50 years after his death, Bruce Lee remains a star, a role model, an enigma

The legacy of martial arts legend Bruce Lee has endured at the 50th anniversary of his death in part because there are so many Bruce Lees.

Since his 1973 death under mysterious circumstances at age 32, Hong Kong has embraced Lee as a native son, China as an anti-Japanese nationalist, Asian-Americans as a role model, blacks and Latinos as a fighter of white oppression, the developing world as a foil against colonialism.

"Think about how many people try to own Bruce Lee and how many narratives there are," said Paul Bowman, cultural studies professor at Cardiff University and lead editor of Martial Arts Studies, an academic journal. "He functions as a kind of fantasy object or muse for people in different contexts."

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At Thursday's half-century mark, there are conferences, double features, special memorabilia and exhibitions - including the Hong Kong Heritage Museum's "Bruce Lee: a Timeless Classic" - amid little sign his legacy is fading.

In a 2022 survey by Laaunch, an anti-discrimination non-profit, respondents rated Lee among the three most prominent Asian-Americans of all time, with the others, actors Jackie Chan and Lucy Liu, still alive.

"He's the only Asian actor to become an international icon, up there with Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe," said Matthew Polly, author of the 2018 biography Bruce Lee: A Life. "Not many who died have generated so many who pretend to be Bruce Lee, like Elvis impersonators."

Even when his star has waned, interest has roared back and taken new forms - befitting his "be like water" fighting mantra - initially tracking China's rise, later in response to anti-Asian attacks in the US and Asians' increasingly prominent global role.

"Interest in Bruce Lee has skyrocketed since Crazy Rich Asians and the rise of Asian pride," said Andre Morgan, a former executive with Golden Harvest, which produced Lee's Enter the Dragon and Game of Death films. "Bruce Lee's legacy is to all the young, non-white children of the world."

Shannon Lee, Bruce Lee's only living child, who was four when her father died, safeguards his image assiduously, having battled numerous lookalikes, fakes and depictions, some sanctioned, many not. She sees no reason that his legacy won't endure, even as artificial intelligence threatens to create new, more convincing mock-ups.

"I definitely think there's another 50 years here," said Lee, an actress, film producer and chief executive of the Bruce Lee Family Companies. "There's been a lot of Bruceploitation things happening ... It's a scary and very interesting place to be."

While Lee's martial arts talent, on-screen charisma, ambition, choreography and acting skills have fuelled his enduring reputation, he also benefited inordinately from timing.

The late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed an explosion in social consciousness, civil and minority rights and interest in Eastern culture as race-based immigration policy ended and newly independent countries emerged.

Those who knew Lee, and the industry of experts created since, say he was not driven by politics, although the image of a person of colour in the early 1970s fighting and defeating whites was in itself a dramatic political statement embraced by long-suffering minority communities.

When his popularity waned in the 1980s, Lee's films and their many imitators became a staple of daytime TV reruns watched by black and Latino kids, helping inspire hip hop and the hugely influential Wu-Tang Clan after 1992.

Meanwhile, widespread film piracy was imprinting Lee globally as a symbol of anti-colonialism, a fighter who attacked and beat white overlords. And in the aftermath of the brutal Balkan wars, when Croatia sought a unifying theme to ease the ethnic hatred, it settled on Lee.

The outlines of his life echo on San Francisco's steep Chinatown streets as biographer Charles Russo retraces Lee's footsteps.

Born in San Francisco in 1940, raised in Hong Kong, obsessed with martial arts, Lee was sent back to northern California in 1959 to sever his ties with local gangs.

Brought up wealthy, he felt humiliation as a restaurant busboy, Russo recounts, pointing out the low-end flat he lived in, Chinese theatre where he performed and fraternal associations he defied.

"He never got on well with the martial arts culture in Chinatown," said Russo, author of Striking Distance: Bruce Lee and the Dawn of Martial Arts in America, standing in front of Chinese Hospital where Lee was born.

"He was very critical of a lot of the stuff that he saw was just overwrought nonsense."

Over the next decade, Lee bounced between San Francisco; Seattle, where he started his martial arts school; Hong Kong, where he made three films; and Los Angeles, where he achieved his dream of starring in a Hollywood feature, only to die days before it became a smash hit.

Along the way, he built up his jeet kune do martial arts philosophy; embraced Zen Buddhism and Daoism; engaged in tempestuous fights with rivals; honed his choreography; and brought emotion to the wooden, slapstick world of fight films that ultimately redefined the genre.

