Lee also had to return to the States to exercise his American citizenship. Because of his father's ties to people on the West Coast, Bruce Lee left a life of privilege in Hong Kong and lived and worked in Seattle in a restaurant owned by a powerful woman named Ruby Chow, who laid down the law. Bruce would go to college at the University of Washington. He didn't finish, but he would meet his wife there. Let's get into the conversation with Jeff Chang, author of Water Mirror Echo.

[music]

Alison Stewart: There are so many different styles of martial arts. There's Wing Chun, gung fu. At the beginning, what made Bruce Lee interested in the martial arts?

Jeff Chang: I think that he wanted to learn the martial arts from when he was even just a little kid. He was somebody who was bullied, and he himself turned that back around and became something of a bully himself in some ways. He was constantly on movie sets asking the elders to teach him gung fu moves. His father tries to get him to learn tai chi, which is a much slower type of art form. It's a martial art, but it's also a very slow type of thing. Bruce moves too fast. He can't take it. It's too slow for him.

He falls in with a group of folks that is going out merry-making after classes and out in the streets, and he meets a guy on the street named William Chung, who knows Wing Chun and is in very strong control of his body. He's a legit martial artist, and he's like, "Teach me what you know." William takes him to his sifu, an older gentleman named Yip Man, who teaches Wing Chun. Bruce begins to learn Wing Chun at the age of 13.

Alison Stewart: One person in the book said, "You don't have to ask Bruce to fight twice."

Jeff Chang: That was his brother.

Alison Stewart: His brother.

Jeff Chang: Robert.

Alison Stewart: He had a huge fight. His parents did not seem happy with him, and they decided his future lies in America. Before he went to America, did he have a goal in mind for what he wanted to do?

Jeff Chang: Yes, I think that what happens is Bruce gets into one too many fights. He roughs up somebody who is connected, is gang-affiliated, and his brother is sure, really, that Bruce is going to get himself killed. His parents are like, "That's it, no more. We are putting you on a slow boat to San Francisco. We're giving you $100, and you're going to have to figure it out, but you can't do it anymore. You're not doing this anymore." Bruce gets serious at this point. All those books that he's been neglecting, he starts picking up again. He realizes that he hasn't been paying attention in his English classes. He's got to brush up on all of his English.

He actually starts going to the library and reads martial arts manuals. When he does that, he realizes that what his father and his sifus have been trying to instill in him, all these ideas in the martial arts that are rooted in Chinese philosophy and Asian philosophies, they're all there. This begins his lifelong love for philosophy. I think he goes at that particular point with this idea, this far-fetched notion of maybe going to the US and teaching folks in the US gung fu.

Now he drops this on his friends, and his friends laugh at him. They're like, "What do you know? You haven't become an expert. You're no sigong. You're no sifu. You're no si bok. You don't have any ranking in any of these things. How are you going to do that?" He's like, "I'm going to do it. You just watch. I'm going to do that. I'm going to make it in America." That's something that he's telling all of his friends, "I'm going to really make it in America." That's it. That's his vague notion.

What we know of this particular period is he's got a lot of doubts about himself, but he's also fully committed. He's reading book after book after book. He's trying to learn as much gung fu as he can from whatever kinds of schools and styles he can learn from, so that he can have all of that when he gets back to the US.

Alison Stewart: Our guest is Jeff Chang. He wrote Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America. It's our choice for Full Bio. He comes to the States in 1959. Can you describe what life was like for Chinese immigrants in 1959?

Jeff Chang: Sure. Chinatown is still very segregated. Bruce is coming into a place where he quickly realizes if he goes a couple of blocks up the hill, he'll be in-- He's in San Francisco Chinatown. If he goes a couple of blocks up the hill, he'll be in Nob Hill, which is a wealthy white community. Police aren't going to allow him to be there. If he goes down the block down the hill, he's in the Financial District, and the police aren't going to allow him to be there either. He's living in San Francisco Chinatown, and, really, he's experiencing the US through Chinatowns. San Francisco Chinatown, Oakland Chinatown.

