Innholdsfortegnelse for Bruce Lee i Bruce Lee

Bruce Lee had the look. Not just the face of a movie star but the look of someone who knew something others didn’t. It was the look of a person destined for greatness. “I feel this great force, this untapped power, this dynamic something within me,” Lee wrote. “This feeling defies description, and [there is] no experience with which this feeling may be compared. It is something like strong emotion mixed with faith, but a lot stronger.” Throughout his life, Lee possessed an almost supernatural sense of self-assurance. Some might mistake this quality as arrogance. Yet Lee lived in a world, and time, that required all the confidence he could muster. It’s entirely fair to say, decades later, that we still live in an equally challenging world today. That is…

In the summer of 1959, the Seafair festival, held at the Aqua Theater off the shores of Seattle’s Green Lake, took over the city. It was an extravaganza of aerial plane demonstrations, pirate shows, and elaborate parades, and also a celebration of the city’s multicultural fabric. Among the many exhibitions that August weekend was an event billed as a kung fu show, featuring the city’s Chinese Youth Club. One by one, performers took the stage, presenting traditional martial arts techniques. An announcer explained the various practices, offering the audience a basic introduction to kung fu. Finally, a handsome young man walked out as the announcer presented him as the show’s last performer: Bruce Lee was his name, and, according to the introduction, he had just arrived from California. The demonstration,…

On the occasion of his 80th birthday, how do you want the world to remember your father? Shannon Lee: People certainly know my father’s name. They know him as a martial artist, an action star, this badass kung fu guy. But they didn’t necessarily know him as well—or as broadly—as a philosopher or thinker or innovator or Renaissance man—all of the different ways that I see him. That is really at the core of what they get excited about when they see him on screen. Without all of that foundation, he is not someone we would still be talking about, 47 years after his passing. “UNDER THE SKY OF HEAVENS, WE ARE ALL ONE, FAMILY.” People see him and they know some of the quotes—like “Be Water’ and “Walk On”— but…

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On December 8, 1939, under the gaze of the glistening, two-year-old Golden Gate Bridge, the SS President Coolidge rumbled into the waters of San Francisco Bay. The ocean liner’s weary passengers, many of them immigrants journeying from the ship’s point of origin, Hong Kong, were roused by the first sights of a strange land that had long existed only in their dreams. They saw the 80-foot statue of Pacifica, goddess of the Pacific Ocean, towering over Treasure Island, then sailed past Alcatraz Island’s forbidding rocks and buildings. The Coolidge eased into the docks at Angel Island, where just beyond the pier was the station that was a gateway to a new world and, the travelers hoped, a new life. But while Angel Island was known as the Ellis Island of…

During the 1910-1920s, Hollywood’s silent era, one of the biggest stars of the silver screen was an actor named Sessue Hayakawa. American audiences were captivated by the Japanese matinee idol whose fame rivaled Charlie Chaplin’s. But Hayakawa’s popularity took a hit when the arrival of sound to movies revealed his heavy accent. The country’s increasing anti-Japanese sentiment and a spirit of nationalism rising out of World War I pushed Hayakawa further to the margins, ultimately compelling him to leave Hollywood. For the next 40 years, it was rare to see an Asian male actor of any nationality in a leading role. By the 1960s, no Asian man had ever starred on a network television show. It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that even an accomplished actor like Bruce Lee, who before…

On July 30, 1973, mourners assembled at a cemetery in Seattle to say goodbye to Bruce Lee. Five days earlier, an estimated 15,000 squeezed into the streets of Kowloon in Hong Kong to catch a glimpse of their hero’s coffin. Bruce spent his life on a quest to bridge the gap between East and West, but when he died his wife Linda had to choose a place to bury him—she decided that after his memorial in Hong Kong, Bruce would be laid to rest in the country where he was born. There was no large crowd at Seattle’s Lake View Cemetery, only a handful of reporters and fans who milled about, away from the friends and family who had come to pay their respects. The group reflected all the worlds…

Wearing sunglasses and a hairstyle that resembled Elvis Presley’s, the new student walked through the doors of the Wing Chun Association as everyone looked on, not sure what to make of the one they called Little Dragon. The martial-arts students knew he was a regular at beimo matches: organized, bare-knuckle rooftop fights which were regular occurrences in Kowloon. They also knew he was an actor, and they sensed his show-business swagger. But they weren’t sure what he was doing at their cramped martial arts school off Lei Tat Street in Hong Kong’s Yau Ma Tei district, because their version of kung fu was about self defense, not fighting, and Little Dragon was a fighter who ran with a tough crew, a hot-head who often instigated the fights. “I WAS A…

On March 27, 1970, Bruce Lee, accompanied by his five-year-old son, Brandon, landed in Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong. It had been five years since his last visit and his main purpose was to visit his mother Grace. Bruce also hoped to conduct some business, but his plans weren’t entirely clear. Bruce vowed that he’d one day return to Hong Kong a success. He had already accomplished a lot for a young man, but with the cancellation of The Green Hornet, Bruce wasn’t entire sure what was coming next. The good news was he had options. When he arrived in America as a teenager, Bruce dreamed of opening a franchise of martial arts schools across the country. After The Green Hornet’s abrupt end became public, potential investors approached Bruce…

In 2004, a youth group called the Urban Movement Mostar sought to do the impossible in the Bosnian town of Mostar: unite the city’s divided people. During the Croat-Bosniak War in the 1990s, Mostar exploded into violence, the city fracturing along ethnic lines. As tensions continued in the years after the war, Urban Movement Mostar believed that a symbol of unity could offer a glimpse of hope that people, no matter which side of the city they were from, could come together after years of division. The group decided that they would finance and build a statue in Mostar’s Spanish Square, located in the middle of an ethnically divided area. They proposed a number of figures, from the Pope to Mahatma Gandhi. But there was only one that the people…