Bruce Lee

Nathan Connolly: Born in San Francisco, but raised in Hong Kong, Bruce Lee is perhaps one of the most iconic Asian Americans in US history. Despite rampant racism, Lee managed to break through the exclusive gates of Hollywood and he did so in a big way. Best known for his good looks, rippling muscles and charismatic charm, Lee transformed perceptions of Asian American masculinity.

Speaker 11: In the United States I think something about the oriental. I mean the true oriental should be shown.

Speaker 13: Hollywood sure as heck hasn’t.

Speaker 11: You better believe it, man. I mean it’s always that big tail and bouncing around chap, chap with the [inaudible 00:35:18] and all that.

Nathan Connolly: In 1973 Bruce Lee’s life was tragically cut short due to swelling of the brain. But before his death, Lee starred in several Hollywood martial arts movies, and he performed many of his famous fight scenes without a shirt putting his chiseled body on full display.

Celine: If you run into Bruce Lee on the street, right? I mean game will recognize game. You will just say like, “Oh my God, this person is so strong.” The muscles on this person is unlike any other kind of muscles I’ve ever seen or the way he developed different parts of his body. And so, I would choose not to even fight with him because you just know you’ll lose, right? And so he behaved this way on screen.

Nathan Connolly: That’s scholar Celine Parrenas Shimizu. She says Bruce Lee did much to defy stereotypes, particularly the idea that Asian men were a feminine and weak. But for Celine the measure of Lee’s masculinity can’t simply be reduced to brute strength. It’s the way Lee couples violence with regret, sexuality with consent, these are the key components of what she refers to as Lee’s ethical manhood.

Celine: There’s this scene in Way of the Dragon that Bruce Lee wrote and directed, and the culminating scene is one with Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee at the Coliseum. It’s a really humorously shot film because the fighting is intercut with several cats, kittens who are looking at the fight, but at the same time that it’s really humorous. There’s this fight to the death and you don’t quite know who’s going to win, right? Chuck Norris is dressed in all white, Bruce Lee is dressed in all black. There’s a moment where Bruce Lee ends up killing Colt who’s played by Chuck Norris.

Celine: And there’s almost like an asking of permission, like, are you going to go to the death with me? And there’s an acknowledgement of consent on the side of Colt, and that’s when Bruce Lee kills him. And it ends with this iconic shot of Bruce Lee bearing the pain of having taken a life. And so this is where I came up with this idea of ethical manhood because I noticed that the killing of men is really flanked by this hesitation to kill and then a regret at the costs of killing somebody.

Celine: And it’s really similar to the way in which he approaches women in his films as well. There’s the moment where he wrestles with, what would it look like for me to interact with this woman who I really want to touch, but I’m not sure she wants to be touched? So there’s a famous scene, well not a famous scene. There’s a scene that I study where the woman who he’s having a romantic connection with, they look at each other. The way they first meet each other is during the scene, almost like a house party where everyone’s drinking and the men are talking about how you are really powerless in the face of a really sexual woman and you can’t really help yourself, but you have to get with them because that’s what they want. It’s brutish and really horrible.

Celine: But this whole time that these men are talking in the background, Bruce Lee and this woman are looking at each other in a really humorous but intently romantic way. And slowly throughout the movie you’ll see that this woman is being preyed upon by the drug lord. And after she’s prayed upon and Bruce Lee saves her, he’s hesitating in terms of how he should touch her and he’s not quite sure. So, it’s really interesting to me that these two scenes are juxtaposed against each other. Where other men in the movie feel entitled to touch women, whether or not they consent, whether or not they present themselves as sexual beings. They are really overly sexualized in service of male pleasure.

Celine: But Bruce Lee occupies a different domain where he’s very conscious about seeking the consent of a woman, looking her in the eye and making sure that this is something that she wants to do with him.