He's largely experiencing the US through the Asian American communities that he's in. At this particular period, there is the beginnings of the transformation of these Chinatowns because after Bruce arrives into the '60s, there are new waves of immigration that are coming in. Of course, in 1965, all the racist quotas against Asians are removed and there's intense immigration to the US but he's coming into places in which the traditions, the institutions have been long established for a few generations.

That actually puts him afoul of the gungfu kuns, the gungfu schools, because he thinks it's like Hong Kong where he can just be walking down the street, challenge somebody from another gungfu school and they'll have this formal way, this ritualized way of organizing a fight and they'll have the challenge fight and somebody will win, somebody will lose, and it'll continue, but in San Francisco, he actually tries to do that with a long standing gungfu school and they run him out of there like he's a bad immigrant.

Alison Stewart: Bruce learned racism at this point. There are so many different examples. Would you share one that really stays with you?

Jeff Chang: There are so many. He moves to Seattle because he gets into trouble with this gung fu school, and his parents are like, "No, we're going to move you to a place where there's fewer Chinese, fewer distractions. He moves to Seattle, which is 95% white. All the folks of color are concentrated in this little area called the Central District. There's Black folks there, there's Japanese Americans there.

The first two major students that he has, the first student is a Black American, this guy named Jesse Glover, who comes to him because at the age of 12 he's been beat silly to a brutal state by police for no reason at all other than him and his friends are trying to walk home one day. Through his life, Jesse has been looking for a teacher who will teach him self-defense and to understand how to basically conduct himself, how not to be afraid anymore, really. He asked Bruce to teach him.

I think that in that exchange, Bruce teaching Jesse gung fu, and Jesse teaching Bruce about what it means to be a minority in the US, so many things happen. I think we see the beginnings of this privileged child now beginning to identify with the underdog. Jesse gives him the language to understand that he is maybe being exploited by his boss, Ruby Chow, in the restaurant. He meets another guy named Taky Kimura, who, when he was 18, was being put on a train to a concentration camp simply because he was Japanese American, and he's lost all his confidence.

As Bruce is teaching Taky and learning about Taky's experiences, he too is learning about what it means to be Asian in America. I think that these are indelible lessons. I think without them, we don't have the Bruce that everybody identifies with now as somebody who's the hero of the down-pressed and the people who feel stepped upon.

Alison Stewart: One of Bruce's friends said in the book that Bruce's main interests at this time were gung fu, cha cha, girls, philosophy and Chinese history. Let's take each one. Gung fu in his life when he's 19, 20 years old, what's the rule of gung fu?

Jeff Chang: Gung fu is the currency that he has now to be able to interact with all of these young folks from across the Central District. Again, Jesse Glover, all of his friends who are poor whites, Latinos, other Asian Americans, Japanese, Filipino, Chinese Americans. Bruce is taking that and he's wanting to learn everything that they know as well, because his thing is he wants to go back to Hong Kong at some point and have all of these new tricks to be able to spring on his wing chun brothers, but it becomes something else.

They really start testing out what becomes something else entirely. It's a hybrid martial arts form. It's a mixed martial arts. It's the beginnings of mixed martial arts in many ways. That's, I think, what he begins to see in this group of friends, this community that he's falling into in Seattle.

Alison Stewart: Cha cha. He loved dancing. He was good at dancing.

Jeff Chang: He was great at it. One of his girlfriends called him a kinetic genius. He could watch somebody dance, and within a few beats, he could figure out the dance and imitate it move for move, gesture for gesture. This was his currency with the ladies. He was literally working his way through Chinatown, taking all these young women out and going cha cha dancing with them. That was the way that he could have impressed him because, really, he was awkward with the ladies. He didn't really have too much game. When he got on the dance floor, they're like, "Okay, we got this. This is flowing now."

Alison Stewart: He met his wife, soon-to-be wife, Linda. How did they meet?

Jeff Chang: They met through a mutual friend. They were both students at the University of Washington at that time, and Bruce's school had now flowered. He found a new audience at the university. Linda is one of the students that comes in just before they head up to UW, and then, as they are working out together, Bruce becomes really infatuated with her. Linda, from the beginning, when she first saw him in the halls of Garfield High School, was like, "Ooh, who's that?" Bruce one day asks her out to go to the Space Needle, and they have a date, and the rest is history.

