Reframing The Legend

A BEST-SELLING BOOK BY JEFF CHANG ON BRUCE LEE’S CULTURAL ECHO

By Anastasia Stanmeyer

August 2026

Read Berkshire Magazine's August 2026 Issue.

Jeff Chang props his phone at eye level on a shelf in his kitchen in Berkeley, California, then goes back to what he was doing: making homemade stock for Hainanese chicken rice. I was quite familiar with the Southeast Asian dish, having lived in Hong Kong and Indonesia, and was happy to keep the conversation going by Zoom as he worked away. “There’s some prep you need to do,” he says before combining all the ingredients into a rice cooker. His focus alternates from the video chat (with me) and his chopping board (with raw chicken). This is how my interview with Chang proceeds. The prolific book author will be traveling across the country to speak at The Mount’s Authors Series in Lenox on August 3 and 4. Chang will be discussing Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America, released last fall and considered one of the greatest and most definitive biographies on the martial arts legend.

Born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, of Chinese and Kanaka Maoli descent, Chang is a journalist, cultural historian, and arts advocate who is best known for his award-winning books exploring the intersection of race, politics, and music. His first book, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (2005) was called one of the best nonfiction books of the last quarter century.

After Can’t Stop, Chang started to explore writing a book on Bruce Lee but was committed to publishing three other titles, which he subsequently did. Somewhere along the way, he lost sight of plot for Lee. Then two things happened: His wife told him that he needed to tell Lee’s story from an Asian American perspective. And the martial artist started popping up on graffiti murals and on social media feeds in Chang’s community. These murals and images began popping up during the pandemic amid the rise in violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Also, Be Water, the acclaimed documentary directed by Bao Nguyen that chronicles Lee’s life, philosophy, and cultural impact, was released in 2020.

That, along with hunkering down during the pandemic, led Chang to dig into working on a book about Lee. The result is a cultural biography that explores Lee’s profound impact on Asian American identity and media representation. In researching for the book, Chang met a number of Lee’s surviving friends and family members, including Phoebe Lee, his sister, who died at her home in San Francisco this June at the age of 88. (Bruce Lee died when he was 32, on July 20, 1973, in Kowloon, Hong Kong. The official cause of death was cerebral edema, or swelling of the brain, which doctors attributed to an adverse allergic reaction to a prescription painkiller.)

For research, Chang had extensive material at his hands from martial arts publications such as Black Belt Magazine, Inside Kung Fu, and Fighting Stars. “I call myself the third generation of Bruce Lee scholars,” says Chang. “This is a story that was asking to be told—Bruce as an Asian American and Asia America as a way of understanding Bruce. That’s the story I set out to write, and once I got that spine in late 2021, I was off to the races.”

And that is what we explored in our Zoom talk, with Chang at his kitchen counter and me working at my kitchen table.

Were you a big fan of Bruce Lee before you decided to write this book?

Yeah, I think we all were. I grew up in Hawaii, so everybody in the playground was Bruce Lee. My older cousins would have seen him in the theater, but I grew up in the generation that first saw him on TV. It’s like my kids; they never grew up without hip hop, and I never grew up without Bruce Lee.

What is it about Bruce Lee that resonates across generations?

We were talking about this the other day, many of us who are Asian and Pacific Islander artists. He was a pioneer. Even as we’ve had now Oscar®-winning folks, and Tony®-winning folks, and Grammy®-winning folks, we’re still in that pioneering phase of Asian American popular culture. I also think every generation has had a way to see him differently. It’s almost like, because he passed so early, they can project onto him their ambition. For us, it was just being cool and in the game. I often joke that our Bruce is the half-naked Bruce in front of two turntables. And then to see him come back in this very strong, warrior type of image was a revelation. Young folks were looking for a Bruce who represented strength and unity. Maybe there’ll be another generation in 10 years or 20 years who will see him as like a spiritual leader.

Can you talk about how Bruce Lee revolutionized cinema by popularizing the martial arts genre globally? That includes reshaping the onscreen combat and dismantling the negative Asian stereotypes.

Yes, absolutely. He revolutionized the action film just by introducing real fisticuffs. There’s a very clear demarcation of on-screen fighting before and after Bruce Lee, in terms of the usage of fists and legs and bodies. The American action movie comes from the American gangster movie, the American Western, and most were about the guns, always about the weaponry. In the ’60s, it’s about James Bond, so it’s not about just the guns anymore. It’s about this advanced military technology. Bruce takes off his shirt and strips it back down to the body, and what that does is rehumanize the action film in terms of creating stakes. If you’re going to have a wound, it’s going to show as blood.

Then the other part of it is there’s a whole story to be told in the physical action. If you pick up a gun and you shoot it, there’s only a couple of different ways you can film that. But, just like in dance, there’s a million different ways to portray a story. That was one of the things that Bruce really wanted to do as well. He wanted to take kung fu movies out of this sort of very rhythmic, very cadenced type of tuk-tuk-tuk-tuk-tuk-tuk-tuk type of back and forth, and just get down to the real nitty-gritty of it. He wanted it to resemble a real fight as much as possible, and in that process he’s introducing storytelling, so that if somebody is making a leap, it’s out of desperation. Or if they’re throwing a punch from a particular angle, it might be a show of force or show power. You’re seeing a person literally struggling against another body, and I think that’s really powerful, and that’s probably one of the very underrated things that he has done for our cinematic or visual language.

Do you think cinematography was at the right point to connect with him?

