Dan Kennedy (0:00)

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Master Lee (2:19)

Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy and the Moth features true stories told live. All stories from the podcast are taken from our ongoing storytelling series in New York, Los Angeles, Detroit and Chicago and from our tour shows across the country. Visit themoth.org the story you're about to hear by Master Lee was recorded live at the Moth main stage in 2008. And the theme of the night was stories about men.

Master Lee (2:55)

I grew up in Connecticut. There were a group of kids who used to make fun of me because I was Chinese. I remember the first time I was made fun of, this kid yelled out, hey, you Chink. And I literally looked around for the Chink. I grew up in West Hartford, Connecticut, this all white town. Kind of like tonight. There were three minority families. We were the Chinese family, there was a Japanese family and there was a black family, the janitors of the school. Later a Mexican family moved in and I was made fun of like a lot. Cause I was Asian and I was weird. I remember this one kid, his name was literally Chip Unsworth. A blonde headed boy who used to tell us, how long you been in West Hartford? I don't know, a year. He goes, my family came over the Mayflower. Great. And he'd call me Chink. And then we'd fight, you know, those big kid punches, those windmill punches like that. And we were fighting a lot. Finally, I made up this one rule. If a kid calls me Chink, I'm just gonna try to kill the other kid. I would do two things. I would either run away or I'd try to kill the other kid. Sometimes I would run into the bushes and read a novel. And it would take me two days to finish the novel. Then I would have to come back into the world. So one day at recess, Chip pushes me and goes, what are you gonna do, Chink? And the rage starts filling my body. I'm like, all right, all I have to do is try to kill him. So I lunge at him and I try to gouge out his eyes. We end up wrestling on the ground and the teachers pull us off each other and they send me to detention. Later that day, I saw Chip in the hallway and I try to choke him from behind. I slowly was becoming the mental kid. I would tell my older brother, I'd be like, that kid called me a Chink. He goes, well, that kid's an asshole. I go, that's it. I was one of those kids who would hold grudges. For years if a kid called me Chink, I would fight him in school. And then after school, I would go to the roof of the school and I would try to drop a brick on his head. And it's really difficult to drop a brick on another kid's head because you got to figure out the hypotenuse. Luckily, I'm Chinese. At recess, where these things go down, you remember, like, you hear, fight, fight, fight, fight, fight. And everybody say, yeah, fight. This one kid threw a ball down the stairs. I was trying to fit in, so I went to fetch the ball. And as I was coming up the staircase, Chip and his four friends surrounded me and started chanting, chink, chink, Chinaman, Chink, ching Chinaman. And then they started spitting on me. I don't know if you've ever been spit on by five people. The spit, it hits your face and it starts dripping down your face like this. And you can smell the spit and you can taste the saliva in your mouth. And it's humiliating, shocking. And then just like, time just freezes. The other kids were horrified, the younger kids and the little girls. And the worst thing was I had to go back to school the next day and the day after and the day after and the day after. That seems to be like what childhood is. A black hole of excruciating pain that goes on forever. So I cut school for the rest of the semester. And I used to have just one friend. I had one friend. He had a big head, so they called him football head. These kids are very creative. So it's the chink hanging out with the football head. And on the last day of school, I told my friend Jonathan, football head Brady, just go in and tell the teachers I have leukemia. So he did it, and I got all B's. And I thought my entire life was just going to be fighting because at that time, my parents were fighting because my father decided he would sleep with my mother's best friend. Yeah, that didn't play too well in the Lee family. So we're fighting at home, and I'm fighting the school year, and I'm just fighting, fighting, fighting, fighting, fighting. Then When I turned 10, everyone was invited to be in the school play except for me and the Mexican kid who couldn't speak English. I thought it was a dissatisfaction. So on opening night, they're singing this song. The play is My Fair lady, the story of an immigrant trying to fit in Irony. They're singing this song. All I want is a room somewhere Far away from the cold night air with one enormous chair. Oh, wouldn't it be loverly? So during that song, I walked out and I went to the bathroom, and I had a lighter fluid bottle in one hand and a lighter in the other. And I'm soaking the paper towels and the newspaper. Then I set the trash can on Fire. Then I walked to the second floor and I set the second trash can on fire. By the time I reached the third floor, the alarms were going off. The kids run out in their gaudy stage costumes. And the parents come, teachers in their Sunday best. And the fire department comes and there's all this commotion. I'm like, yes. Everybody's surrounding the principal. And then I had this moment of guilt. One of the last times in my life I felt guilty. And I fought my way through the crowd to the principal. And I tapped him on the shoulder. I go, excuse me, sir. And he's like, what? I go, you know the fire. Yeah, I said it. And his face in slow motion, turned from concern to I'm gonna fucking kill you. I was like, ah, Ah. My parents are getting a divorce. And I got away with it. They sent me to a room and they called my parents and they recommended therapy. And I never went. And I thought my life was just spiraling farther downhill, farther downhill. Until 1973, Bruce Lee's film Return of the Dragon came to Connecticut. And I'm sitting there on a drive in movie theater on a picnic blanket. I'm huddled in another blanket. The tinny speaker is giving us horrible sound. Baby boomers talk about seeing Hendrix at Woodstock. I saw Bruce Lee and Wes Hartford. This hundred foot Chinese God. Oh, my God. And he was ripped. Remember how fighting used to be in the old days with John Wayne? I gonna get you, pilgrim. Fuck that. He knew how to fight. This was an Asian man, my hero. He was beating up the white people. Let me repeat that. Before Bruce Lee, there was no star of an Asian movie in the States. It was Fu Manchu. And number one son, Bruce Lee was not only fighting the whites, he was kicking ass. And I remember in the final scene, he goes and he fights Chuck Norris one on one. And he, in slow motion, he does a sidekick and he launches Chuck in his acting career, if you can call it acting, I call it methodless acting. And Chuck crumples against the ground. Then he takes his two feet and he breaks his neck. Then he gives him a hero's death. He covers his eyes. The next day in school, I was treated with a new respect. I was a funky China man from funky Chinatown. I was cutting cats up. I was cutting motherfuckers down. They all thought I knew kung fu. They would ask me if I was related to Bruce because my name was the same. I'd always say yes. And it's taken me 25 more years to become masterly.