"With Nothing But Fists and Attitude": How America and Hong Kong Each Received Bruce Lee, 40 or 50 Years Ago

With a new Bruce Lee film about to open, a look back at his past as a cultural icon.

The teenage years of Bruce Lee, the kung fu legend of his generation, are going to the big screen.

The film is titled Little Dragon (《小龙》), a China-U.S. co-production. Bruce Lee's daughter Shannon Lee will help write the screenplay and serve as producer. Indian director Shekhar Kapur, who made the Oscar Best Picture nominee Elizabeth, will direct Little Dragon and work on the script with her.

Set in 1950s Hong Kong, Little Dragon covers Bruce Lee's life and coming of age before he left to study in the United States.

The film looks at the years before Bruce Lee had any international reach. His most active years were the 1960s and '70s. With his fists and feet and the way he moved on screen, his influence spread well past kung fu and film, and he became an icon across eras and borders.

At the turn of the century, Time magazine put Bruce Lee on its list of "The 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century." He is, looking back, a landmark figure by any measure — but in the years when he shone brightest, America and Hong Kong understood him differently, and he meant something different to each place.

America: his fists and feet changed the West's stereotype of the East, but his Hollywood run fell short of his hopes

When Bruce Lee first landed in America to study, Westerners held no friendly picture of the East. In their eyes, Easterners — Chinese people above all — were a lesser kind of person.

Many things fed that picture. The sight of Chinese men at hard labor may still have been etched into the American mind: in 1863, when work began on the railroad spanning America's east and west coasts, Chinese laborers poured into the country for railroad jobs paying $30 a month and laid the track. By 1870, Chinese people were only 8.6 percent of California's population but as much as 25 percent of its labor force. In the San Francisco area, where Bruce Lee was born, Chinese laborers made up a third of the entire workforce in 1880.

The long quarrel between East and West left the West hostile as well. The Boxer Rebellion made the West see the East as a threat, and the nationalist panic over the "Yellow Peril" was everywhere in the early 20th century. The British novelist Sax Rohmer even gave the Yellow Peril a face, inventing the character Fu Manchu. This tall, gaunt, bald schemer with two long eyebrows swept upward crossed the ocean, became a well-known figure in American popular culture, and set the template for how Chinese people were imagined there.

So in film and television, one of popular culture's windows, the stereotype turned up again and again. For a long stretch, Asians on screen were scrawny, fawning, calculating, short on masculinity — clowns. The characters were not only given ugly personalities; any Asian role with real screen time was usually played by an American. In costume and behavior, actors deliberately pushed the stereotyped features to convey an Asian character. In America from the 1950s into the early 1960s, this racially demeaning portrayal was simply accepted; it touched few nerves anywhere.

In 1959, the year the 18-year-old Bruce Lee arrived in America to study, NBC aired a new series called Bonanza with exactly such a Chinese figure, every Western stereotype rolled into one: Hop Sing, an immigrant from China. Thin and wearing a queue, he was the obedient houseman on his American employer's ranch.

"With nothing but his fists and his attitude, he turned an unremarkable physique into that of a tough guy." That was Time's verdict when it put Bruce Lee among "The 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century."

When he first arrived, though, Bruce Lee may have looked to people around him much like the stereotyped Eastern character. He was not yet the martial artist in the yellow tracksuit who settled an opponent with one punch and one shout — only a student his mother had sent to America because he kept getting into fights in Hong Kong.

It did not take long before people felt he carried something different.

In 1962, Bruce Lee, a sophomore at the University of Washington in Seattle, rented a corner of a parking lot, put up a sign reading "Jun Fan Gung Fu Institute," and began teaching martial arts. Two years later he showed what he could do on a far bigger stage. At the Long Beach International Karate Championships in California, the then-unknown Bruce Lee performed two-finger push-ups and the one-inch punch. In one bout he crushed the Filipino-American black-belt judoka Dan Inosanto in a matter of seconds; Inosanto, stunned by his skill, simply asked to become his student.

The television producer William Dozier, having seen Bruce Lee at the tournament, offered him an audition. Bruce Lee ended up with the part of Kato, the crime-fighting chauffeur, in The Green Hornet.

It was only a supporting role, the ratings were middling, and the show ended after 26 episodes — but none of that kept the series from working like a magnifying glass, carrying his influence everywhere.

In The Green Hornet he even outshone the lead. "I believe every kid in America in front of a television noticed that guy behind the Green Hornet — the one who could kick and punch and move so fast, who pulled every eye onto himself," the film critic Ric Meyers said. "The people who made The Green Hornet had to stop Bruce Lee from being himself, because every time he appeared everything else on screen turned into background."

Bruce Lee's popularity in 1960s America planted the seed of a change in that stereotype, but the change did not come at once. Even Bruce Lee himself still felt the discrimination the stereotype produced.

While they were shooting a scene for The Green Hornet, a producer came looking for Bruce Lee, who was in his chauffeur's costume.

"Where's your car? Go pick up another actor now," the producer told him.

"Do you know who he is?" an actress on the show said to the producer, puzzled that he would order Bruce Lee around.

"Isn't that Bruce Lee? He plays Kato," the producer said.

The scene captures, more or less, how people thought then: Asian, chauffeur's uniform and servant were interchangeable words.

If this was how Bruce Lee could be treated, it is easy to imagine what Westerners made of the bit-part actors and the people lower down.