In many ways, the Hong Kong cinematographers were already beginning to think about how to portray acrobatics and those kinds of things that you would see on a stage, on a screen. So it’s a really interesting question. If you think about the classic Bruce Lee fight scenes, I think ofFist of Fury with the overhead shot in the dojo, and he’s conducting the entire school in some ways. Everybody cites the shots in The Way of the Dragon, where he’s fighting Chuck Norris. They needed to be able to film him from different angles in order to capture his speed and his motion. In a lot of kung fu movies before that, it was just one shot. By the time you get to Enter the Dragon, you’re starting to see these slow-mos, and you’re seeing different angles. They still hadn’t perfected it, of course, but that leads into what we’re looking at these days, with a John Wick or a Matrix, with Keanu Reeves and all of these different types of angles of understanding the fight.

Would you say that he became wildly popular in Hong Kong because martial arts already was deeply established?

There are two ways to answer that. The first would be to say that in coming back to Hong Kong, Bruce is already fitting into a particular cultural context. You’ve had martial arts movies being made since the beginning of filmmaking in China. They resurged in the 1960s against this backdrop of the youth boom and social unrest and anti-colonial movements. The second way to answer the question is that America is still a big crossover. Even at the lowest point, when he gets turned down for the Kung Fu TV show, he’s thinking, I have to get back to the U.S. That’s the big ticket, the global industry. Basically, his strategy is, I’ve got Asia, I’m going to go to Europe, shore that up, and then I’m going to go back to the U.S. He starts negotiating with Warner Brothers. Somewhere at the end of 1972, they nail it and are supposed to start shooting at the beginning of 1973. Even then, the fights that he had with Warner Brothers about how to portray himself are what some of his friends say really killed him.

When you were gathering the family archives and private memories for this book, what was the most surprising piece of history that you uncovered?

Two things: One is his vulnerability and the kind of loneliness of it all. They’re linked. His vulnerability had to do with the fact that socially, he was kind of awkward, except with his fighting buddies. With regular everyday folks, they were like, “God, you’re really focused on this martial arts.”

Well, he was comfortable in it, wasn’t he?

Yes, I think that was how he could express himself was physically. He was always on stage. That’s part of the story is that he was a child actor. He was the son of one of the most famous actors in town. [Bruce Lee was the son of Lee Hoi-chuen, a famous Cantonese opera singer and film actor. Because of his father’s connections, Bruce began appearing in films as an infant and had already acted in roughly 20 movies by the time he was 18.] He’s not like his brother, who is effortlessly cool, a fencer and top scholar, and he’s handsome, and he’s very social. Bruce feels like he has to put on a show because that’s what he’s been doing all his life. His fighter friends always would be like, “Oh, he’s always telling jokes, and he’s always holding court,” but I started coming to see that as not an act, but sort of his comfort zone. The vulnerability piece came in when I would put things on the timeline and saw when his letters were happening in relationship to when he was having setbacks. You can feel the vulnerability that he’s having at different moments, like real doubts, because he doesn’t have anything to fall back on.

How did his martial arts philosophy cross racial boundaries?

There’s the structural reasons, which are that Hollywood waslike it is now, it was overspending and losing a lot of money. Big historic studios were on the verge of going under, so they’re finding independent films to invest in. They’re trying to sell Tora Tora Tora! and Doctor Zhivago to the suburbs. As it turns out, all the kids wanted to see is Shaft and Five Fingers of Death in the inner city. I like to tell people that racial segregation always plants the seeds of its own demise. You have these young Black Puerto Rican kids going up to The Deuce to watch these movies, and, oh, what’s this kung fu movie? Oh, wow, it’s actually the same kind of thing, and that becomes part of the hip hop generation. These are all the kids that grow up to become the Wu-Tang Clan. Then the personal historical reason is, of course, that he moves to Seattle into a segregated district and meets the working class folks. All the folks of color who are in Seattle live in the same district. Jesse Glover becomes his first student, and Bruce goes from being this privileged child star to becoming somebody who is sympathetic and teaching older men of color and working- class folks Chinese martial arts. It’s really a profound thing.

Your book is divided into three concepts: water, mirror, and echo. How do these three phases map out onto Bruce Lee’s shift from an individual artist to a collective symbol of Asian American resilience?

“Be water, my friend” is the line from Bruce that most of us know. But I think that he was always struggling in his life to understand all of it. “Moving, be like water. Still, be like a mirror. Respond like an echo.” I think that the tragedy of his life is that he didn’t get to the mirror and the echo part. He was trying to make sure that the film [Enter the Dragon] was going to get made the way it needed to get made, so he never got to be still, and he never really got to understand what it would mean just to be an echo.

And then like a mirror, what I get out of that is similar to this exchange with you and me. There will be parts where you’ll be still, and you’ll be in some ways reflecting back what I’m saying to you, and then there are moments when I’ll be still, and I’ll be reflecting back what your intention is to me. I think that he started to have that when he becomes Kato. He literally becomes that mirror for everybody. He’s a reflection; he is like the projection and the reflection of what people are putting onto him. The fact that he dies early, it’s like his process is halted in that stage. It’s so interesting right now. Here we are talking about him, more than half a century after he’s passed. He’s certainly still echoing in that way. He just never got to be able to embody that. In some ways maybe this book is part of that echo.

Jeff Chang, author of Water, Mirror, Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America, will speak at The Mount in Lenox on Mon., Aug. 3, 4–5 p.m., and Tues., Aug. 4, 11 a.m.–12 p.m. For additional information and to purchase tickets, go to edithwharton.org. Turn the page for more author talks at The Mount.