Nathan Connolly: On that question of strength and in the way that Bruce Lee is thinking through the question of violence specifically, I mean at the time that he’s making some of his earliest films, you have, again, iconic representations of male virility by way of violence and there are characters like John Wayne and characters like Clint Eastwood. I mean, I’m curious about how obviously somebody as violent on camera as Bruce Lee’s characters were there’s still a kind of thoughtfulness as you’ve laid out about how he’s dealing with violence and using it. I mean, what would you say about Lee’s approach to violence compared to some of his contemporaries?

Celine: He was very insistent on hand to hand combat that there was something about not doing a shortcut in terms of that encounter between people who are fighting, right? But what is striking about his representations of hand to hand combat is that he really made sure to express facially vulnerability that discloses the emotional costs of wielding physical power over another. And this face of regret, of a shattering of the self because you wielded violence against the other is something that’s so forceful and so strong that it can end up destroying him, even if he’s the one who is victorious and standing over a dead body, whose death he caused, right?

Nathan Connolly: Right.

Celine: And so I find that really powerful because what it does is that it reveals a psychic consciousness that catches up to the body’s conducting this expression of violence. It becomes an awareness of the wellbeing of others in civil society beyond the gains for the self. Because, you saved yourself when someone was trying to kill you, you’re the one who didn’t die. So I guess the thing that it’s so amazing about Bruce Lee’s representation of violence is that it doesn’t bring about certainty. What instead it does is that it explodes gender. It explodes power. It becomes a position of uncertainty. What we consider victory is instead the raising of many questions, was it worth it to take that life because of that finality?

Nathan Connolly: Right. I’m really, I’m just enjoying taking a moment to appreciate these as choices, as creative choices that Bruce Lee is making, but also deeply political choices that he’s making through his film. And there’s got to be a way to connect these creative choices with Bruce Lee’s broader set of political commitments. I mean, I would love to have you just to talk a little bit about how Bruce Lee’s political vision is coming out of struggles against colonialism, struggles against racism, stereotypes of Asian people. And then it just sounds like from how you’re characterizing what Bruce Lee’s choices are, that he really is challenging a lot of those ideas.

Celine: Other scholars have said that this body of his and his choice of fighting against white men, black men, Italian men, men from other countries or even having a mapping of, oh, there’s a Korean kind of karate, or there’s a Chinese style of fighting, a Japanese style of fighting. He always wanted to show a larger field of relations, whether it’s a black man struggling against racism or the characterization of the Chinese body from the perspective of Japanese enemies, right? He always included a larger field of social hierarchies that were represented in his films.

Celine: I think it’s so interesting, for example, that his film Way of the Dragon was shot in Italy. Why? And it begins with this really strange encounter at the airport. He arrives at the airport and there’s this older white woman who is really staring him down so shamelessly and so aggressively and he’s really uncomfortable. And there’s this discourse of racial otherness that’s happening throughout his films that’s really transnational, and I think it has a lot to do with his own experiences. Later in one of his interviews that he conducted before he died, he said, when I wake up in the morning, I really have to remember which side of the ocean I’m on. Am I this transnational superstar in Hong Kong or am I this exotic oriental support player in the US.

Nathan Connolly: Bruce Lee died in 1973. He was 32 years old, and he starred in only a handful of what we would call Hollywood films or films with that kind of big Hollywood budget. Given that his career was largely cut short, how do you explain how he became such a cultural icon?

Celine: How did Bruce Lee achieve immortality with four films, right? I mean, it’s 40 plus years since he died. But he has this Elvis like what other people have called an Elvis like iconic following, even in San Francisco, right? There’s a night devoted to Bruce Lee when the giants are playing at the park downtown. And the latest Bruce Lee as a DJ T shirts that you see on the street today.

Nathan Connolly: Right. I have one of those.

Celine: Yeah, me too. And so, why did he resonate and why did he achieve this immortality? I think, and I hope this is not particular to me alone because there’s something really deeply satisfying about his representation, not just as a Superman of steel, an invulnerable god on earth. We see through his performances, these pauses that happened before he wields death or before he makes a move sexually or romantically towards a love object. We see that he is a man who depends on others, who needs others and protects others in order to sustain himself.

