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99% Invisible
100 Objects #10: Nunchaku
00:36:25
In the early 1970s, Bruce Lee made nunchaku (nunchucks) cool, but the nunchucks craze coincided with something much bigger: the birth of a radical new Asian American identity.
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A
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B
Crisp, refreshing, and unmistakably tasty. Ice cold Coke.
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C
Zero sugar.
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It's the only drink with real Coca
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Cola taste and zero sugar.
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So we're here to talk about nunchaku, and I want to ask you first, nunchucks or nunchaku, like, how do you say it? What does it mean when you say one versus the other? How do you use it?
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D
I don't know. I mean, everybody usually just says nunchucks, right? Yeah, that's just sort of the standard way of doing it. I say nunchaku. I don't know, maybe just out of a little reverence for the object itself and also, you know, a nod to its origin. But yeah, nunchucks. Nunchucks is fine. I mean, you know, we're gonna be talking about this for a long time. You know, nunchucks is gonna be. It rolls off the tongue much easier.
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This is historian and culture critic Jeff Chang. His own personal history with nunchucks started when he was five years old. He and his brothers would watch the classic Bruce Lee movie Fist of Fury.
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D
I grew up in Hawaii, so on a regular hot, humid day in an afternoon, watching these things and just going crazy. Fist of Fury.
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Fist of Fury is a 1972 kung fu classic from Hong Kong, dubbed in English. Bruce Lee plays a martial artist who is trying to settle the score after his famed teacher is killed by Japanese occupiers.
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And then there's that amazing scene in the dojo where he's just, whenever you're ready, I'll take on any Japanese. Here he comes into the dojo and he's about to beat up all these karate men, surround him.
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The camera pans up and you see all these karate fighters in a circle surrounding the lone Bruce Lee.
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He gets kicked and sort of rolls over, does a somersault and comes up and he pulls out some nunchaku, like from who knows where he had it hiding, maybe in his pants or something like that. He pulls it out and everybody's like looking at each other like, ooh, it's that.
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We can totally picture it. Nunchucks whipping his villains, flying right and left. He is unstoppable. But it was the sound that really did it for Jeff.
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When you whip the stick, it's whoosh. It's like, you know, it's just activating all these different senses. And then we would, after that, like, go and find toilet rolls. I remember this, like, and string and tape and try to make our own little things and whack each other on the heads with it.
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A
Five year old Jeff didn't know it then, but that toy he made, emulating the weapon on screen, whipping around Bruce Lee's body was also a symbol of something much larger. The emergence of a new radical political and cultural identity forming in America. From 99% Invisible and BBC Studios, this is a history of the United States in 100 objects. I'm Roman Mars. Today how nunchucks, through sheer force of their cultural relevance, went from ancient weapon to symbol of resistance, not only uniting Asian Americans in the fight for their own rights, but also connecting them to every other group pushing back from the margins. The story of the nunchucks is also a bit of the story of Bruce Lee, Hollywood's first Asian American action hero, who brought martial arts to the mainstream big screen. So when does Bruce Lee. When and how does Bruce Lee first learn to use nunchucks?
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D
Well, maybe we can go back a little bit and talk about Bruce as a martial artist.
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The man, the myth, the legend. Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco in 1940, but grew up in Hong Kong, which was then under both British colonial occupation and Japanese occupation during World War II. But from a young age, it was obvious this guy was a star.
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D
So Bruce was a child actor in Hong Kong. He was really good with his body. So he became the cha Cha champion of Hong Kong. He was kind of magnetic in a lot of ways, and he's at the same time living this double life. He's like fighting in the streets. He just loves fighting. He's the kind of person who I imagine, you know, like gets hit in the face, is like, oh, that tasted good, like, I'm going to get you back. And, you know, like, there's some folks who just love the taste of blood on their lips.
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In school, Bruce was constantly challenging other kids, even his teachers, to fights. The trouble was, after training in kung fu since he was 13, he was good. Too good. After one particularly brutal fight, the police showed up at his school and threatened to arrest him. And his parents were fed up, so
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they had to say, okay, you won't stop. We're putting you on a slow boat to America with $100, and you're going to figure it out. You're going to go back to the land of your birth, and you're going to figure it out as an immigrant.
