John Martin relates how legendary martial artist Bruce Lee’s search for his cultural identity secured a cinematic Golden Harvest…

Chinatown. Oakland. California. 1964. Fledgling Kung fu instructor Bruce Lee has accepted a challenge from Wong Jack-Man, a fellow Wing Chun practitioner who’s also hoping to set up his own martial arts school. Or depending on how you cut it, Wong is responding to a provocative challenge that Lee allegedly put out to everyone in the local martial arts scene after an exhibition in San Francisco. Either way, the stakes are high for both men in terms of career prospects and “face”…

There are at least as many accounts of how the challenge match played out as people who witnessed it, but two things are clear. Firstly, that at least part of the ill feeling between the contestants concerned Lee’s inclusion of non-Chinese (gweilo or “foreign devil”) aspirants on his student rolls. Also, that the fight crystallised Lee’s frustration at the restrictions of traditional Wing Chun, with is repetitive rotas of set moves and stances, which he likened to “swimming on dry land.” He was already well on the way to developing his own, more intuitive “style without a style”, Jeet Kune Do (“the way of the intercepting fist”) a breakthrough that would capture the world’s imagination while further alienating the conservative Chinese martial arts establishment. Nor were their feelings much mollified by his marriage, in August ’64, to WASP Linda Emery, his fellow student at Seattle’s University of Washington.

Wong Jack-Man did not represent the greatest challenge ever faced by Bruce Lee. Nor did Chuck Norris, Kien Shih, the Bobs Baker and Wall nor even the spectre of Jimmy Wang-Yu, his predecessor as Asia’s most prominent action star. Nor, with apologies to Quentin Tarantino, was it any clapped out stuntman who trained on a cocktail of drink, drugs and junk food.

No doubt 7’ 2” Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was Bruce’s biggest opponent in purely physical terms, but far from the most indomitable. In fact Bruce Lee’s most exacting struggle was the ongoing one to establish his own cultural identity.

BRUCE -THE EARLY YEARS

The future martial arts icon was born Lee Jun-fan on 27/11/40 in San Francisco while his father Lee Hoi-chuen, a star of the Cantonese Opera, was touring Chinese communities on America’s west coast. His mother (Grace Ho) was of mixed Sino/European heritage.

Shortly after the family’s return to Hong Kong, on Christmas Day 1941, the British colony fell to Japanese invaders. The “Three Year, Eight Month Occupation” was harsh and Bruce proved to be a sickly child, but as it happened the Japanese authorities viewed the Cantonese Opera as a useful propaganda tool. Lee Hoi-chuen continued to ply his trade and the family continued to eat. Japan’s devastating defeat and surrender in September 1945 returned Hong Kong to the routine humiliations of British rule. Through his dad’s connections, Bruce became a child star (as “Lee the Little Dragon”) and by the age of 18 had made twenty (mostly successful) films, his parts ranging from plucky kids to juvenile delinquents. In the latter category life began to imitate art as the unsettled youngster became embroiled in gang conflicts and got himself expelled from school. Believing he’d benefit from the discipline of the martial arts, Bruce’s parents tried to enrol him as a student of legendary Wing Chun instructor Yip Man. This proved to be problematic on account of the long standing tradition of imparting Kung fu wisdom only to “pure bred” Chinese, and even after Lee was accepted by Yip, fellow students spurned him. Not that this deterred him in any way from cleaning up at a succession of martial arts tournaments. Meanwhile, deft deployment of the feet that would ultimately kick a thousand faces assured Bruce victory at Hong Kong’s chacha-cha dancing championship in 1958.