Celine: So it’s a very socially embracing definition of a man. It isn’t a man by himself. He has to suffer the consequences of society when he kills somebody, even if it means that he has to give up his marriage, or his loved one because he has to be accountable for what he’s done. And so, I think that’s the kind of manhood that’s so pioneering that’s so innovative and inventive that he established in these four different films.

Celine: I actually don’t think I’ve seen anyone else say that, but I’m definitely saying that. I mean, maybe the reason why he has lasted in other people’s minds, whether it’s all of these Asian American male scholars who really prop up this idea that he’s a man who can beat up everybody because he’s a God to all the geeks. But this is what I personally get out of him, that we are not yet done with representations of male vulnerability on screen that does not forsake strength or being attractive. So, I think Bruce Lee, in a pioneering way established this definition of masculinity that’s more open and that really declares a need and love for the other and not just a heroic version of the self alone.

Nathan Connolly: So to this question, if you were to think about the moment we’re in now in American history, I mean we’re obviously more than a half century removed from some of the most unfortunate world war II era depictions of Asians and Asian Americans. We are a full half century removed from Bruce Lee’s earliest work on screen. And yet as we’ve been discussing, he holds fast to a certain kind of dominance as an iconic figure. And clearly he’s someone that’s not going to go away. And so just based on your own sense of where the arc of history is bending relative to the place of Asian Americans in American life, the role of someone like Bruce Lee in world culture, what do you see as the possible and positive future for Bruce Lee status as an iconic figure?

Celine: I am such an unhappy spectator because so few people who are not cisgendered straight white men get to make movies in this country, right? 96% of films are made by men and predominantly they are white men. And so what we know about how men relate to each other, whether you’re in a family or a friend or your enemies or what we know about how men occupy positions of romance in relation to their love object, whether they’re men or women or trans people we’re so not done. And we need to continue to make films that really take heed from what Bruce Lee was able to do in the 70s.

Celine: We can’t simply replicate the models of masculinity that have been written and imaged on screen. The films that will do good things for our relationships with each other are the ones that will redefine what masculinity can look like on screen beyond a hero that just counts on himself and saves the day for not only a family but entire countries. Iron man landing and by himself gets rid of everybody. But spirits of cooperation and collaboration, or even what Bruce Lee did, which is to say I had to kill somebody, but it cost me so much, right?

Nathan Connolly: Right.

Celine: That the film can do so much more for us in terms of expanding our ideas of who can be loved and who is strong.

Speaker 13: Do you still think of yourself Chinese or do you ever think of yourself as North American?

Speaker 11: You know what? I want to think of myself as a human being because I mean, I don’t want to sounds like as Confucius say, that under the sky, under the heaven, man, there is but one family. It just so happened, man, that people are different.

Nathan Connolly: Celine Parrenas Shimizu is director of the school of cinema at San Francisco State university. She’s also the author of Straitjacket Sexualities, Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the movies.

Joanne Freeman: So, Nathan, Erika, I have a question. Actually, I’m going to send it towards you, Erika. I gather that we’re at a moment this year in which there are a lot of anniversaries involving Chinese American relations.

Erika Lee: Yeah, absolutely. So it’s 2019. There are three important anniversaries that folks have been marking. One most recently was the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese communist party. So if anyone was watching the news, that’s when all of the tanks and military parades were happening in Beijing and elsewhere. But there’s also the 40th anniversary of reestablishing full diplomatic relations between the US and China, which had occurred in 1979 and then the most fraught anniversary, I think for US China relations is the 30th anniversary of what we in the West referred to as the Tiananmen Square massacre where an estimated between a hundreds to thousands were killed. As many as 10,000 arrested following a month of pro democracy protests.

Erika Lee: So in many ways the show on the Chinese and America and US China relations could not be more timely. There’s also the fact that Asian Americans are the fastest growing group in the United States, over 5 million Chinese Americans.

Joanne Freeman: Well, and let’s build on that because as you noted, all of those anniversaries are really centered on Chinese American relations. But the show that we just did, talks about a lot more than that.