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But he hits kind of a cold reality when he arrives on the shores.
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D
Yes. When he comes to the US he's realizing very quickly, oh, I'm not in the majority anymore.
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It's the early 1960s. Bruce is 20, living in Seattle, an incredibly segregated city with most of the black and Asian residents crammed into just a few neighborhoods.
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He can't go anywhere he wants to go. But the flip side of it is that he starts meeting all of these other folks who have grown up as oppressed folks who have lived through being what it means to be a racialized minority. So he begins to identify with black folks who have been beaten by cops, Japanese Americans who have been incarcerated, poor white folks who always feel spit upon, people who feel left out or marginalizer, outcast. And I think that's what makes him decide that he wants to become a teacher to them. They ask him to teach them. And so at that particular point in time, he's thinking, the way that I'm going to make it in America is to open up all these kung fu schools.
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Bruce starts teaching people in the neighborhood kung fu. But this was not something that was done at the time.
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The kung fu schools are called kwuns in Chinatown. They were meant to produce folks who could literally make sure that business was running in Chinatown. So these are like the bouncers and the security guards and the enforcers and all kinds of legal and illegal business.
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Teaching anyone who wasn't Chinese was a big no, no. And not only that, a kung fu student would only study one particular school under one particular type of person.
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Kung fu, you know, was confined to these small schools in which the sifu, the teacher, had complete dominance over what was being taught. It's like if you're studying under a sifu, you're studying in that school style.
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But Bruce was kind of a punk.
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He becomes a maverick. He's somebody who's actively poking his nose and sort of sticking his finger in the eye of the old sifus and saying, what is all of this fake hierarchy? What is this classical mess that he calls it? It just teaches you how to obey, and it doesn't teach you anything about
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how to fight in a real fight. He learned that the traditional kung Fu punch, while it was flashy and might look cool, was no match for the hook or the jab of a skilled heavyweight boxer. So he started adapting, taking the fast footwork of fencing, a choke hold from judo, a punching pattern from boxing, and working it into his own practice. Bruce was making a name for himself, and it got the attention of a guy named Ed Parker, who was already popularizing karate in the US but who now had set his sights on bringing that popularity to all martial arts. So he reaches out to Bruce.
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Hey, you got something? And why don't you come and say that something to all these other folks? You know, I'm doing this big thing in Long Beach. And Bruce says, yeah, let's do it.
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So In August of 1964, Parker holds a big exhibition with all kinds of martial artists performing for regular Americans.
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So he's bringing in judo men, jiu jitsu men, folks from Kauai, from the islands, to show Filipino martial arts. He's literally creating this sort of Pan Asian, what would come to be known sort of as aanhpi, right? Asian American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander culture, right?
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Ed decides to give the headliner exhibition spot to Bruce, who at this point is virtually unknown. Bruce takes the stage, 3,000 eyes on him. Straight away, he drops into his one arm, two finger push ups and starts talking. He says, you don't need a million forms and techniques. No high kicks, no twirling around, no set moves.
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And everybody is just gawking. They've never seen anything like it. The folks who run schools are like, you're ripping on my entire, like, training and my teachers.
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And then finally, Bruce demonstrates something that he's been developing for years, the one inch punch.
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Bruce asks for somebody to come down from the audience. He puts that person, you know, a few inches from him. He gives a guy a pillow cause he's gonna need it. And then he just sort of stands there holding up his right fist and flicks his wrist. And this guy flies back like 10ft, falls into a chair, and the chair
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tips over and the crowd goes wild.
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So everybody wants to know how he did that. And that makes him an immediate sensation. His name starts circulating. It becomes almost legendary. He's a force that kind of can't be contained.
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But beyond the main stage, there was something else happening, something that was perhaps equally important, because backstage at this exhibition is where Bruce Lee would encounter nunchucks for the first time. It all happened when Bruce was hanging out with another fighter who had been experimenting with a weapon from Japan.
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He's picked up the Nunchakus. And he's backstage and he's kind of fooling around with them.
