In Water Mirror Echo, the journalist tells the story of actor and martial artist Bruce Lee’s rise to fame alongside the cultural history of Asian America.
You write that Lee is “perhaps the most famous person in the world about whom so little is known.” What do you mean by that?
People knew Bruce and they knew his screen presence, but they didn’t really know who he was off-screen. Bruce Lee is the picture that people have of Asian Americans, but people don’t have that picture filled in.
Lee moved between the U.S. and China throughout his life. How was he perceived in each country?
When Bruce first returns to Hong Kong after starring as Kato in the The Green Hornet, Hong Kongers receive him like a superhero, because he’s been on American TV. He’s the Asian who broke through the bamboo ceiling and kicked ass on screen. But Bruce is embarrassed about The Green Hornet because he realizes that he’s another version of the stereotypical Asian male in Hollywood. He’s basically the servant for the white hero. Southeast Asians can’t understand how internally oppressed he feels from racism in the U.S., and then on the other side, white folks see him as an Oriental, mystical, guru-type character.
The book paints a portrait of both Lee and the development of Asian American culture. How do these histories overlap?
Bruce, after coming to Seattle as an 18-year-old and living in a segregated neighborhood, begins to understand what it means to be minoritized in America. There’s a direct line from that to who he becomes, which is a global hero of the underdog. Bruce is this transcendent hero who seems above history, but that reduces him in some ways. He becomes an archetype, and Asian Americans think of him as a stereotype that they have to live into. The reality is that his story is like so many other Asian American and Pacific Islander stories. That was what I wanted to recapture by putting Bruce back in his context.
Can you discuss the book’s title?
It came from a Taoist text that for Bruce’s whole life was a huge riddle to him. The complete line is, “Moving, be like water. Still, be like a mirror. Respond like an echo.” What my editor got me to see was that in Bruce’s response to racism, he was trying to become adaptable
like water. And then as he reaches the last years of his life, he becomes a mirror for all these fans, reflecting their hurts and traumas but also their desires and ambitions. And then for me, as part of the second generation after Bruce, everything that he’s done and said continues to echo.
