A (4:25)

How did you begin your research for Water Mirror Echo?

B (4:30)

I started by doing what my wife would call hoarding. I was on ebay. I was buying a lot of these old sort of karate magazines and kung fu magazines, because, you know, those are the magazines just like I came up as a hip hop journalist, right. So those are the kinds of things that were like the. The first record, right, of. Of Bruce jumping on the scene, you know, all the way from the 1960s through his passing, and then especially after his passing, too. These magazines would interview everybody. His friends, his family, you know, everybody that knew Bruce got interviewed. And so I was collecting for a long time, filling up this room here with all kinds of stuff. And then I sort of moved into really, you know, kind of talking sort of gingerly, deep, you know, dipping my toe into doing interviews, talking to his friends and his family, surviving friends and family members. And, you know, I built up a relationship with Shannon Lee, his daughter, and she gave me access to his papers. And so, you know, the last two parts of it, sort of doing the interviews and sort of going through the papers and doing that in an iterative kind of a way, taught me a lot about sort of how he was feeling at different moments and what his friends were seeing, you know, as he moved through these different parts of this really epic life.

A (5:57)

How did you differentiate the stories about Bruce Lee from the facts of Bruce Lee? Because there are a lot of stories, but you have to have facts in your biography.

B (6:10)

That's right. Yeah, that's right. That's exactly it, you know. Yeah. You know, it's sort of. That was. That was the thing I wanted to get grounded. I was telling you about the magazines. The magazines, you know, a lot of these are just street transcripts, stories that people are telling of him. But then I had to kind of match it up to the record, and that was the papers, you know, and. And then I needed to double check and triple check and quadruple check the vibes, you know, with his friends and his family members. So one of the things I really wanted to do was to build a strong chronology, which I think every biographer does that for Bruce, the way that his story's been told, a lot of different events in his life get mixed up and moved around and. And I wanted to construct something that was psychologically like compelling, psychologically rich, you know, and psychologically true. And so I really needed to kind of move that stuff around. Needed to double check that against what was happening in the world at that time. And I'm also the kind of person that loves to do the contextual research, you know, so I had to do that as well. And. And once I had that spine, that timeline, everything really kind of flowed. It took me a really long time to get to that. And even to now, we're still figuring out different types of things about his family's genealogy and history and working with some of the family members to think and talk about all that kind of stuff. But, yeah, it was this iterative type of process. And after a while you begin to tell, oh, these are folks who met him one time and had a lot of stories about him. And these are folks who knew him really closely. And you're going to have to actually work to get some. Some of the stories out of them. Usually it was like that, you know.

A (8:08)

And just so we can understand the title of the book, Water Mirror Echo. Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America. What does that refer to? Water mirror Echo.

B (8:20)

Yeah, that first part. Water, mirror echo. Well, so, you know, you and I, and most people, I think, who know Bruce, know of this line that he said, which is be like water. Right? Be water. And I, early on, had gone to one of these books that had been compiled of all of his notes, this book called the Tao of Jeet Kune Do. And in there was this. These three lines moving. Be like water. Still be like a mirror, respond like an echo. And those knock me out. I just. I. When I first read them, I closed the Book. I was in a residency on a farm in upstate New York. I got out of the room, and I walked around the farm for maybe an hour or two. I was just blown away. You know, what does this mean? What is. What's the import of this? How is he thinking about this? And so it became kind of a mystery that I had to unravel. And as I read and read his papers, talked to his friends, I realized it was a mystery for him to kind of unravel as well in his life. So he must have read this, I think, when he was about 18 years old, and he wrote it down, and he immediately tried to apply it. He was teaching folks kung fu at the time. He immediately tried to apply it to martial arts for folks. And I think that's how most folks still kind of understand it, right? Like, be elusive, be. Be adaptable to your opponent. You know, understand that you don't necessarily have to throw the first punch. In fact, you don't. You know, you. You react like water does. You find the lowest channel to. To move to, and you flow. And yet throughout his life, he came back to these words as well. You know, still be like a mirror and respond like an echo. Especially, I think, during the times in his life when he felt most far from his dreams, most far from being able to attain the kinds of goals that he had set out for himself. When he was at his lowest, he kept on coming back to this. And so it was poetic. You know, it's a nice kind of choice, but it was also this thing of, like, wow, when we look at his life, we can actually kind of see how he, in his relationship to, you know, these three lines kind of developed himself. And then I had this great editor who was like, okay, we're gonna break this down. Here's your water part. Here's your mirror part. Here's your echo part. That was Rekiya Clark, and she was the most amazing editor I could have ever had.

A (10:57)

And.

B (10:57)

And it all worked out really beautifully and wonderfully and poetically.

A (11:02)

You're listening to full bio. We're discussing Water Miro, Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America by Jeff Chang. Let's get into his family background. Let's start with his father, Li Hoi Chin, who was born in 1902 in China's Pearl River Delta. He was the sixth of eight children, and he would go on to become a Cantonese opera star. How did he make it from being the child of a poor fisherman to being an opera star?