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At that moment, another fighter, a master of Filipino escrima and true master of this weapon, walks up to them and
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says, oh, we have that in our culture. That's Tabuk Tayuk. Here, gimme those. And he starts doing all these Kali forms with it. And I think at that particular moment, like, Bruce is staring at this going, oh, wow, this is all related. And Bruce is kind of taken with it.
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Nunchucks themselves don't have a single definitive origin story. Most historians trace them to Okinawa, where they likely evolved from farming tools into weapons. But across Asia, people made their own versions. A weapon with no single owner, no pure lineage. That's exactly Bruce's kind of thing. A while later, Bruce would ask his new friend if he could try nunchucks out for himself.
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Bruce tells him, hey, you know, whatever happened to those sticks, those nunchaku things? And he's like, oh, here. And he's like, yeah, you know, like, I don't know anything about these, but this is what I would do with them. And he sort of whips them out. And he's just kind of flabbergasted because Bruce has just seen this and kinetically figured out how to, like, mess all this stuff around. And of course, it becomes a big part of his toolkit, his arsenal, if you will, in the movies.
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And it's significant that it's at this exhibition that Bruce learns about nunchucks, because that event is what would launch Bruce's Hollywood career.
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The Hollywood folks who are in the audience, and there's lots of them, you know, there's actors, there's directors, there's producers, there's people who are barbers for the actors. They're just drawn to him.
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And it was one of these folks, a celebrity hairstylist, who was responsible for Bruce's big break. This barber was going on and on about Bruce while he was cutting the hair of some big time Hollywood producer. And he convinces the producer to consider Bruce for his next lead role. The son of Charlie Chan.
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And it would be the first Asian American male TV lead ever. So he's like, come out and try out for this part Now, Bruce, just
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look right into the camera lens right here and tell us your name, your
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age and where you were born. My last name is Lee, Bruce Lee. I was born in San Francisco, 1940. I'm 24 right now.
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Bruce comes out and does this amazing audition in which he demonstrates some kung fu techniques on a hapless Older white dude. You can watch this. It's hilarious.
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There are various kind of strikes to the eyes. You would use fingers or straight at the face.
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At one point he's all like, yeah, the guy's a little scared, isn't he?
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Don't worry. All right? He's kind of worried.
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He has nothing.
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And it's just a scintillating type of thing. Like, clearly he's a star. But TV's not ready. TV's not ready for an Asian American male to be a lead, let alone Bruce Lee to be a lead.
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The network drops the Charlie Chan spinoff series completely. But it's not over for Bruce.
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The producer says, hey, stick around. We might have another thing for you.
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That thing turned out to be the ABC series the Green Hornet, where Bruce plays Cato, the sidekick to the crime fighting Green Hornet.
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Bruce comes in, he gets the part, and he goes and tries to get some acting training. And he and his acting coach are looking at these scripts and he's like, wait a minute, they didn't give me any lines. Because nobody has ever imagined that Cato would ever speak.
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And for the vast majority of the show, Bruce was indeed silent.
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He's a guy who saves the Green Hornet's ass because the Green Hornet can't fight for himself. He's an executive. He sits in the backseat and he kind of tells him, cato Drive, or Cato Cook, or Cato like Kung Fu, that guy. And that's what Cato does.
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This kind of subordination, servility. This is something that Cato had inherited from earlier versions of this character. At first on the radio, an adventure
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of the Green Hornet, which is an old sort of character that's kind of blandly oriented. They've never really figured out who this guy is.
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Originally, the writers made him Japanese. Cato, his faithful Japanese valet, knows the dual role, the young. But then in the lead up to World War II, that seemed unsavory. So suddenly Cato wasn't Japanese anymore.
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He was just Cato, his faithful Valid. And the only.
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Then the writers gave him a new identity. Cato was now his Filipino Valid.
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Cato stepped through a secret panel.
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Then in the film serials, executives made him Korean, which they thought would be the least controversial of the Asian identities. But through all of this, nothing about the character actually changed. All this Orientalism, this frustrated Bruce.
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I mean, they trying to get me to do too many things that are really for the sake of being exotic.
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He said as much in an interview he did with the Canadian broadcaster Pierre Breton.
