Bruce Lee

Biography

Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco's Chinatown between punches of the Year of the Dragon, raised in Hong Kong in the wake of World War II, and shipped back to America at eighteen with a hundred dollars and a philosophy degree ahead of him. By thirty-two he was dead, and already mythology.

He began in Wing Chun under Ip Man. He ended with a system of his own: Jeet Kune Do, "the way of the intercepting fist." Jeet Kune Do rejected rigid style. "Be water, my friend," Lee said — a training koan that doubled as an epistemology. Use what works. Discard what does not. Method was a cage; combat a conversation.

Hollywood did not know what to do with him. He was cast as a sidekick in The Green Hornet, passed over for Kung Fu, the television series he had helped pitch. He went back to Hong Kong, made The Big Boss in 1971, and suddenly a Chinese-American in his thirties was the most electrifying screen presence on the planet. Fist of Fury, Way of the Dragon, and Enter the Dragon followed. The last opened in America six days after his death.

Lee's philosophy has outlasted his films. He read Krishnamurti, studied Zen, quoted Spinoza in his journals, and trained his body with a rigor that confounded doctors who autopsied him. He lifted weights before martial artists lifted weights. He wrote poetry. He designed equipment. He kept a private library of two thousand volumes on combat, philosophy, acting, physiology — most of them annotated.

The autopsy called it cerebral edema, probably a reaction to a painkiller. Hong Kong called it the end of an era. Hollywood called it too soon. Lee himself had written, years earlier, a letter to a student: "The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering." He had done that before he turned thirty.