B (11:34)

Oh, that's such a great story. He was living in southeastern China, and he, you know, his father was disabled, and so he was the person who would take the fish to the market. He was like a fishmonger. And at some point, his uncle said, hey, you know what? The best way for you guys to kind of stay away from hunger is, Is for you to go work for a restaurant. Like, don't just sell the fish. Like, work in a place that's got food all around it. So he sent Hoi Chun and his. His brother to go to work for this restaurant. And Hoi Chin would take, you know, like, orders from guests who came in. And so one day, this famous opera artist walks in, and Hoi Chun is one of these guys who just. He loves to. He's very creative. So he's reading the order back, but he's singing it, like, back to the kitchen. And this opera star is just tickled. He's like, whoa, you got some. You got some talent there. You know, like, come with me, young son, and we will take you to, you know, this camp. Basically, it's the. The troop. It's a roving troop there, you know, a bunch of them, you know, moving throughout China at that time. And that's what he does. He. His. He. He goes away. His parents give him the okay to do this, and he goes away and lives with this company. He washes clothes. He learns everything that there is to learn about the opera. And, you know, in the Chinese opera, there's a lot of martial arts. There's a lot of physical stuff that's happening on the stage. You know, he actually finds his role as a comedian. He's just got great comic timing. And so, you know, when his son comes along, Bruce. Bruce has a direct opening to the opera industry, but actually more the movie industry, which, after the war, is what takes off. And everybody's moving from the opera seats into the theater seats for the movies.

A (13:39)

Bruce Lee's mother, Grace, was born in 1907, and she grew up around wealth. How did that change her expectation of what her life would look like and what her children's life would look like?

B (13:53)

Yeah, she grew up around extreme wealth. She grew up on the peak in Hong Kong, where all the money is concentrated. She was actually part European. She had a European mother, was still trying to figure out all of that, like I said, with the family, but she was incredibly wealthy. And one day, the parents have Hoi Chun's troupe to come over and perform at the house on the peak. And she just immediately falls in love with him and starts a relationship with them, to the horror of all of the folks in the house, and decides that this is the man she's going to marry. And so they. They can't, you know, do that with anybody's approval. So they kind of. They elope and they move down to Kowloon. They move down from the peak, you know, into Kowloon, into teaming Kowloon. And so she's cut off from her wealth at that particular point. And, you know, her husband, luckily, has become recognized or quickly becomes recognized as one of the four great comedians, I guess you could say. He's sort of the Adam Sandler of Cantonese opera. He's just beloved. And so they do pretty well for themselves even through the war and afterwards.

A (15:18)

Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco on November 27, 1940. He was not born in China. Why was he born in San Francisco?

B (15:29)

Because his parents, I think they knew that war was coming to Hong Kong. The Japanese had occupied large parts of China by this point. And, you know, there was an effort, of course, to raise funds from the nationalist cause. And the opera was one of those ways to do it, you know. So they got a good. A really great offer, actually, that they couldn't refuse from San Francisco, from theaters in San Francisco to the Mandarin Theater in San Francisco, to actually come across the Pacific and to actually do a tour in the US and so I'm thinking that they're thinking, hey, this is a good way we can bank some money before things go like, you know, things fall apart. And we can also raise money for the cause, and that's what they do. And his mother unexpectedly gets pregnant. And so Bruce is born in a segregated hospital, China Hospital, Chinese hospital in San Francisco, Chinatown, which is the segregated neighborhood in Chinatown during a time when the Chinese Exclusion act is still in place. So he's one of these very few people to be born a citizen in the US and. And I think that has an actual really big resonance in. In the current sort of political climate. But, you know, he, he, he, at the age of a couple of weeks, gets put into a movie that's being done called Golden Gate Girl by a woman named Esther Eng, who is working across the Pacific from San Francisco to Hong Kong. And it's one of the last movies that gets made before war happens in Hong Kong. The family moves back, and then Hong Kong is plunged into war on December 8, 1941. And Bruce barely survives. You know, they barely survive that particular period.

A (17:25)

I wanted to ask, he sometimes called Tiny Phoenix. Why did they call him that?

B (17:34)

So if you can imagine Right. China and Hong Kong and Asia at this point really plunged into war. Infant mortality is huge. Infant mortality is at just an astonishing rate. I mean, I think maybe one in three babies is not surviving, you know, and, and, you know, and Hoichun and, and Grace are, are superstitious. So they attribute the fate of their son to the spirits. You know, the, the spirits may come and take their son, their boy child, because boy child, boy children are thought of as. As more valuable, I guess, in that particular period in time and place. And so they give him the name Tiny Phoenix Siphon as a way of trying to draw the spirits away from him. Tiny Phoenix is sort of an effeminate name. And so they think that if they dress him up as a girl, they put earrings on him, they call him, you know, Siphon, that they will like, ward the evil spirits away from him. And actually later on this causes him to be bullied when he goes to a predominantly boys school. And I think that's the beginning of him deciding, man, I gotta defend myself. You know, I want to be able to stand up for myself. Nobody else is gonna do it for me. I gotta be able to do this myself.

