[ Cheers and applause ]
-Mahalo.
I would also like to say, aloha mai, aloha pumehana.
It's so wonderful to be able to be here in Seattle
and to be here with Town Hall
and especially with the Wing Luke Museum.
I was invited about 10 years ago to come to the first exhibition
that they had opened on Bruce Lee and just, sort of,
that just really made the book become real for me.
Because for many years it was an idea,
hadn't really started writing, doing a lot of researching.
But then to kind of be plunged into the real world
of Bruce Lee,
which is continued here in Seattle
over 50 years after his passing, was everything.
It was everything.
And so I made frequent trips back
to the museum over the years.
You know, Vivian Chan was always happy to introduce me
to everybody, to invite me in, got to meet the staff.
And I eventually spent hours upon hours
at the Wing Luke going through a lot of the books
that Shannon had donated to the Wing Luke.
And so now you can actually go up to the research library
and they, today, have a little bit of an exhibit there.
A small little thing,
where you'll see some of the books
that I actually got to touch, and open, and read
and take notes from as part of this process for
"Water Mirror Echo."
So it feels like a real full circle moment
and I'm very thankful to the Wing Luke Museum
and to the entire staff there for all of the support
that they've given me
and they've given so many of us over the years.
Seattle is a place where Bruce Lee first became
the Bruce Lee that we know.
The teacher, the philosopher,
the fighter for everyone who's ever felt stepped on.
The fighter for justice.
It was here that he worked as a busboy.
It was here that he barely escaped being drafted
into fighting the wars in Asia.
It was here that both as a citizen and as an immigrant,
he made close friends with people
who taught him what it meant to struggle,
to be poor and a minority,
to live in segregated neighborhoods,
to live with people of such a breadth of cultural diversity
in the Central District.
It's here that he dove into the study of Asian philosophy.
Here that he formed his first school as a 19-, 20-year-old.
It was here that he began developing the ideas
that would make him famous as a martial arts renegade.
It was here that he learned how to be an American,
how to be an Asian American. It was also here
that he tried to meet as many girls as he could.
We'll hear about that today.
Trying to impress them with his muscles,
with his coin tricks, with his cha-cha.
And it was here that he met the woman
who would become his wife, Linda.
Bruce Lee arrived in Seattle unformed,
and five years later, he left to become the hero
that we all know today.
So it's amazing and it's powerful
and it just means a lot to be able to be here in Seattle
with you all to talk about Bruce Lee's life.
So what I'm going to do is actually read a little bit
of an excerpt here from the book, if that's okay.
And then to introduce some amazing people
in Bruce Lee's life.
And we're going to talk about Bruce Lee's
time here in Seattle.
Sound good? Yeah? All right. We'll do that then.
Okay.
So actually, I'd say maybe, I don't know,
a quarter to a third of the book, it feels like maybe more,
is set in Seattle.
Because it's so important to understanding who Bruce is
and who he becomes.
And so this part is really kind of a stage setter
and then you'll get to read the multiple chapters
that there are in Seattle afterwards with the book
that you purchase tonight.
Thank you so much. We can eat another week.
Okay. So this is a chapter,
it's called The Power Broker
and it focuses actually a lot on Ruby Chow.
I know Judge Chow is in the audience.
Thank you, Mark, for all of your support.
And we're not going to read that portion tonight.
Although, again, that section meant a lot to me,
but I wanted to do this part as sort of a scene setter.
Okay. So here we go. Chapter 9, The Power Broker.
When Bruce arrived in Seattle on September 3rd, 1959,
he found a city even more beautiful than San Francisco.
Bays and lakes of sparkling indigo
that met a palette knife stroke
of running greens and hemlock fur and cedar.
But he would learn that crystal days like this were fleeting.
Most of the time -- you guys are laughing.
Most of the time, Seattle -- I thought you would be insulted.
Most of the time, Seattle would be shrouded
in a gray mist pelted by cold, steady rain.
A place of intimate distances. Seattle was the kind of town
where, as a community activist Wing Luke once put it,
the first English words every Chinese learned were,
yes, no, and he hit me first. In 1962,
Luke became the first person of color
ever elected to Seattle City Council.
Many credited his victory to an unusual get-out-the-vote
campaign led by Bruce's new boss and landlord, Ruby Chow.
