East Of Eden: The Cruel Double Edge Of Bruce Lee’s Cultural Legacy

When I was a kid, Bruce Lee was my James Dean.

I was born and raised in Golden, Colorado, home of the Coors Brewing Co. and a giant wooden sign stretching over its main street that says “Howdy Folks!” and “Where the West Lives”. I spent a Norman Rockwell childhood there, hustling for pennies at the barber shop where the first chair was manned by Frank Leek, a man who would be the town’s mayor in a few year’s time. My parents owned a little store a couple doors down and it was there I learned the value of work and the loneliness of a child of entrepreneurs. The hours for small business owners are brutal. I worked eleven-hours a day every summer from the first grade to graduate school to just after when I started my own corporation for a while. And then my dad had a heart attack at 52 and I started to think that maybe all I knew wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

But there were good moments, too. We bought groceries from Denver’s Far East center which, to this day, is predominantly Vietnamese. There’s not a greater Chinese presence in Colorado because the Klan burned down its Chinatown in 1880 and, you know, the population never really recovered completely. Given that a prominent neighborhood in just north of Denver is named after former Mayor Benjamin F. Stapleton, a member of the Klan who appointed Klansmen to posts like Manager of Safety, City Attorney, Clerk and Recorder and allowed white supremacists to infiltrate the police department and, eventually, to control the lower courts through judicial appointment. If the name sounds familiar, our airport was Stapleton International Airport until 1995. Anyway, it was at a few Vietnamese groceries that my parents procured shopping bags full of bootleg VHS tapes of Chinese soaps, traditional operas, and oh the bounty of martial arts and wuxia pian, too.

This is how I saw a Bruce Lee film for the first time: a grainy dub with Vietnamese subtitles with tracking issues that warped the top of the picture no matter how I wrestled with that dial. It was 唐山大兄 which my dad translated for me as something like “The Big Brother” or, The Big Boss. I was transfixed. As one of two or three minorities at every school I’d ever attended to that point, here was evidence of Asian masculinity that had nothing to do with popular western conceptions of Asian men. When I learned Lee had died three months after my birth, having completed only five films (one, Game of Death, completed with a double after his death), I was seduced by the romance of it. James Dean has a similar death cult of personality: this intoxicating mixture of evidence with promise and a healthy dash of melancholic acceptance of the fleet caprice of existence. I obsessively tracked down his other films. I watched them until what was already difficult to parse because of the quality of the media, became incomprehensible. My copy of Enter the Dragon, pirated onto a TDK HS tape at SP no less, eventually snapped from all the pausing and rewinding.

Bruce Lee was validation for me that I could be adored and respected, this Asian kid with a stutter, head too big for his spindly body sure, but Bruce, man. Bruce. But there’s a cruel double edge to an Asian icon who is, for many in the United States, the only really positive representation of Asianness. As the coronavirus ravages the United States, laying waste to its economy and fraying divisions already strained to snapping, a steady refrain from the right is how the Chinese are to blame. Yellow Peril is never far beneath the skin of the American character. I felt a lot of that racism growing up. Even my friends wanted me to do the “Short Round” voice for them, and I accommodated with imitations of my parents’ accents because if they were laughing at me then maybe I could be acceptable to them for a while. And Bruce Lee became the touchpoint for a specific kind of racial bullying on the schoolyard. His signature yips and howls were leveled at me as a way to underscore my difference. What had always been a source of comfort for me had become a source of real pain.

Bruce Lee’s legend, carefully cultivated by himself in his lifetime and now by his estate and what seems an endless parade of hagiographies, paint the portrait of a tireless worker, a mystic, an indomitable demigod who never lost a fight (and, indeed, could never lose a fight). I worshipped at this particular shrine as a child. As a 47-year-old man — fifteen years older than Lee at his death — I wonder if Lee wouldn’t now be better served by a real reckoning with him as a human being. I guess what I’m saying is that the laughter that attended his “appearance” in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, a film only interested in upending tragic stories, can not easily be explained as a white director disrespecting a perfect being – but rather as a white audience’s inability to see Lee as anything but a caricature of their perception of Asianness. In Chinese, Bruce’s given name is 李振藩 which, in Cantonese, sounds just like the phrase “Return Again”. His mother hoped he would come back to America, you see, where he was born (though he was raised in Hong Kong). For me, the idea of Bruce Lee as a King Arthur figure, a once and future icon, is a beautiful one. I visit his image in my mind sometimes and I remember the hope he gave me as a troubled, isolated kid. When I see him now, all I see is that hope tarnished by a place that only truly loved him because he died.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2020. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Watch 30 for 30: Be Water on ESPN