Alison Stewart: What was something that she understood about Bruce that other people didn't understand about him?

Jeff Chang: She was non-judgmental. She was there for the adventure. Bruce was attracted to another young woman before Linda, and she had high goals for herself. She saw through Bruce that Bruce was improvising the whole thing, if you will. "These gung fu schools. Okay, yes, sure. How are you going to get that together?" That was Amy Sanbo's, Bruce's first crush and love, reaction to that. Linda was like, "Okay, I'll help you."

Linda was also incredibly fierce. She was really, really smart and really, really athletic. The attraction, I think, was very deep. I think Linda understood that Bruce had this highly creative mind, and she was willing to follow that and support where he wanted to go with that.

Alison Stewart: The final two things on that list were philosophy and Chinese history. What kind of philosophy was he interested in?

Jeff Chang: He was interested in Asian philosophy primarily, but he picked up some of the Western classics in his one class that he took in Introductory Philosophy. What he was looking for, I think, was how to live. He found that in the West Coast take on Asian philosophy. He's reading people like Alan Watts, the same people that the Beat poets are reading, the Beatniks are reading. He's reading DT Suzuki, he's reading books on Chinese philosophy. He's in a class on Asian studies at UW, the University of Washington, where he's one of two Chinese Americans in a class of maybe 100.

There's just a huge fascination with Asian philosophy. That gives him a little currency as well. He's actively trying to read philosophy and apply it again to his martial arts teachings, his martial arts school over there in the University District. I think that he's looking for ways to live. He finds that in this strange combination of Daoism, Zen Buddhism, and American self-help books as well. He also discovers at this time the books that are advancing this American self-reliance idea, this idea that if you can dream it, you can be it.

Those are really interesting to him as well. It's this contradictory mix of suppress the ego and go with the flow on the one hand, and the "He, you can do anything. You're American," self-help type of manuals.

Alison Stewart: That's interesting. I was wondering, at this point in his life, he's still pretty young. I wondered how he thought about China at this point. Was he a Chinese person living in America, or was he turning into a Chinese American?

Jeff Chang: I think he's becoming Chinese American even though there's no terminology yet for it. He is in Seattle, living in Chinatown for most of the time that he's there, and he is seeing all of the structures of Chinese America from the inside because he's working for the most powerful Chinese American in the country, Ruby Chow, this restaurateur who has turned a restaurant into a gathering place for white elites and who is literally playing ball politically with them at that level.

He can understand everything that's happening. It's literally all there, laid out in front of him. I think, as we were talking about earlier, he's learning what it means to be a minority in the US and he's also somebody who has a lot more confidence in himself, a lot more pride, a lot more resistance in him, so to speak, than other Chinese Americans at this particular point. He is getting into it with ROTC officers. He's in ROTC, in R-O-T-C, and he's getting into it with ROTC officers. He's getting into it with cops on the streets.

His friends are like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, you're going to get yourself killed." He's, I think, learning what the limits are, and he's straining at them at the same time. I think that that's what's really interesting about it because we're still about three or four years before there's a language for Asian America, and yet he's already in full-blown rebellion mode, like the Asian Americans who come of age after 1968.

Alison Stewart: You're listening to Full Bio. My guest is Jeff Chang. He wrote the book Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America. Before we finish up today, I have to ask you this. Linda and Bruce, they were always broke.

Jeff Chang: Yes. They're students. They're starving students.

Alison Stewart: How did they make money? What was their plan, especially when they headed to California?

Jeff Chang: I don't know if they had a plan. I think that Bruce had this one school, and his faithful friend Taky Kimura was collecting dues on his behalf. That's what he's living off of, literally, is this, are the dues from his school. When he gets to California, he opens up a new school there with his friend James Yimm Lee. James is really doing a lot of support for him as well, because James has a-- He's a union worker, he's got a full-time job. He's much older than Bruce. Bruce and Linda are living there rent-free.

They are all there because they believe that Bruce has something, that Bruce has something to teach, that Bruce is destined for something great, and they believe in him, and so that's how they get by, I think.

Alison Stewart: That was Jeff Chang, the author of Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America. Tomorrow, Bruce Lee and Hollywood, from The Green Hornet to Enter the Dragon. This is All Of It.