She had organized all the Chinese restaurateurs
to fill their fortune cookies with messages that stated,
Charlie Chan style, the phrase,
Wing Luke says, and concluded, with a little bit of humor
and a little bit of threat, it's wise to vote for Wing Luke.
That was badass.
His electoral breakthrough only highlighted
how racially segregated the city remained.
A century after the first Chinese had arrived,
Seattle was still 95% white. Seattle was the kind of town
where a young Chinese American girl named Sue Ann Kay,
a student at Garfield High School in central Seattle,
could win an essay contest
that offered the opportunity to attend Ballard High School
in North Seattle for a short time.
For six weeks, she and the other prize winners,
a Japanese American girl, a Jewish American boy,
a Black boy and a Caucasian girl,
could enjoy Ballard's new science classrooms,
their new gym for the boys, a remodeled gym for the girls,
and a state-of-the-art auditorium.
Ballard was the kind of school
that boasted all the prerequisites of one
that merit a quote,
all-American rating from educational experts
at the University of Minnesota. At the time,
only three Black students and one Japanese American
were enrolled there as full-time students.
Seattle school administrators sent five white students
from Ballard to Garfield High
and called it an exchange program.
Garfield was the kind of school
where thousands of community members
crowded into student assemblies
to hear Martin Luther King test lines for what would become his
I Have a Dream speech.
And later in 1967, C.
Stokely Carmichael, pre-Kwame Ture,
after winning a free speech battle against the school board,
heralded a new era of black power consciousness.
The school was roughly equal parts white, Black,
Asian, and other.
Sometimes Garfield students marked the boundaries
between each other with racial epithets.
Sometimes they mixed in ways that pointed to the future.
During the 1950s and the 1960s,
Garfield produced cultural visionaries like Quincy Jones,
Ernestine Anderson, Minoru Yamasaki,
Robert Bumps Blackwell, and Jimi Hendrix.
You guys all know this, right? By the '70s,
Black and Asian children would no longer need to compose
exceptional essays to be bused across town
to a wealthy all-white public school.
Seattle was the kind of town where four months after --
or four months before Congress had passed
the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964,
voters defeated by a two-to-one margin of referendum
that would have outlawed housing discrimination.
Nearly all the people of color
in Seattle were confined to the inner city,
an area called the Central District,
from Chinatown in the west to Lake Washington in the east,
and Madison Valley in the north to Rainier Valley
at the southern edge of the city,
cross-shaped strokes of color in the middle of a milk-white map.
Madison Street marked the northern border
between whites and non-whites, Broadway a western one.
Edison Tech, like Ruby Chow's,
was just on the low-fawn side of Broadway.
I actually liked writing that.
When I was writing that, the low-fawn side of Broadway.
But it's -- I know there's going to be a right-winger in here
who's going to tape that and like put it on the net
and just be like, see, do you see?
You see what they say?
But as Hall's teen with the Central District's
multiracial working class, nurses, mechanics,
veterans, those labeled nontraditional students,
Leroy Garcia, whose wife Sherry was attending Edison Tech,
said there were folks who got kicked out of other schools,
or got pregnant, or this or that.
It was a delinquent high school sort of deal.
In the segregated city,
Garfield and Edison were cauldrons of amalgamation
in the borderland between the white and the non-white,
and the wealthy and working-class neighborhoods.
So that's just to set the stage.
And now it's my incredible pleasure to introduce you
to the folks who will be sitting on stage here tonight.
So I want to bring them up one by one.
And first, introduce you to Sue Ann Kay.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-Where do I sit?
-Anywhere you want to. Maybe the front?
Do you want to sit -- or just sit in the middle.
Sit in the middle.
Yeah, one of the middle seats, yeah.
Sue Ann Kay is a legendary organizer from Capitol Hill,
a long-time advocate for the Chinatown International District
and a member of the CID coalition,
aka Humbows Not Hotels,
who have a table here in the house tonight.
Go and visit them. And Egg Rolls.
She is also a singer with the Seattle Raging Grannies.
Sue Ann Kay.
[ Cheers and applause ]
Doug Palmer. [Indistinct] Doug Palmer.
[ Cheers and applause ]
Doug Palmer is a fellow graduate of Garfield High School,
a retired lawyer who has spent most of his life
working across Asia and the Pacific.
And he's the author of "Bruce Lee: Sifu, Friend
and Big Brother," which is going to be on sale over here
by the Wing Luke after the show.
Doug Palmer.
