When Little Dragon Was On Fire

A comprehensive biography of Bruce Lee offers a new explanation for his untimely death.

- Gilbert Wong

This quote will take the Bruce Lee tragics back: “If you try to remember, you will lose. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup; put it into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or creep or drip or crash! Be water, my friend.”

For the rest of you, the Asian superstar’s “Be water, my friend” sums up the philosophy of jeet kune do, the street-based martial art Lee invented and promoted as better than all other Eastern disciplines, more effective than kung fu, more deft than judo and a much more spectacular way to break bricks than karate.

How apt that the first Asian crossover movie star’s most famous words were scripted by Hollywood. Matthew Polly, an exhaustive researcher and often exhausting biographer, sources the words to screenwriter Stirling Silliphant, the Aaron Sorkin of his day, written for Lee’s character Li Tsung in an episode of Longstreet, a television show about a blind detective.

It was inevitable that Lee would end up in the movies. He was born in San Francisco, the son of Cantonese opera star Li Hoi Chuen and Eurasian heiress Grace Ho. Li’s troupe was on a tour in America when Bruce was born. Upon arrival, immigration officials had changed Li senior’s surname to Lee. Chinese-American friends suggested the Western name Bruce. The baby’s Chinese name was Li Jun-fan, translated as the prophetic “shake up and excite San Francisco”, though as a child he was always Little Dragon. Through his mother, Bruce was related to the fabulously wealthy Eurasian Ho Tung Bosman clan, though Grace’s marriage to a lowly “actor” saw her cut off, even if able to live a comfortably middle-class life.