In 1959, at the age of 18, Bruce Lee returned from Hong Kong to Chinatown in San Francisco, the neighborhood of his birth. In a remarkable convergence of perspectives that could only have erupted in the blocks where Chinatown faded into North Beach, the Beat generation troublemakers were awash in a Zen-adjacent counterculture loosely influenced by D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts, rebelling against what they viewed as the nuclear-family nationalism of the Cold War era. Meanwhile, Lee’s ethnic peers were practicing Buddhism and Taoism to sustain their traditional families and communities against segregation and erasure.
The term “Asian American” had not yet been coined when Lee first began to develop a poetics of fighting. He maintained a diary, writing down ideas from Suzuki, Sun Tzu, and the Tao Te Ching, discovering within Asian philosophy exactly the type of self-reliance and radical individualism the Beats thought they had found.
In Jeff Chang’s epic new biography of Lee, Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America, the author disregards the arcane debates one might hear among fanboys or critics and instead prioritizes who Lee actually was at various points of a brief cultural history. While others have focused overmuch on Lee’s early death and how it supercharged his transformation into a worldwide phenomenon, Chang instead takes us through the chapters of Lee’s short life, the internal and external battles he overcame, and also the ones he didn’t.
“I was much more interested in thinking about who Bruce was in the context of the times that he was living in,” Chang says as we sit in his East Bay living room. “It was a much more interesting story to think about Bruce as an Asian American, as an immigrant, as somebody who is living through a period of war in Asia, in the Pacific, as somebody who comes of age in segregated neighborhoods in the U.S.”
Lee’s coming of age put him right alongside the emergent Asian American political struggle of the late 1960s, although he didn’t yet have the terminology to articulate his position. He tried to shatter racial stereotypes in Hollywood during a time when a Chinese man was likely to be perceived as an uppity intruder or an “exotic Oriental support player.” He had no bank of managers or handlers to guide him, as he might now. Lee felt completely alone in fighting the establishment, so he took to his diaries, which are filled with entries in which he tries to pump himself up, using language that anticipated self-help movements years later.
“He doesn’t necessarily have an agent between him and these studio execs,” Chang says. “He’s trying to do everything by himself. And so you get a really strong sense of the limitations that have been placed on him…how much he really wants to break through, and the sheer El Capitan granite face of the obstacles that he has to overcome.” With exclusive access to Lee’s papers and archives granted to him by the family estate, Chang traces the correspondence Lee had with a lot of Hollywood studio bigwigs. These letters allow Chang to sort out various battles behind the scenes and re-create Lee’s state of mind in masterful detail. At one point, Lee even begins to draft a manifesto applying his gung fu ethics to show business, including passages like “You have that personal obligation to yourself to make yourself the best product possible according to your own terms. Not the biggest or the most successful, but the best quality—with that achieved, comes everything else.”
Anytime a frantic movement of marginalized youth has emerged from the chaos and seismically shifted everything, Chang has been all over it as a writer. He naturally sees Lee’s life through just such a lens, zeroing in on historic moments of pop culture convergence, an obsession that spills over from his previous books about hip-hop and race. In 1950s Hong Kong, for example, when gangster syndicates, fight culture, and social unrest helped spawn specific franchises of kung fu films, Chang likens it to the rise of hip-hop 20 years later in New York. Similarly, when Lee appeared at the inaugural Long Beach International Karate Championships in 1964 and contributed to the most diverse range of Asian and Pacific Islander fighting arts ever assembled in one place, Chang analogizes the event to James Brown first synthesizing forms of Black music, creating what came to be known as funk.
“That’s the link between hip-hop and Bruce Lee,” Chang says, emphasizing the deep historical similarities that attracted many hip-hop fans to Lee. “You’re talking about Hong Kong in the 1950s, where basically all of these young people have just poured over the borders because of the end of the Chinese Civil War, and they’re living in unsafe housing, and fires are breaking out everywhere. This is exactly what I was writing about with the Bronx.”
Even though Lee’s life came to an abrupt end as a result of cerebral edema, Chang shows us that his legacy refuses to fade.•
WATER MIRROR ECHO: BRUCE LEE AND THE MAKING OF ASIAN AMERICA, BY JEFF CHANG
Gary Singh’s byline has appeared over 1,500 times, including on newspaper columns, travel essays, art and music criticism, profiles, business journalism, lifestyle articles, poetry, and short fiction. He is the author of three books, including The Unforgettable San Jose Earthquakes: Momentous Stories on and off the Field, published in 2024.