[ Cheers and applause ]
And last but certainly not least in our hearts,
Shannon Lee, the daughter of Bruce Lee.
[ Cheers and applause ]
Shannon's the author of "Be Water, My Friend:
The Teachings of Bruce Lee"
and the co-author of the best-selling YA novel,
"Breath of the Dragon," which is also here on sale.
She's the founder and president of the Bruce Lee Foundation
and the host of the Bruce Lee podcast,
as well as the short form podcast, A Little Leeway.
Shannon Lee.
[ Cheers and applause ]
All right. How are y'all doing tonight?
-Just fine, thanks. -All right.
-You got your mic too, Sue Ann?
-Can you hear me? -Yeah. How are you doing?
-Fine. How are you doing? -Doing great.
Super happy to be here on this panel with you all.
Let's start with you, Sue Ann. -Okay.
-I think you met Shannon's father first of everybody
here on the panel.
-Yes, I was 16 years old.
Now I'm 80. -Wow.
-And so it's dipping back into the memory bank here,
but it's all there.
Yeah. -Let's pull it all out.
How did you meet him?
-It's kind of a long, drawn out story.
My father was the first one who saw Bruce perform
and wanted him to teach my brother.
So he would drive across the lake
to where they were practicing. And Doug will talk about that
because he was also part of that ride early on.
But then he befriended Bruce and invited him into the home.
And they were sparring in the backyard, my brother and Bruce.
And I was watching and Bruce showed me some tricks.
I was really impressed.
And he said, "Well, you should come to my class."
And I said, okay.
And he said, "Just come."
That's the way -- yeah, very enthusiastic.
And my father took me to the Saturday classes until later on.
Linda, who was the first one to drive a car in our group,
also joined and took me to class.
So yeah, that was the beginning and I was hooked.
-Let's back -- there was so much in there.
There's so much.
There's Shannon's mom, like driving guys around town,
like you guys joy riding and stuff
and doing all kinds of carousing in the car.
The AM radio cranked up, I'm sure.
Right? -Yeah.
And you were so poetic about describing Seattle,
but yeah, I've started out at Beacon Hill
and moved to Capitol Hill where Volunteer Park is,
the Arboretum, beautiful places.
I'm sure everyone here is aware.
And yeah,
so this is where Bruce hung out
and took advantage of all those places, too.
But yeah, Chinatown was our place of refuge
where we ate, played.
-You were -- so you were Bruce Lee's first female student.
What was that like?
-Yeah, people often ask, what was that like?
And I -- my reaction is, oh, I was the first female student.
I didn't feel like I was any different
from the rest of the class.
There was something about Bruce that just --
you know, we were there to learn from him.
And he had such a presence that everyone was focused on Bruce.
And he made it a point to go around the class
and show the technique to everyone.
So I never --
you know, I just waited my turn
and he treated me like the rest of the class.
But I really appreciate there was one class
where he gave me an umbrella
and he showed me how I could use it as an extension of my arms.
And that has always stayed with me
because we did the whole routine.
And once the person was on the ground, they added punches.
[ Laughter ]
Not that I ever had to use that umbrella.
But once you're exposed to it, it's still there with you.
-Yeah.
-Well, and everyone's got an umbrella in Seattle, right?
-However, in Seattle,
we pride ourselves on not using umbrellas.
-It's true. It's true. It's true.
I saw it today. -I'm learning so much tonight.
This is awesome. We pulled some pictures.
I don't know if you've seen -- I don't know,
I just wanted to surprise you, actually.
These are great photos of you at the --
I think this is the university district room, right?
Where you guys are practicing.
And that's you on the left over there at the circle.
I think we might have pulled that
from the "Northwest Asian Weekly."
Shout out to the "Northwest Asian Weekly" in the house.
And that's Taky, of course.
Taky Kimura, Bruce is sparring with.
You're looking on, getting ready to do your thing.
And of course, the middle picture with you and Taky.
And the last photo, what's going on with that?
Doug's turned a little red.
-Doug, you should take this one.
-Sue, I was showing how to kick the hell out of somebody
who was trying to punch her.
-And I'm not sure if in that photo,
Bruce used to make little dotted lines so that we would remember,
you know,
how we were supposed to block and then kick right after,
or at the same time.
But that studio, too, was so special.
It was his first formal studio, is what you wrote.
