Matthew Polly’s Bruce Lee: A Life is the first new Bruce Lee biography in decades. It presents Lee as a 145-pound, muscled collection of extremes, Kevin Chong says:
a short-tempered brawler who studied philosophy; a kung fu devotee whose fighting borrowed from Muhammad Ali and fencing manuals; a loving husband and father who blew his earnings on sports cars and whose dalliances were trumpeted on Hong Kong gossip pages.
Bruce Lee wasn’t exactly Chinese:
Polly begins his account with Lee’s father Li Hoi Chuen, aged ten, standing outside a Cantonese restaurant and shouting out the specials: out of the blue, he was talent-spotted by a Cantonese opera troupe. Bruce was born in 1940 in Oakland, California, at a time when his father was touring the US with his wife Grace Ho, a mixed-race socialite, in tow. (Through her, Lee had English and Dutch-Jewish ancestors.) During the Japanese Occupation of Hong Kong from 1941 to 1945, it was thanks to Li’s star power as an opera and film actor that the family was able to eat. Lee’s own talent emerged early on: he became a child actor, a cha-cha champion and a student of the Wing Chun School of Kung Fu. He picked fights in his drive to dominate any group, and Polly mentions one childhood friend who “describes young Bruce’s personality as ‘teeth brushing,’ [Cantonese] slang for boastful, cocky, a peacock”. In 1959, after a fight got him in trouble with the school headmaster – Lee had earlier been expelled from another English-language Catholic school for forcibly removing a classmate’s trousers and painting his genitalia red – his parents sent him to the US to complete his education in Seattle.
At this point, the brash young man became an underdog. While studying at high school and then at the University of Washington, Lee washed dishes at a restaurant of a family friend; he married Linda Emery, whose mother disapproved of their mixed-race union. Lee also gained, however, the maturity through adversity – what the Chinese call “eating bitterness”– to merge his brawling tendencies with a philosophical approach to combat.
I hadn’t heard this version of his death:
The story of Lee’s life ends mid-stride, like the flash-frozen final frame of Fist of Fury (1972), just as his career is lifting off. Overextending himself during the filming of Enter the Dragon, Lee collapsed in a hot recording studio while overdubbing dialogue, and died two months later. Conflicting rumours and theories emerged about what may have happened, and Bruce Lee: A Life concludes with a lengthy coda as Polly unpacks the details. Polly suggests a simple explanation: heat stroke. This idea fits with anecdotes about Lee’s poor physical reaction to high temperatures and surgery he had undergone, three months before his death, to remove sweat glands for cosmetic reasons.
That version is better than the old idea of the Monks who killed him for teaching Kung Fu to Westerners. I think it is more likely.