A (19:02)

We're talking about the book Water Mirror, Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America by Jeff Chang. It's our choice for full bio. Hong Kong really became the center of cinema, you note, after World War II. From 1945 to 1950, Hong Kong's population grew from 600,000 to 2.2 million. How did that change the type of movies that were being made as the population swelled?

B (19:32)

Yeah, it's very interesting because you kind of see the development of this youth culture, right? You have, as you mentioned, a huge number of young people streaming across the borders as refugees, along with their parents, of course. And they come into Hong Kong where the British colonial administration is not really looking out and taking care of the situation at all. So they're under housed, right? They're setting up in shanties on the hillsides and fire goes and rips through these shanties there severely under housed. They're angry, right? There's, there's nowhere for them to go. And, and, and you know, at the same time, people in Hong Kong are feeling abandoned. They're feeling abandoned by China and they're being feeling abandoned by the British colonial administration. So in the, in the stories that they're circulating and the cinema becomes really big in this, right? The stories that they're circulating, they're looking for heroes that kind of represent who they are, and they feel like orphans. They feel like they're abandoned by both sides. And that's exactly the role that Bruce seems like he was born to play. And so at the age of nine, he stars in a movie called the Kid, where he's playing like this street urchin, getting by on his wits, and, you know, his parents have kind of disappeared. He's being raised by an uncle, and he turns into a street kid, a thief, and somebody who's really angry all the time. And Hong Kongers are like this new generation of Hong Kongers, like, that's us, that's us. That's our guy. And so Bruce actually ends up playing these kinds of roles through most of his. Into his teen years. Really. The last movie that he makes before he comes back to the US Is called, literally, the Orphan.

A (21:29)

From your book, it seems that as a child he was energetic, a little bit wild. And there are lots of stories in the books about him getting in fights, but one caught my attention because it revealed how he could be really, really tough, but that he had shame about a medical ailment that left him. He had an undescended testicle. Right. What happened to him that day when he was teased about it?

B (21:56)

Well, you know, he had gotten in a lot of fights. He was picking on folks sometimes. And a group of folks got together who had been picked on by Bruce, and they cornered him in the bathroom and they pantsed him. And so Bruce is here revealed, and they run out and they have a new nickname for him. And. And so this sort of, I think, intensifies his. His feeling of shame and his need to kind of be that guy, you know, be the. The sort of be the boss. He. He kind of is able to. To gain, if you will, a little bit of credibility because he is. He stands up to the British bully. There's a big guy that's kind of picking on them, and Bruce lures that guy into a bathroom one day and puts a knife into his belly and strips him and locks him in the or. Tells him to go inside one of these stalls and not to come out. And so the word of that spreads throughout the school, throughout the streets, and gives him a little bit of credibility and a bit of a rep. But he's still a small guy, Bruce.

A (23:23)

And school did not necessarily go hand in hand. He did get kicked out of school, right?

B (23:27)

Yes, yes, absolutely. Yeah. He was not a good student. He just couldn't focus on his studies. He had a creative mind that was always racing. And so he. He finds much more pleasure actually reading kung fu novels or Being on the set with his father or even, you know, jumping in front of the camera as an actor. And so this is the way that he, his energies are sort of contained in a way. His parents, his uncles and aunties, they all call him the kid who can't be stopped. And so they see that he takes to the screen really well and they let him kind of go along that path.

A (24:13)

And one final note for today. I did want to note that Bruce Lee's father, he became hooked on opium. What was the impact on the family?

B (24:24)

I think that Bruce took it the hardest. You know, Bruce I think felt the closest to his father. He literally had been brought into the movies by his father. He wanted to please his father, but he was not the kid that studied. He wasn't like his older brother who was an athlete and somebody who was an A student. And when his father begins to smoke, he withdraws from the family. And so Bruce takes this really, really hard. And I think that's the period when he really begins to act out and really becomes a lot more, shall we say, like bound to the streets. He's out gallivanting, as the folks would say.

A (25:10)

That was Jeff Chang, the author of Water Mirror Echo. Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian Our choice. For full bio tomorrow, we'll hear about how Bruce Lee's early days were in America. Black Friday at the Home Depot. En la tienda oper Internet note Pierdas, Black Friday and the Home Depot. The holidays mean more travel, more shopping, more time online and more personal info in more places that could expose you more to identity identity theft. But LifeLock monitors millions of data points per second. If your identity is stolen, our US based restoration specialists will fix it, guaranteed your money back. Don't face drained accounts, fraudulent loans or financial losses alone. Get more holiday fun and less Holiday worry with LifeLock. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit LifeLock.com SpecialOffer terms apply.