Wong Jack Man versus Bruce Lee Mythology: On Bruce Lee Legends and the forthcoming George Nolfi 'bio-fic'

The origin story of Bruce Lee's Jeet Kune Do hinges on Lee's 1964 fight with Wong Jack Man. This is a crucial event in the martial arts biography of Bruce Lee, because it prompted his subsequent reflections on why he had not won quickly, cleanly and decisively. This caused him to revaluate critically his 'classical' or 'traditional' martial arts training and to begin researching and experimenting with both new theories of combat and innovating with new training methods and techniques.

So far, so good. But what about his opponent, Wong Jack Man? What does the origin story do with him? And, given the fact that Wong is still alive and disputes key aspects of the story, what might this tell us about 'reality'?

In many accounts – both in writing and in film – Wong is said to have challenged Lee to the fight because Lee was offending the Chinese martial arts community by teaching kung fu secrets to white and black westerners. In this narrative, Lee is a representative of an open-minded multiculturalism. If we follow the chain of dominoes that falls down from here, this means that Wong is conversely the representative of an essentially racist and closed Chinese community. If Lee is the future, Wong is the representative of a separatist, hierarchical and racist past. Wong writes his formal challenge letter and has it hand delivered to Lee by a deputy. In some versions, the letter actually comes from the elders and rulers of the Chinese martial arts community tout court, and Wong is their champion.

In these versions, the Chinese community is formal and structured. As such, for the word 'community' we can easily hear the word 'triads'. And the liberal multiculturalist Bruce Lee is accordingly anathema.

Of course, in literal terms, in this narrative, the Lee-Wong fight most frequently becomes a fight to decide Lee's right to teach martial arts at all, never mind to non-Chinese people. The point that is emphasized is that if he loses, he loses his right to teach at all. But, as I have been suggesting, the story has a strongly symbolic or even symptomatic dimension.

Given the symbolic character of the key coordinates of this hugely overdetermined narrative structure, the bits and pieces of information that we have been given about the plot line of the forthcoming 'biopic' on Bruce Lee, directed by George Nolfi, are understandable. As one site writes: 'It will focus, in part, on Bruce Lee's 1965 duel with famous kung fu master Wong Jack Man and the attempts all three men made to stem the influence the Triads had around San Francisco'.

Now, at first I found this laugh-out-loud funny. For what we have here is a total flight of fantasy. Bruce Lee teaming up with Wong to fight the triads?! But in terms of the overdetermined character of the Jeet Kune Do origin myth, this kind of thematic exploration makes a kind of perfect sense. For, if we think about these narratives, the fight takes place at a transitional time: Bruce Lee has yet to escape from his martial arts culture. He's struggling with it. He's an ethnically Chinese man in the US, with a white wife and a burning ambition. But in many respects he's still stuck in 'China'. As Gina Marchetti writes of the intra-ethnic struggle played out by Brandon Lee in Rapid Fire, to become smoothly 'Asian-American', there must be a battle with something 'Asian' that must be vanquished (Marchetti 2006, Bowman 2013). Thus, Lee comes into contact with the representatives of China-abroad, fights and wins. He is now free to renounce and transcend something of his past and embrace the future.

In these narratives, Wong becomes the bearer of all of the negative symbolism of a formal, ancient, traditional, violent, Triad-China. And Lee must beat this, to prove not just 'his' but also modern multicultural US superiority. But what of Wong? In real life, very little attention has been given to what Wong has said very about the fight, although the Wikipedia entry that appears highly in an online search on him is suggestive: 'According to Linda Lee Cadwell, Bruce Lee's wife, Lee's teaching of Chinese martial arts to Caucasians made him unpopular with Chinese martial artists in San Francisco. Wong contested the notion that Lee was fighting for the right to teach Caucasians, as not all of his students were Chinese' [accessed 14 December 2015].

Nonetheless, in the films, such as Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, and even supposedly sober documentaries on Bruce Lee, such as one I appeared in (I Am Bruce Lee), Wong is roundly dismissed as a Chinese racist, pure and simple – a kind of capo of the racist Chinese 'authorities'.

As Sylvia Huey Chong has argued in her book, The Oriental Obscene (Chong 2012), the problem with this kind of narrative is that it locates racism related to the Chinese in the US firmly in the Chinese community: the Chinese are racist, because their community is closed and impenetrable, and so on. This means that even the celebratory narrative myths of Lee 'struggling against racism' displace the lion's share of 1960s racism away from the white hegemony and onto the shoulders of the ex pat Chinese community.

Given this, a reconsideration of famous characters like Wong in films like the forthcoming one from Nolfi do not seem surprising. But, on all the evidence we have to date about the likely plot structure, it seems that the film is following film-history rather than the biographical-history of Bruce Lee. But, this is hardly surprising: as Meaghan Morris has pointed out, it is easy to forget that films are primarily about films, at least as much as and before they are about anything else (Morris 2001).

In this light, it seems that George Nolfi's film will be in some sense responding to representations of Wong as typified by films like Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, and undertaking a reflection based primarily on them. And indeed we should ask, whether informed by film or by history: what about Wong? If Bruce Lee learned so much from this fight, what did Wong learn?

Surely both the real and the mythological Wong must have learned from the fight with Lee. And if Lee beat him, then what is the lesson that the mythological Wong might? That Lee's modern 'Western' ways are superior, perhaps even the future… Such a Wong might renounce the triads and indeed 'team up' with the mythological Lee on his ineluctable battle against iniquity, tradition without reason and blind conformity to style, etc.

Of course, I have scanty information about the film at this time. Only time will tell what the film comes to be. But we do have information about Wong, and his fight with Bruce Lee.
Continued next post