And yeah, and a shout out to the Seattle Bruce Lee Fan Club
that tried to make it historically preserved,
but wasn't successful.
Charlotte's here somewhere and Philip.
-Now, there's one other --
well, there's a lot of details in these photos.
But I'm wondering if the two of you
could describe what it is that you're wearing.
Because you all have uniforms that you all
have for the school.
And yeah, tell us a little bit
about what the uniforms look like,
how they came about.
And yeah,
did you wear them around town challenging people to fight?
-No, we just wore them for class.
And this might have been the first time
that we actually wore some kind of uniform.
It was the first couple of years when I was taking it.
There was -- we just used street clothes and nothing formal.
In fact, this might have been the first time
Bruce really paid rent for a space
because we would practice in Leroy Garcia's yard,
and parks, and parking lots, open parking lots, etc., etc.
-Doug, let's kind of ask you the question of
how you met Bruce Lee. -I was 16, too.
Actually, it was right after my junior year at Garfield.
And I had boxed since fifth grade or so.
And I was in Chinatown for a street fair
that they have every year leading up to see fair.
And I saw this demonstration by a Chinese guy
and several of his students. And I was just blown away.
I mean, I thought I'd boxed a while,
but I'd never seen anything like it.
And I was mesmerized.
And so he did the cheese style,
the sticking hand with the students.
He did a praying mantis form,
which I'd never seen anything like.
Executed perfectly and very crisply.
And the power that he generated was -- I mean, it was awesome.
So I decided that's something I wanted to learn.
And I left the word out among Chinese friends at Garfield
and nothing came of it.
I didn't hear anything for a week or two.
And a week later, there was a Japanese community event,
same kind of street fair,
in front of the Buddhist church called Bon Odori.
And I was milling in the crowd,
felt the tap on my shoulder and turn around.
It was Bruce looking at me, he said,
"Heard you were looking for me." I said, yeah.
I just --
and I quickly let him know I was not challenging him or anything.
Told him I had seen his demonstration in Chinatown
and wanted to learn.
He kind of nodded noncommittally and said,
"Well, we practice on Thursday nights.
You know, if you're -- drop by sometime and we'll see."
Well, he didn't tell me where it was.
But I -- talking to Sue Ann's sister who was in my class,
I found out that their younger brother
was already taking Gung Fu.
And so I hopped a ride with them the next week.
And that's how I started taking lessons from him.
-I wanted to ask you both too, what were the classes like?
Like what -- how did they start? What was he doing in it?
What were you -- obviously you're learning
how to kick people in the groin.
But what are other kinds of things?
Like, what --
just describe what a typical class would have been like.
-Well, we would start out --
sat least when I did it in Leroy's backyard.
We would start with the salutation, the formal --
to Bruce, and he would reciprocate.
And then we would do a lot of exercises
that were mostly for limbering up, stretching exercises.
And we practice certain techniques.
And he would then usually give a short lecture about --
might be about a different Gung Fu school.
We might run across -- it might have been Taoist philosophy.
He was big on peppering, you know, like be water, etc.
That was one of his favorite phrases.
-Bend like the bamboo, right?
Like the willow and spring back stronger than ever.
-Then we'd spar for a while.
-Yeah. -That was it.
-What do you remember?
-Well, I remember the studio in the basement
and it was like going down --
it's where the lobster roll house is.
There's some disagreement which door is the entry.
But I think we went and we verified that it was at 414.
But I think Bruce -- -Four fourteen?
-Fourteen and a half, 8th Avenue.
-Eighth Avenue.
-Yeah, except Taky said it was on the corner.
And maybe Bruce taught in all those places.
But that's the one that felt like --
-One we thought was maybe --
-Yeah, I mean, they fixed it up.
People are living in it now
but then it was a dirt floor with a light bulb.
And I took Linda there
and I was a little worried that she was going to get turned off.
-Instead she got -- -But she kept coming.
And Bruce treated her just like the rest of the students, too.
That was very special. Yeah.
-Okay, so you just dropped that in there.
Let's like back that up and unpack that a little bit, right?
Like you and Linda, how do you go from like,
joyriding in Linda's car on weekends
to actually studying martial arts with --
and he's also very, very young, right?
Like you all were young.
-Yeah.
-You were 16 when you first started.
Doug, you were 16 as well when you first started?
And he was just a couple or a few years older than you.
-He was four years older than me.
-Four years older. Yeah.