Erika Lee: Yeah. So this is the complicated aspect of Asian American history and I think especially Chinese American history, because as we’ve seen from the interviews with Nancy Davis and Karen Leong and Celine Parrenas Shimizu, there’s a long history of Asian-Americans in the United States that many people don’t know about. And yes, it’s shaped by US international relations, but it’s also a history that’s been shaped by fractured race relations and immigration debates. And we can’t understand any of these key figures, Afong Moy, Mayling Soong, Bruce Lee, without understanding all three of those stories.

Nathan Connolly: It almost feels like when you deal with the question of Asian American Americans, really thinking about them as US born folk who have families and multigenerational belonging to the United States, that there’s always still this question of how does foreign policy impact their experience of America? And to your point, Erika, it almost feel like that’s a distinctive problem for that group in terms of how they experience their racial problem in the United States.

Erika Lee: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. For better or for worse, Asian Americans have always been tied to Asia whether they want to or not. And it’s a particular form of racialization that they’ve always been seen as more foreign than American, especially during times of tense international relations, whether it be the trade war now or the anticommunist 1950s, that is the time when Chinese Americans loyalty to the United States, their very Americanness has always come under suspicion. And this is a theme that’s really not just of recent invention, but of course has really long, deep historic ties.

Joanne Freeman: As the early American historian here and even early this week gets to the 19th century, but when we’re talking about the 19th century, you certainly get in the story of Afong Moy the sense of how exotic in every sense of the term and unfamiliar she was and everything that she represented was. And what’s interesting about the later stories, the 20th century stories is there still seems to be that deep sense of unfamiliarity that isn’t necessarily true of all immigrant groups. Is there something distinctive about the Chinese in America along those lines?

Erika Lee: Yes, absolutely. I was thinking about in terms of preparing for the show and thinking about, yeah, so what are some of the other parallel immigrant experiences in relationship to US international relations and it’s all Asian. I think if we were to make this show about Japanese Americans and US Japanese relations or South Asia, you would have the same types of themes that we could map on. So in early American history, it would still be that search for Asia, the search for Asia in terms of riches, in terms of conquering, in terms of Christianizing a heathen land.

Erika Lee: And then similarly, in the immigration decades, the late 19th, early 20th century, you would have the same in a similarble foreigner, more like African Americans then European immigrants racialization. Obviously the same exclusion laws, the same bars to naturalized citizenship. So you would have the same mapping if we’re talking other Asian immigrant groups. I would think it’s more similar to Mexico, Mexican Americans and fraught US Mexican relations for sure. To show one’s pride in one’s ancestry in this political climate opens up the doors to charges that you’re not fully American, don’t want to become American or are part of a larger immigrant invasion from the South. What’s the commonality here? It’s race, it’s race and a particular kind of racialization in terms of which immigrants are more assimilated, more Americanized than others regardless of generation in the United States.

Nathan Connolly: But the thing about the Asian American question that I always find to be so striking is it’s a group about which there are these lingering narratives about forever foreigners even as there are a bundle of what are effectively positive stereotypes about this group. So when you think about, the way in which we regard native Americans or we’re surprised as native Americans engaged in modern practices like driving cars and using appliances, right? That actually becomes a way of fixing that population in space and time imagining that they’re on this timeless reservation.

Nathan Connolly: And obviously you think about the question of folks coming across the border, there’s always a sense about, well they’re struggling with their language. They engage in particular kinds of unskilled work, and this is a way that we have to then deal with the question of the border crisis and very much in these terms. And this is a very different dilemma where you have a population that again goes back to the 1830s in terms of its discernible presence in North America and certainly has an extraordinarily important role to play in how housing history develops, how the history of immigration develops, how popular culture develops. And yet it’s almost as if there’s always a sense that at any moment any geopolitical concerns like in the case of a trade war with China can write them right out of the American story.

Nathan Connolly: So, I guess I’m curious about how we are to understand this duality of positive, negative stereotypes. How does this work in the case of the Asian American presence in America?

