Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America
Published September 23, 2025
Growing up in San Francisco's Chinatown in the 1980s, few names were more revered than Bruce Lee. Boys would run amok in yellow jumpsuits on Halloween, and everyone wanted to practice kung fu. Once I moved over the bridge and attended a school in Larkspur, California, Lee became a tool for bullying and taunting. Kids would strike poses and mimic the sounds Lee made in his films to point out my otherness. Upon further investigation, I learned that in many cases, Bruce Lee was the only Asian that these kids could identify. Straddling the two worlds of Chinatown and a predominantly white suburban America, Lee's imprint on the collective psyche was both distinctive and long-lasting.
In Jeff Chang's new book “Water Mirror Echo”, we are given the opportunity to explore the human who lived before Lee’s legend was gilded in gold.
Following the actor's untimely death at age 32, “Bruceploitation” movies began to pop up almost immediately. False Bruces, wearing similar clothing, imitated him across the silver screen, creating both a parody and an immortalization of the man.
Born in a then segregated San Francisco Chinatown on November 27, 1940, to parents who had been lured there from Hong Kong with the promise of work, Lee's family decided to return shortly after. The Hong Kong of the 1950s was full of young people who had just arrived due to the end of the Chinese Civil War. After becoming a student of kung fu, a street brawler, cha-cha aficionado, and an accomplished child actor, Lee moved back to San Francisco in 1959. Described as having nearly endless energy, he was a poor student but avid reader.
In America, Lee soon learned there was little space for him in Hollywood. Beat poetry and an interest in Asian arts were on the rise. Lee opened a studio to teach Jeet Kune Do, his own martial art inspired by Wing Chun, Tai Chi, Taekwondo, boxing, fencing, and Jujutsu. His goal was to reach the very core of movement, without unnecessary flourishes. Lee would go on to train Hollywood greats like Steve McQueen and Julie Andrews. He was cast as Kato, “the orientalish right-hand man,” in the short-lived series The Green Hornet, but still he struggled; he was accepted as a teacher, but not as a serious actor. He would battle the shadow of Asian stereotypes for the rest of his career in America, even as he became a massive film star in Hong Kong. Constantly caught between the specters of Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu, he walked a cultural tightrope.
“For many restless young Asians in America, ‘Oriental’ signified the rug that everyone walked on or the dark peel of thunder from the other side of the world. It was easy for them to bomb someone, something, that was abstract and distant. When they called you ‘Gook’ from a Korean hillside, in a Vietnamese jungle, or even on an American street, they were saying you could be removed too. There were others. They praised you for keeping quiet and to yourselves. They asked you to tally your American traits and your Oriental traits as if you could divide yourself into asset and liability columns like a balance sheet,” Chang writes. It was these expectations that Lee would always be in battle with. No matter how pure his fighting style or how strong his body, the will of Hollywood was stronger.
While the Black Panthers were demanding equal rights, Asian Americans were forming their own activist groups. Lee did not set out to be an activist, but his drive and ambition made him one by default. That Bruce Lee sought to create an Asian-led television series at a time when Hollywood deemed it financially unviable was, in itself, an act of protest. Sadly, the father of two died just one month before his film Enter the Dragon hit American theaters and catapulted him into the fame he had long sought.
Though Chang's book, especially during its fictional and real fight scenes, can at times read like a radio play-by-play of a baseball game, his extensive research offers a compelling portrait of Lee's life and motivations. This 560-page volume makes clear why Bruce Lee's energy has lasted longer than his mortal life. Like my classmates all those years ago, despite the rampant stereotypes and roadblocks, the American public could not help but see him. Bruce Lee lived as the water he so often encouraged us to become. He flowed around and through all obstacles, paving the way for others.
“Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless. Like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”
Chang will be at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center on November 5th to talk about “Water Mirror Echo”. Tickets available on their website.
