Brandon Lee training with his father, Bruce Lee
Courtesy of Shannon Lee
Fast-forward 20 years and China's film industry was still rough. On set in Hong Kong, Shannon was hollowed by grief. Everything was recorded without sound, because actors spoke different dialects and languages. Fight scenes weren't choreographed. There was no script. A guy would show up, teach her a routine and then scold her if she didn't get it right immediately. Propmasters were handing her guns, showing her the empty barrels, assuring her over and over there were no live bullets in there, which only reminded her more of her brother's death. Then the director looked at her and said, "Just do it the way your dad would do it." Shannon remembers thinking, "I was, like, 'OK, and you direct it like my dad would direct it.'" If Bruce had directed it, there probably wouldn't have been any guns in the picture at all. Bruce was adamantly anti-gun in his films. He thought men with guns were weak.
"It was hard," she says. "I cried a lot. In private, obviously."
It was only when she began studying her father's writings after her brother's death that she first felt complete. It was then that she realized how powerful Bruce's words would were — and how far his circulated image had gotten from his intention. She launched a years-long battle to regain the rights to Bruce Lee's archive, which consists of all those file cabinets of poems, love notes and planners, plus 10 large metal shelves housing things like his nunchucks, tiger-skin rug and the bongo drum he accidentally punched through (it helped him develop an arrhythmic fighting style to break into his opponent's patterns). Even family photos belonged to third parties. "Publishers actually told us, 'But you gave them to us to make this book, so we own them now,'" Shannon says, rolling her eyes.
Shannon admits it could have been different — she could have been one of those kids looking to make a quick buck off her pop's image. "You have no idea how many bags of money I've had to turn down. But if something doesn't match up with our goals — if it's too violent, or even if it's just too boring — my father may have been a philosopher, but he was always an entertainer — we're not going to take the money." And if they can't fit a positive aphorism on it, they're not going to make it. Spreading the message is imperative.
"People can't believe he was so positive all the time," Shannon laughs. "But he was."
Shannon Lee
Amanda Lopez
Casual fans of Bruce Lee might miss that anger is not rewarded in his films, where violence is the last resort. Bruce Lee's adage, "Be like water," is physical and accessible. It's simple. He even demonstrated the meaning, grabbing a fistful of liquid and letting it fall through his hands: Water is too slippery to catch. Vincent Brown of the History Design Studio at Harvard University, who studies cross-cultural effects of public figures like Bruce Lee, recalls a scene from Enter the Dragon in which Lee tricks an opponent into getting in a dinghy, which he then lets float away. "He wins the fight without fighting in that guy's way," Brown says. "It's not about overpowering the world but changing the terms so you can come out victorious."
No one knows this better than Aquil Basheer, the violence de-escalation specialist, who in 1971 founded the Academy of Tactical Street Fighters, one of the first black martial arts schools in Los Angeles — he also got his first black belt around the same time as Bruce Lee. Basheer recruited youths to train at his school, many of whom had been inspired by seeing Bruce Lee sparring with African-American actor/martial artist Jim Kelly. "You have to understand, this was a time when we didn't see any black heroes on the screen," Basheer says. "No Latino heroes, no Asian heroes. Nothing. So it was a period that brought a lot of happiness and a lot of confidence to people of color."
Basheer, a former Black Panther, remembers showing up at rallies and protests all over Southern California in the early 1970s with his fellow martial arts practitioners. He says that while police would hassle the other black marchers, his group was left largely alone. His group was trained and confident, which led them to be calm and controlled; they fought on their own terms, using intellect, like the philosophies espoused by Lee. "If you have to resort to using the physical art, then you've already failed at the engagement," Basheer says.
Lee himself dared in his films not to celebrate the dealing of death. In 1972's Way of the Dragon — which he wrote, directed and starred in — Bruce's character is forced to kill a karate champ played by Chuck Norris. As a filmmaker, he lets the camera linger on his own face as Lee, the actor, considers the gravity of what it means to snuff out a life. The climactic spar emphasizes thinking as much as fighting.
But today, many Bruce Lee fans forget the nuance beyond his kung fu moves. "The U.S. likes the competition part, the fighting part, the violence and aggression part," Sharon Lee says. "The other stuff has slowly been stripped away, and what's left is cage fighting. And it's a far deviation from his original intentions." But through their podcast and online community-building, Shannon Lee hopes to bring back her father's messages of non-aggression to new audiences.
Shannon Lee
Amanda Lopez
Shannon and Sharon have monitored the positive effects that their Facebook and podcast community report having experienced from Bruce Lee's teachings. At every event where Shannon is asked to represent her father, the rooms are packed with men from the military, martial arts and policing communities. And they are emotional.
"This is grown men weeping in front of [Shannon] on a regular basis," Sharon says. It's men "at great pains to tell her, 'This never happens to me. I'm not emotional.'" She doesn't quite have words for the phenomenon. "For men to have a space in a culture with strict male-identity rules, for them to show up in front of a woman, in public, and start weeping — I've never seen anything like it before."
She says Bruce Lee perhaps showed men that they didn't have to be just one thing, or fit inside a box. "You have a lot of men in our culture who are asked to be just one thing — manly," she says, "But what even is that?"
Bruce Lee, she says, is filling some kind of cultural vacuum."Right now, we're at a point where self-help says you need to relinquish your control to someone else, a guru, who can tell you what to do. But what he's saying is you already have it inside you. Like Shannon did."
Shannon's got every bit of Bruce's perseverance gene in her. She's now partnering with director Justin Lin (the Fast & Furious franchise, Star Trek Beyond) to bring her father's TV series, Warrior, to life with a pilot for Cinemax — featuring a multidimensional Asian action hero in the honorable vein of Bruce Lee.
She also shares her father's sense of humor. Shannon jokes that she's "not just the president of the Bruce Lee philosophy club; I'm also a user, too. If it can work for me, it can work for everyone."
And she shares her father with the world. Not once has she been alone at his gravesite, she says. Almost 100,000 tourists visit him annually. On the Bruce Lee online communities, she's surrounded by millions who study his words. And now on the podcast, she's breathing his spirit into the internet airwaves. She even speaks of him in the present tense. "I can feel him everywhere," she says. "Once you get past the grief of losing the body, you can understand that."
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