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And I mean, it's always that pigtail and bouncing around, chop chop, you know, with the eyes slanted and all that. I have already made up my mind that in the United States, I think something about the oriental, I mean the true oriental should be shown.
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Oriental, a word that was so universally used at the time even Bruce was calling himself that. But meanwhile, across the country, there are kids who felt frustrated in the exact same way. Japanese, Chinese, Filipino American college students were all fed up with being lumped together by white folks in power. But unlike Bruce, they were going to organize. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move. Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. And Claude doesn't just give you answers. It helps you think through the problem and amplifies what you're already curious about. Create your personal command center by connecting Claude to your calendar, emails and tools like GitHub, Jira and Google Workspace. Save time by delegating tasks. Claude can run automated security reviews for your pull requests and fix vulnerabilities. So I wanted to buy this one room cabin that I had my eye on and it had been on the market for years and years and it also had, you know, some things that needed to be fixed and it was in a weird market and I kind of didn't know where to start in terms of my negotiation. So I asked Claude, here's the list price, here's the location, here are the issues with the place, what should be my opening offer. And it broke down all the sort of logic of things and presented a range of what I should offer without insulting the seller and ended up that offer got accepted and I bought the place. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at Claude AI. That's Claude AI. There's only one Ozempic.
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D
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we're now moving into the late 1960s and across the country tensions are rising and what
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we see is this growing anti war movement, all right, people rising up against the Vietnam War.
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A lot of the anti war movement was happening on college campuses like Berkeley, where two American born Asian students, Yuji Ichioka and Emma G. Had been organizing. But by the spring of 1968, they'd started to notice something. For one, there were more and more Asian folks, people who looked like them, showing up at these demonstrations. And the more they looked around, the more disconnected they felt from the main message of the movement at the time.
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Young people are on the streets saying bring the boys home. And they are looking at this and they're saying that doesn't seem to be what the movement should be about. We're seeing people who look like our parents just getting bombed. Their home places are being torn up. If you think about it like that's the reason we're here. It's not just about bringing the boys home. It's about ending American imperialism.
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Then they had this idea they were organizers for this new political party, the Peace and Freedom Party, which had formed around an anti war agenda. So they decided to look over their own party's voter registration lists to identify any Asian people who might have felt the same way.
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So they take their lists, they look at all the names of folks on that list and they go, hmm, you know, that person's last name is Kim. That person's last name is Chang. Like, that person's last name is Wong. And they're like, we should call all of them and invite them to this meeting. They bring this group of folks together and it's, you know, it's not many folks. Six people or so show up and they are having this discussion about how to address the war. And the conversation quickly takes on a new motion when folks are talking about how they actually really feel. I walk across the street and they're calling me a gook. People are like, I haven't been able to get a job for so long. I've stopped looking. And they say that they're getting beaten because people are saying, oh, that's the enemy. Go practice on him. So they're like, how do we talk about this? Maybe we need to be able to figure out how we can all kind of come together and have a name. And Yuji just throws it out. Yuji is like, don't call us Oriental anymore. That's a rug, and Oriental is a rug. We are Asians and we are from America. Then they're like, ding, ding, ding. You know, the lights go on, you know, everybody's like, excited. And they come out and they form a group that they call the Asian American Political Alliance.
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Asian American. It seems commonplace now, but this new political identity was radical. Up until then, US Immigration and military policy had forced Asian people to separate themselves by nationality as a matter of survival. Just two decades earlier, during World War II, Japanese Americans were being disappeared to internment camps to distinguish themselves from the ethnically Japanese. Asian families would put signs in front of their homes and businesses that read, we are Chinese. We are Filipino. We are Korean. But now they were done with all that.
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That's 1968. And by 1969, there's thousands upon thousands of people all across the country who are using that name were Asian Americans.
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These kids took something that people in power had been doing to them for years, lumping them all together, regardless of nationality, under the same racist banner of Oriental. And they flipped it on its head. Now they were joining forces intentionally on their own terms, and it was powerful, like the one inch punch.
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What's interesting is that it's already building in the culture, right? So if you look at what Bruce is doing with his friends in terms of mixing up these different types of martial arts forms from Asia and the Pacific is heralding this new development of an Asian America.