So he's 20 years old and he's also teaching a lot of students
who are much, much older than you.
-I think myself and Roger, Sue Ann's younger brother
were the two youngest students in the class.
-Yeah.
-But okay -- -He was like 22.
And like the book that he wrote then,
I remember when he went to pick up extra copies.
And it was all -- I'm not sure if it was hand typed,
but it looks like it's typed with all his drawings
just ahead of all of us.
-What kinds of drawings and things was he writing in these?
-Very detailed everything that, you know,
he had learned in Hong Kong possibly.
But he was, yeah, a real student of Gung Fu.
And that's why we were all mesmerized.
I mean, for a 16-year-old, and you go into a class,
and he says something as simple as the shortest distance
between two points is a straight line.
And I go, yeah.
But then he shows you. Okay. So there's the person's face.
And there's your fist.
The shortest distance is right there.
You know, it's so simple. And so everybody was hooked.
And then the Chi Tsao, to learn about energy,
it was, yeah, just a real a-ha moment.
And through the years,
I've taken that interest in energy medicine.
Somebody showed me that, you know,
if somebody's giving you a bad time,
you can just do a figure eight,
and that'll break that negative energy.
But there's just a lot of things
that came out of what I learned from him with yin and yang.
And I've told the story about acupuncture.
He introduced me to acupuncture,
and I checked with physicians at the U of W asking them,
did they know about acupuncture, and they responded, oh, voodoo?
Yeah.
And so now it's very commonplace,
and even our insurance covers acupuncture.
-We've got to come back to the love story.
In a second, in a second,
because that's how we get Shannon, right?
So yeah. So let's come back to that.
But I just wanted to ask you, Doug.
So you were quite athletic.
You were boxing,
and your brothers were also athletes as well,
your family, a bunch of athletes in your family.
And so I guess two questions.
One is, what was different as you were beginning to learn,
you know, the martial arts here? First question.
And the second question is,
I understand that he decided to announce --
Bruce decided to announce to Ruby
that he was leaving and suddenly showed up on your doorstep.
So I'm wondering if you could tell that story as well.
But first, maybe the, you know, sort of boxing,
American boxing or Western boxing to martial arts thing.
And then if you could tell us a story about
how he ended up with you all,
staying with you all for a while.
-Well, yeah,
the thing that impressed me about Gung Fu
was that it had not only the hands, which boxing had.
And boxing had a lot of rules you had to follow
if you're actually boxing in the ring.
Although my boxing coach knew a lot of dirty tricks
too that he couldn't use in the ring
but were useful in a real fight.
But Gung Fu had the feet, the knees,
the shoulders, I mean, everything.
It seemed like a very full, complete system of martial arts.
So that's what really drew me into it.
As far as Bruce showing up on my family's doorstep,
he invited me after my freshman year in college
to spend a summer in Hong Kong with his family.
And I jumped at the chance,
and his family welcomed me,
treated me like one of the family.
It was really special.
This is after Bruce went back after four years in Seattle,
first time he went back to see his family.
And at the end of the summer, I guess he was --
had decided he did not want to move back in with Ruby Chow.
So when we came back, he -- I went back,
this was at the end of the summer,
back to school on the East Coast.
And he asked my parents if he could stay with them,
and they said, sure.
I mean, how could they say no?
I'd just spent two months with his family in Hong Kong.
So he stayed with my parents for several weeks,
I guess, until that different slide now.
But the slide where Sue Ann and I were sparring.
That -- -This one, yeah.
-The university, you know, university district,
he was just getting that ready.
And he -- there was a place -- apartment in the back of it
that he could sleep in and stuff.
So that was what he was moving into.
-And these pictures here are actually of that summer
that you all were in Hong Kong. Is that right?
-Yes, those were all -- sparring on the rooftop,
one of the rooftops, which was often used.
Hong Kong is very crowded, as many of you probably know.
And rooftops were used commonly for all kinds of stuff.
And the other one was in a park somewhere.
And the one in the middle was in the family apartment.
-Okay, so love story.
So how did you bring Linda into this?
-Well, both of us were at Garfield the very special --
during a very special time, '60s, '61, '62.
And like it was mentioned, Bruce came to the philosophy class.
I'm not sure if to demonstrate or if to talk about philosophy,
most likely both.
And Linda and I were walking down the hall, and she said,
"Who is that guy?"
And I said, oh, that's Bruce, my Gung Fu teacher.