Erika Lee: Yeah, I mean, I think that framework of duality is really important. I also think of it in terms of a probationary status. So one of the positive stereotypes that, I’m sure listeners are thinking about is the model minority. This idea that Asian Americans of course lumping together a really diverse group of people’s into one category. But this idea that Asian Americans are somehow the model minority more than African Americans, Latin X peoples, native Americans, meaning that they “play by the rules.” They, “work hard.” And now there’s all sorts of data and research that shows how false the model minority stereotype is. Nevertheless, it’s so persistent in defining the ways that many Americans think of Asian Americans.

Erika Lee: The other labels that I think are perhaps more useful in thinking about this idea of duality is forever foreign and honorary white. So Asian Americans are such a fascinating case study because they go from the 19th century being much more categorized alongside African Americans and native Americans as these racial problems, racial inferiors to now whiter than white. The whole tiger mom phenomenon of a couple of years ago that Asian Americans are out pasting, out competing, out earning whites. This is still a threatening stereotype because they’re still based on the zero some racial game where, ones “success” comes at the expense of white Americans.

Erika Lee: It’s a complicated status that’s both domestic based on what’s happening in the US, race relations, immigration debates, et cetera. But also just, much more tied towards the international side than many other groups in the United States.

Joanne Freeman: The other thing along similar lines that is striking to me and in particular about the three stories that we explored today is all of the complications of that duality of seeming foreign but seeming as you put it, whiter than white. All three stories in one way or another, those three people, it’s culture that gives them the major impact that they have in the United States. It’s being on stage, it’s being in film, it’s having a speech broadcast on the radio. And that striking too is that there’s a political dimension and the international dimension and a race dimension. And then mix that in with what people find to be the attractive parts of Asian culture and Chinese culture and the ways in which the media familiarizes these people with Americans and then changes their thinking.

Nathan Connolly: Right, right. I mean, is there something about the history of all of these different forms of engagement and transformation in American life coming out of a Chinese American tradition that will hopefully be much more evident on the political stage or even in a cultural arena that’s not simply relegated to cuisine or to other kinds of cinematic representations, right? That there’s a future of broad expression for Chinese Americans?

Erika Lee: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. And I think actually that the demographics of immigrant America actually are going to necessitate that diversity because even though on this show we’re talking about Chinese Americans and then when we talk about other immigrant groups, we often use similarly broad terms like Mexican Americans. We’re talking about groups that are extremely diverse in terms of generation, in class and where they’ve come from. And you can see this very precisely within the Chinese American community and how fast it has transformed in the past generation. So maybe, 1980 or so we’re talking about the Chinese American population being majority, maybe 60, 40 US born, now it’s exactly opposite.

Erika Lee: Back then, most Chinese Americans came from the Southern region of China. Now it’s from all across that great country. Politically, it’s extremely diverse as well. Older generations tend to vote democratic, newer, more conservative. There’s a very active group, Chinese Americans for Trump, which has taken some people by surprise. And of course the debates over affirmative action, so where Chinese Americans are fitting into and making their voices heard.

Erika Lee: In terms of, again, our ongoing debates over immigration and race, it’s a much more diverse field of voices than we’ve ever had before, but it’s also perhaps one of the most fraught times because of these ongoing tensions between US and a much more powerful China than we’ve ever seen in the US history period that we’re talking about in the show.

Joanne Freeman: Well, I mean I suppose in a way you could say it’s appropriate we’re talking about a moment of change in American society and we had a really wonderful change in this week’s episode, which is having you here, Erika, and really thank you for being here with us.

Nathan Connolly: Indeed here, here.

Erika Lee: Thank you so much.

Joanne Freeman: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. Send us an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @BackStory Radio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger and special thanks to the studios at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Nathan Connolly: Backstory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Support for this episode comes from International Education at the university of Richmond and The Rose Group for Cross-Cultural Understanding.

Speaker 1: Brian Balogh is professor of history at the university of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor of the humanities and president emeritus of the university of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is professor of history and American studies at Yale university. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams associate professor of history at the Johns Hopkins university. Backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.