Further fuelling the legend has been boundless speculation over his early death from brain swelling - one more figure who burned bright and died young in an era of political assassinations and celebrity overdoses. His demise in Hong Kong has been variously attributed to heat exhaustion, an allergic reaction, Spanish fly, a curse, mafia revenge.

"Dying early is so useful for iconic status because you don't have the messiness of three divorces, four stints in rehab," said Polly. "That's what the point of being an icon is, to be used by people for what they need."

For mainland China and Hong Kong, his legacy has been problematic. On one hand, his scenes defeating whites and Japanese dovetail well with nationalistic themes.

In 2008, CCTV, along with Shannon Lee and Beijing's propaganda ministry, produced a 50-part Legend of Bruce Lee series showcasing Chinese culture and unity before the Olympics.

But reported illegal drug use, extramarital affairs and a headlong quest for wealth have made Lee a challenging Chinese role model.

Also incongruous has been his defiance of Confucian hierarchy and smorgasbord approach to martial arts, seen as more typical of American pragmatism than traditional Chinese culture.

A statue erected in 2005 on Hong Kong's Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront was initiated by fans, not officials; his Kowloon home reportedly became a rooms-by-the-hour hotel before it was demolished; and a permanent Lee museum never got off the ground.

The ambiguity only increased after pro-democracy students embraced Lee's "be water, my friend" approach during 2019 protests.

The legend's global expansion has resulted in legions of copycats, pirates, wannabes and cheesy souvenirs.

There are Lee bobbleheads and aftershave, "genuine autographs" on rent checks and credit card receipts, auctions for his scuffed white platform shoes - hardly fashion's finest moment - and a 1969 manifesto he wrote outlining his goals: become the highest paid US "Oriental superstar", achieve world fame and make US$10 million by 1980.

"Everyone is seeing Bruce as a symbol of universality," said Jeff Chang, an author and cultural critic working on a Lee biography. "You're really trying to sell the nail clipper and so you put an image on it that people recognise."

Lee's legacy has made the family millions after his daughter fought to regain control of his intellectual property, film rights and domain names. Since then, Bruce Lee Enterprises has marketed its own memorabilia and challenged views it believes tarnish his image.

Some say the legend and adoration risk going too far.

"This deification that the family is trying to project, he's not a god," said Morgan, adding that he carried Shannon Lee in his arms when her father died.

"I have no axe to grind, but I've never met a god and never met a living god. I've worked with a lot of actors who hoped they were a living god."

Projects the family have authorised include a 2008 commercial for Nokia showing a Lee double playing ping-pong with nunchucks, and a 2013 "Water, it's like instincts. Shapeless, formless, fluid" Johnnie Walker whisky advertisement with a Lee lookalike conversing in Mandarin, which he did not speak well.

Shannon Lee is suing a fried chicken chain in China for US$30 million over a marketing image it says looks like Lee, and has criticised director Quentin Tarantino after he depicted her father as a pompous loser in his 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

"I'm tired of hearing from white men in Hollywood that he was arrogant," she wrote in a 2021 rebuttal.

"My voice is just one among many, and Ang Lee is an auteur filmmaker and has his own perspective on things," she said.

Over the years, Lee has inspired a raft of books, conferences, scholarly papers and exhibits.

Memorabilia collector Jeff Chinn walks tourists and fans through San Francisco's Chinese Historical Society of America, recounting the new-found respect he and other Asian-American schoolkids received when Enter the Dragon opened, even as Lee fought barriers, seen in an early 1970s movie poster.

"You'll see that the artist gave Bruce Lee extra slanty eyes and those stereotypical eyebrows," Chinn said. "It's stuff that he had to face in order to succeed in Hollywood."

Much of the aura surrounding Lee has been frozen in time, his notebooks the musings of a seeker as a hippie-tinged society sought spiritualism from an Asia viewed as exotic, mysterious, enlightened.

"It was pop philosophy," said Chang. "To reduce the idea of dissolving the ego to the notion of the most efficient way of crushing your enemy, it's a leap."

Endless debate among obsessive fans centres on whether Lee ever lost a fight and whether traditional martial arts communities, including tai chi master Wong Jack Man, fought him for teaching non-Asians.

While some were certainly against his sharing, experts say, he also had an arrogant streak that invited challenge.

"The whole fight with Wong Jack Man is just ludicrous; all along he said 'I was teaching Westerners,'" said Bowman, a martial arts practitioner for more than 40 years. "Bruce Lee was like a hothead. He tried to say he was the best and it annoys people."

Said Russo in front of the Great Star Theatre: "They want their teacher to be seen as the unbeatable master. Well, that doesn't happen in sports, right?

"It doesn't mean you're still not the best ever."

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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