And that was -- I said you should come and see the class.
And she did. [ Laughter ]
-Okay.
-And here we are with Shannon. But --
-I think Shannon and I want more.
Like, what was going on?
Like were sparks flying from the very beginning?
-Well, I have one story to tell.
You know, I was not where she was.
She was leaps and bounds ahead of me.
But we were giving a birthday party in this formal studio
on University Way.
We had a birthday cake, and we had birthday presents.
It was Bruce's birthday and it was after the class.
We were surprising him.
And I think he didn't like all that attention on him.
And he said, let's all cha-cha. Yeah.
And so he turned the music on and, yeah.
-I heard that he taught a lot of people
how to cha-cha in Seattle. -Yeah, he taught us all.
Not quite like how he does it,
but, yeah, we got the basic.
-So then we get to Shannon.
-Ta-da.
-Shannon, actually,
did you have any questions you want to ask of Doug and Sue Ann
about these early days? -Oh, my gosh.
-Of your parents getting together and, you know,
all the stuff that's jumping off.
Your father teaching all of the -- you know,
him learning all of this philosophy
as well at the same time, and.
-Yeah, it's interesting.
I've heard a lot of stories from a lot of his students
over the years, you know, about how he taught.
And you know, I trained with Ted Wong for a number of years.
And he would say, you know, we would just sort of watch him.
Like he would talk a lot
and, you know, convey some philosophy
and all that sort of stuff.
They would do chi-ca, they would do all this sort of thing.
But he said a lot of time
we would just watch him and learn by watching.
Is that your experience?
-Yes, yes.
But he was very good at explaining also,
if you had a question.
-Yeah, yeah. -Okay.
So you weren't sort of left to try and mimic what he was doing?
-No.
-No. Yeah. Yeah. When did you --
-Pretty hard to mimic what he was doing.
-I know.
Well -- Well, I remember Ted sort of like saying like,
yeah, we would just watch him
and try to figure out what he was doing.
-Especially because he could move so fast you
couldn't even see what he was doing.
So he needed to slow down and to explain many of the moves.
-We tried really hard to be as fast.
It was quite an effort, but --
-I don't know. -What? What?
So when you like, hear about these days
and that kind of thing, what's the kind of feeling
that you get out of hearing all these different types
of stories about them?
-I mean, I love it.
I love getting to hear this side, right?
Like, not the movie star, you know, the --
not the person, you know,
battling his way through Hollywood and all of that.
But just like the beginning, the human,
the stepping into being a teacher.
I mean, I guess, did you ever get a sense --
was he nervous ever about teaching?
-You know, I always tell people that Bruce was like --
well, out of the classroom, he was like one of the friends,
one of the family and kind and supportive of people.
Yeah. So that has stayed with me.
I mean, we knew him before fame. -Yeah.
-He did like practical jokes, though, too.
-Oh, yes. This I've heard. Yes.
-Tell us about some of those.
-Well, he could -- he had a lot of things that he did,
but they didn't depend on the person knowing
exactly necessarily that he was being pranked.
We had a one routine in Hong Kong where he would --
I would go up to a policeman
if they had a red bar on their shoulder.
That meant they supposedly spoke English.
And he would have me go up and ask where the --
if he could show me where the Canton theater was.
And there was no such theater.
And the policeman would try to explain, well, the Canton Road.
And no, no, not Canton Road.
And I would then start to talk, you know,
really fast and half gibberish.
And just as the policeman was getting, you know, frustrated,
Bruce would walk up and say, can I help you?
And I'd say, well, we're trying to find the Canton theater.
He goes, oh, I'm going that way, let's -- I'll show you.
And we'd walk off and leave the policeman.
It was kind of stupid things like that.
-It's sketch comedy. -Very high concept, too.
-Yeah. -Yeah. That's great.
-You know, I have to say, it's lovely to hear you say that,
because I remember asking Ted when I trained with him.
I said, what's something about my dad
that a lot of people don't know?
And he said, you know, your father was really kind.
He really liked to try to help people if he could.
Yeah, so -- -One of the things I think
that I understood about his time with you all,
Sue, is that he went to you all for home cooking.
Yeah?
-Yeah, and my lovely mother cooked food --
I think when I read Doug's book here,
he said it was because Bruce needed to have some rice.
-When he was staying at our house.
-Yeah, right. -Yeah.