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After years of frustration, the culture seemed to be changing. And it seemed to Bruce that now just maybe he might be able to break out of his role as the sidekick. In 1970, Bruce met with Fred Weintraub, a Warner Bros. Executive, who wanted him to star in a new film project literally called Kung Fu.
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Bruce, more than anybody else in the country, has popularized this martial art called kung fu. And he's been on tv. So all the other Asian American actors in Hollywood are like, oh, that's a lead part, but that's Bruce's part. I'm not even gonna go out for that part.
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Bruce nails the audition, but still the other executives in the studio are dragging their feet. They ultimately kill the idea of a kung fu movie. The they do keep dangling the possibility of a TV series. But frustrated and without an answer, Bruce decides to take a job in Hong Kong.
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D
Like Hong Kong's kung fu film industry at that particular time is running all of Asia. And they're like, clamoring, we want that guy. We need to get that guy. He's already made it in Hollywood. He's going to definitely make it here. And they make him an offer he can't refuse.
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Finally, it's a leading role, a chance to prove his star potential to the executives in the US and it is a hit.
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It becomes a sensation. It breaks all box office records and becomes a star literally overnight.
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Immediately afterwards, Bruce shoots another kung fu movie, another smash hit called Fist of Fury. And while his star is rising in Hong Kong, he finally gets news from Hollywood about his role in the TV show Kung Fu.
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D
He gets turned down because they say, we can't understand his accent. And, you know, Bruce has got a British accent. He just has the wrong face. And so they give the part to David Carradine, who tapes up his eyes and darkens his skin and stoops on the set and plays it in yellowface and just continues the tradition of how Hollywood looks at Asia. You gotta imagine this is like the role of his life. He really thought he deserved it. He feels like he played the game. He really, you know, worked with these folks and he got to know them. He trained a lot of them in kung fu, like, at their houses. And then they would do this to him and not give him this role and put a white guy into a role playing a Chinese, a half Chinese guy.
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After that, Bruce has had it with Hollywood. He has had it with America. He decides to stay in Hong Kong for the foreseeable future.
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He's like, okay, I understand. This is where I have to be. I have to be here in Asia where they can see me.
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So these Hong Kong action movies, they're not just huge in Hong Kong. I mean, they're huge, huge in Hong Kong, but they make it over here. Tell me about where they thrive, how they sort of infiltrate culture here in
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D
the us this is a moment where Hollywood is collapsing. You know, the old studio system that's been going strong for over half a century is showing a lot of signs of cracking.
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The movies Hollywood had poured millions into were flopping at the box office. The older generation was at home watching their color TVs and the kids didn't want to watch another Sound of Music or hello Dolly.
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D
And so what's the breath of fresh air that comes along? Well, 1971, Melvin Van Peebles independently releases this movie called Sweet Sweetback's Badass Song. And it just is a sensation.
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The movie follows Sweetback, a black performer at a brothel who fights back against racist police officers. And it completely shattered the way old Hollywood worked.
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It makes over a million dollars off a tiny, teeny, tiny budget. And it makes that money just by playing in the inner cities, like in the scariest parts of America.
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The movie was released to gritty grindhouse theaters that played everything the mainstream rejected on a 24 hour loop.
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They just play blaxploitation movies, they play foreign films, they play porn movies, right?
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Sweet, Sweet Back is a classic of the blaxploitation genre, a new form that was exploding at the time where black protagonists took down white authority with violence, style and glamour.
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D
So kung fu movies come in on the heels of that. Kids are coming in and they're watching these blaxploitation movies. They're there for an afternoon. It's super hot. And so they're just going to watch all the movies that are playing in there. Shaft maybe comes on like, and then the Chinese boxer comes on and they're like, what is this? But it's dubbed. You know, the dubs are kind of corny and a little hilarious and at the same time they're kicking butt. And the plot lines are pretty much the same. These are folks who are on the margins. They've been harmed, they've been disenfranchised, and they're avenging their folks against these tyrannical and corrupt bosses and politicians. So they stick around and they realize, oh, wow, these are great.