Because he was Asian, Bruce Lee went on playing minor parts. The films he appeared in — Marlowe, Longstreet — left little mark on audiences. He got nowhere much in Hollywood: he could talk directors into changing a plot point during a shoot, but he could never get top billing.

Bruce Lee did in the end realize his dream of leading a film, and he genuinely changed how Hollywood saw Eastern actors. When Enter the Dragon opened, ticket lines ran the length of the block and out into the road; through the 1970s, martial arts schools sprang up along the streets. But it was not in America that he made his vision real.

Hong Kong: his Hollywood credentials made him a sensation there, and through Hong Kong cinema he finally exported the kung fu film

How Hong Kong saw Bruce Lee was another story altogether.

He caught America's attention at once largely because of his foreign background and because he did more than anyone expected. Nobody imagined a slight-looking Easterner could be that formidable. His early years in Hong Kong had already shown a talent for both film and martial arts — he was a film lead at just 9, and at 16 he won the junior title at Hong Kong's inter-school boxing championship — but film and martial arts both had long traditions in Hong Kong, so none of that counted as especially fresh there. And his father was Lee Hoi-chuen, one of the four great comic actors of Cantonese opera in Hong Kong, which made his ease in front of a camera seem only natural.

Bruce Lee's arrival in Hollywood made Hong Kong suddenly notice how unusual he was. Even without a lead role, breaking into Hollywood was at the time an achievement nobody else could claim. Hong Kong began to hold him in the highest regard and chase after him.

How hard did it chase? What happened during his brief return to Hong Kong in 1970 tells the story. People called him Kato — he had not realized The Green Hornet was airing in Hong Kong, where the show had simply been renamed The Kato Show. To eat in a restaurant undisturbed, he always took a corner seat. "If I die, it'll be from starving to death for want of a free hand to eat with, because I have to use my hands to sign autographs for them," he joked in one interview. Once, at the cinema, a female usher shone her flashlight in his face and asked for an autograph.

Thanks to the previous generation's baby boom, half of Hong Kong's roughly 3 million people in the 1960s were under 25, which drove demand for film entertainment. Audiences were no longer satisfied by the morally improving films of before, and family melodrama, comedy and wuxia all took off.

So when Bruce Lee, going nowhere in Hollywood, let it be known that he was thinking of coming back to Hong Kong to build his career, it is easy to imagine how the studios there stirred.

The obvious match was Bruce Lee and Shaw Brothers. In the 1960s, by opening up the wuxia genre, Shaw Brothers had become the most influential film company in Hong Kong. Its wuxia pictures — borrowing from Peking opera, Japanese samurai films, even James Bond plots — were loved. Signing Bruce Lee looked like the natural next step.

Shaw Brothers did in fact invite him. But the conditions Bruce Lee set from America — a production budget of no less than 600,000 Hong Kong dollars, the job of martial arts director, the right to revise the script, and payment in US dollars for any foreign actors he brought in — were more than the studio's bosses would accept. Shaw Brothers also had a roster of stars, including the Asian best-actor winner David Chiang, so it never acted as though it had to have him.

Golden Harvest, founded by the former Shaw Brothers CEO Raymond Chow, staked everything on Bruce Lee instead. Needing one big star to settle the matter, Golden Harvest would not let go. Its producer Liu Lianghua was the first producer from any Hong Kong film company to visit Bruce Lee in America, and she promised to do everything she could to meet his terms. Through that twist of fate, Bruce Lee ended up at Golden Harvest.

Famous as he already was across Hong Kong, Bruce Lee was uneasy once he came back and started shooting. For him there was no way back.

The Big Boss was his first film after the return. The production ran to the typical Hong Kong pattern: cheap, fast, a little chaotic. At the premiere Bruce Lee sat in the theater with his wife, Linda. When the film ended, the theater went quiet — in Linda's words, you could have heard a pin hit the floor. Just as the anxious Bruce Lee started wondering whether he had pulled it off or blown it, the theater broke into thunderous applause and cheering. The audience carried him out on their shoulders.

Everyone knows what came next. Over the following year, Fist of Fury and The Way of the Dragon both broke Hong Kong's box-office record. In 1973, Bruce Lee shot a big-budget Golden Harvest–Warner Bros. co-production with a group of Hollywood actors, Enter the Dragon — this time as the lead. He helped write the script and choreographed the fights.

So it was that in Hong Kong, on the fame Hollywood had built for him, Bruce Lee did what he had not managed to do in Hollywood.

He lived only three years into the 1970s before his strange death, yet through Hong Kong cinema he built an influence no one could ignore. For a long time afterward, nearly every film was hunting for the next Bruce Lee, and leading men named Bruce Le, Bruce Leh and Bruce Li kept appearing. The imitations were all bad.

Still, because of him, Hong Kong kung fu films found a large following abroad, and he quietly changed Hollywood's later casting, clearing the way for the likes of Jackie Chan and Donnie Yen to take heavyweight parts on Hollywood screens.

David Henry Hwang, a Tony Award–winning Chinese-American playwright, wrote a play about Bruce Lee's career called Kung Fu. Bruce Lee, he has said, created a new figure in the West: the Asian male hero.

The mainland, like Hong Kong, has treated Bruce Lee as a national hero. It just came to know him later. Because of distance and poor flow of information, his name meant little on the mainland during the 1960s and '70s, when he was most active. Only in the late 1980s, as Hong Kong magazines and films made their way in, did it grow loud there.

Cover image and images in this article from: Wiki Commons, Douban Movie.