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A
In 1972, Fist of Fury opens in New York's Chinatown Pagoda Theater. And for the first time in the theater's history, half of the crowd was non Chinese. And it's this movie where Bruce Lee gains a whole new audience, a deeper layer to his fame.
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D
When Bruce first Came out in the mid-60s as Cato. He wasn't a hero for the Asian American radicals. He was just like, oh, that's another sort of guy who's gonna serve his white master. But when Fist of Fury plays, a lot of those folks who were calling themselves Asian American, they're sitting there in the theater and they're watching Bruce Lee kicking down that sign that says no dogs in Chinese allowed. And they're seeing black folks, white folks, Latino folks, you know, Indian American, Indian folks. They're all going crazy just like they are. And so they're realizing, oh, this is a moment and this is a thing. This guy is an underdog. Like he's fighting on our side. He's exactly what we want to see represented and to be about.
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A
By 1973, the Kung Fu movie craze is at an all time peak. In that year alone, six kung fu flicks out of Hong Kong hit number one at the box office and 15 more hit in the top 50 as they played in Chinatowns and segregated neighborhoods across America. Which movie encapsulates this peak of this era? I mean, to me, I think it's probably Enter the Dragon. But maybe you have a different opinion about this.
- [30:05]
D
No, I think Enter the Dragon is absolutely it. Yeah. And the reason it does is because, you know, it comes in this year, 1973, where we're kind of at peak third world culture. If you're looking at it that way,
- [30:17]
A
when Jeff says Third world culture, he's referring to a movement where black and Asian activists among other groups started seeing their struggles as part of something bigger. Not just a fight for rights at home, but a connection to people pushing back against power everywhere. In Vietnam and Algeria and the Congo, the idea of was that a so called ghetto in Oakland had more in common with a foreign village under colonial rule than anyone in power wanted to admit. And that feeling was everywhere in culture. One of the top albums in 1973 was called the World is a Ghetto. Bob Marley was gaining popularity everywhere. Hip hop was literally invented that year.
- [30:58]
D
We're at sort of this peak moment where folks are just looking for a different kind of hero. And that's Bruce. That's what Bruce Lee is.
- [31:11]
A
In Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee teams up with Jim Kelly, a black martial artist, and John Saxon, a white martial artist, to form a multicultural fighting squad. It really is just taking everything and showing a kind of commonality, a common struggle.
- [31:27]
D
And you know, it's funny because it wasn't really planned this way. So, for instance, they chose three actors as Leads because they were actually unsure that Bruce Lee was gonna be able to carry a movie all by himself.
- [31:40]
E
Right?
- [31:41]
D
So let's put a black man in there. Of course, a nod to blaxploitation. And of course, let's put a white man in there.
- [31:48]
A
Whatever they intended, the movie spoke directly to the Third World movement. There's an iconic scene where the black member of the trio, Jim Kelly, is riding through a harbor in Hong Kong, looking around at people living on these crammed houseboats. They don't live so big over there. Ghettos are the same all over the world. They stink.
- [32:13]
D
The ghettos all over the world, they're all the same. That's one of those lines that it's just like, what could be more Third World than that particular line? And it's one of those lines that just sings down the generations.
- [32:24]
A
And of course, there's the incredible scene with Bruce Lee and his nunchucks where a shirtless Bruce, surrounded again on all sides, takes the nunchucks from one of the men and fends off three different attackers.
- [32:35]
D
When Bruce is in these scenes with his nunchucks, people are just magnetized, right? And then the natural reaction is you're gonna go out and you're gonna make your own. You're gonna go and buy some. You're gonna try to do it yourself. And so suddenly there's all these young people, like mostly black folks and yellow folks and brown folks just in the streets with nunchakus.
- [33:02]
A
In a way, the nunchucks are the perfect symbol for this moment. Here's this weapon, not born from any single nation, but a mashup of fighting traditions across Asia, one that is now being embraced by a coalition of minorities in America. It's scrappy. It's the kind of thing you pull out when you're surrounded on all sides, when you're backed into a corner.
- [33:22]
D
And this scares the hell out of people who are already feeling threatened by blaxploitation movies and gung fu movies. They just don't want to see this image of. Of young folks of color with weapons.
- [33:38]
A
Immediately after Enter the Dragon was released, officials started referring to the people who used nunchucks as muggers and members of street gangs. Mainstream outlets like the New York Times ran articles saying that they were turning up in the hands of youth across America. Newsweek called them killer sticks, and the following year, five states banned them entirely. Unlike laws for pocket knives or baseball bats, where police usually have to prove you intend to use them as a weapon, nunchucks were classified alongside brass Knuckles and sawed off shotguns. Simply having a pair sitting in your bedroom could mean a felony charge.
- [34:15]
D
I was looking at the number of nunchuckus that were sold on New York, and it was something it came out to like, maybe like less than 3,000 a year. There's like 15 million guns that are sold a year. So that tells you that it wasn't about the nunchakus. It was about the folks who were holding the nunchukus. And even more, it's about what that meant to folks who are seeing those folks with the nunchuckus.
- [34:40]
A
It wasn't until 2018 that these states finally began to repeal their bans. But even as the government tried to ban nunchucks, they couldn't stop them from influencing culture. The kung fu movies sort of somewhat ride in the wave of the blaxploitation movies, but then the kung fu movies sort of feed back into black culture as well. Can you talk about the adoption of the sort of kung fu aesthetic and things like that in black and hip hop culture?
- [35:07]
D
Yeah, it's like young black and brown kids in the inner cities who are discovering these kung fu movies and they're going crazy, you know. And it continues, right? It continues all through the 80s and the 90s. And in 1993, right, like 20 years after enter the Dragon, we get Wu Tang Clan, you know,
- [35:35]
A
Bruce Lee made a huge impact. He and his nunchucks represented a huge change in the way that the world saw Asian Americans and how they saw themselves, which is pretty remarkable given how short his life actually was. Bruce Lee died in 1973 when he was only 32 years old, at the peak of his career, only a few months after Enter the Dragon was released. The official cause of death was an allergic reaction to equagesic, a prescription painkiller that he'd taken earlier that evening to treat a headache. And he died from swelling to the brain. I wonder if you thought about what would have happened to Bruce Lee if he hadn't died so young.
- [36:19]
D
I do. I do wonder about that. I think about it actually a lot. I think about it in the context too, in terms of representation. And I think about how it took almost 50 years for us to get to a place where you could have Michelle Yeoh receive an Academy Award in a role in which she could represent all these different ways that we appear. So not just sort of a kick ass kung fu master, but she could be a bedraggled housewife and laundromat owner, and she could play literally dozens of different types of roles and represent the broad range of what Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are. And it hurts me that it's taken that long for us to be able to kind of get to that particular point. I like to think that had Bruce lived, that he might have been able to move away from just being a martial artist and that he could have been able to explore all of these different types of things that represented the breadth of his humanity. It kind of makes me a little melancholy thinking about that.
- [37:33]
A
It's devastating to imagine this, this alternate reality where Bruce Lee doesn't die at 32, where he keeps working and keeps shifting culture at the same time. Perhaps there would have been a time sooner or later where he could have set the nunchucks down that he would no longer have to win people over by fighting. Jeff Chang is the author of Water Mirror, Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America. He's also the author of the classic Can't Stop, Won't Stop, a history of the hip hop generation, Foreign. A History of the United States and 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios. It's hosted and curated by me, Roman Mars. This episode was produced by Ellie Lightfoot. Our other producers are Priscilla Alabi and Brenna Daldorf. Our associate producer is Isaac Fisher. This series was edited by Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell, mixing by Charlie Brandon King, fact checking by Amy Bracken. Our theme song is by Swan Real from 99% Invisible. Our executive producer is Kathy Tu. From BBC Studios. Our executive producers are Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Our production coordinator is Shan Pillay and the Production manager is Mabel Finnegan Wright. Artwork by Stephen Lawrence. 99% invisible is part of the Sirius XM podcast family headquartered in beautiful uptown Oakland, California, and BBC Studios is headquartered in beautiful white city West London. If you want to get in touch or have an object for us to consider, email us at 100objects99pi.org. There's a Pill version of Ozempic hello,
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