He would go over to Sue Ann's for some rice.
-And when he's staying with you guys,
he's eating potatoes too, and steaks,
and all that kind of stuff as well.
What were some of the things that you
and your brothers were --
I understand there was a lot of horsing around, too.
There was just a lot of a lot of play that you guys would do.
-When he was staying at --
-Yeah. When he was staying with you guys.
-I was back East in college. -Oh, okay.
-He shared a room with my younger brother,
who was then a football player at Garfield.
And my brother -- according to my brother,
he would crack jokes,
corny jokes all night and then laugh
and crack himself up under the covers.
And -- So they fooled around quite a bit, yeah.
-The original dad joke teller.
-Yeah, the original dad joke, even before he's your dad.
-That's right. -Yeah.
-I also wanted to mention
that he taught the Boy Scouts in Seattle.
-Yes, he did.
-That was part of the link up with my father.
But I spoke with my brother recently
and I was trying to pick his brain.
And what he shared with me
was that Bruce taught him how to draw.
And then he sent me a picture of a Western person
with a cowboy hat on and said, with a patch over his eye.
And that's what Bruce taught him how to draw.
-A pirate cowboy.
-I also -- this is a time in which,
you know, a lot of folks across the US are learning karate.
It's come back from Japan,
you know, via soldiers and via immigrants
who have come to the US.
And yet there's not as much kind of emphasis on Gung Fu.
And in karate, you know, it's sort of formal teaching,
but that there was not necessarily a lot of philosophy
all the time in it.
And that this is sort of something
that you were talking about.
I think when we were when we were meeting Doug about you
were taking notes in class
and writing down these different types of ideas.
Can you talk us through a little bit of that?
Like, how did that strike you?
You're a student here
and you're getting a heavy dose of Chinese philosophy,
Asian philosophy.
How did you -- were you confused?
Was it like, wow, this is really mind--
like how did that -- that hit?
-Well, I was fascinated.
I mean, it was something I'd never been exposed to before.
So especially the philosophical parts were amazing to me
that be like water, be like a mirror, be like an echo.
You know? All that was fascinating to me.
-And you were saying that it opened up a lot for you.
That it helped you back to,
kind of, understand sort of foundational things
that you had already had around you and your family.
-He gave me a book, the "Tao Te Ching."
And not that I read it from cover to cover,
but I flipped through -- -It's a short Sue Ann.
-Yeah, but -- yeah, and he --
but I remember looking at the pictures of him
telling me about how the water can wear down a rock
and just little nuggets like that.
But also a nugget that has really stuck with me
was he told all of our class that, you know,
if we can avoid a confrontation, that would be the way to go.
And I mean, we call it de-escalation now,
but he was ahead of his time again.
-And it feels like this is the moment
where he's going from being somebody
who just loves fighting,
to somebody who's understanding the purpose
and the intention for learning how to fight self-defense,
fighting to protect your folks, fighting for justice.
Would you say that?
-Yeah.
And the other piece that has stuck with me
is just he taught us to be aware of our surroundings.
I guess that's part of emptying your mind.
You empty your mind,
but you're still aware of what's around you.
-Yeah. -Sorry, go ahead.
-I'm just curious, what kind of student was my mom in class?
-I didn't pay a lot of attention to her.
She was right in there, you know.
Yeah, and I mean, she was real physical.
We were both -- well, she was a cheerleader so,
yeah, she was in top condition.
-Mm-hmm.
Even to this day,
like she works out way more than I do, even today.
And she -- and I think like, wow, what a great match.
-That's what I really enjoyed in your book, Jeff,
because, you know, as I read it, I wanted to read about Linda.
But just her strength and her smarts came through.
There's a lot of credit that goes to her support and wisdom.
-Yeah.
Well, I think you were the one
who had told me she graduated the top of her class.
-Top 10.
-Top 10, yeah, and -- of your class.
And then she immediately becomes like,
one of the top students as she's studying with --
alongside you all.
And yeah, yeah. It's a beautiful thing.
-Yeah.
-And it's not often talked about with your mom.
-It's true, yeah.
-Just how badass she is. -Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
-Doug, I wanted to ask you a little bit more about later.
I know that Sue Ann,
after Bruce leaves, you didn't see him for a while.
But Doug -- and Doug, you as well,
you kind of fell out of touch when Bruce left.
But you reconnected in Hong Kong much later in the 1970s.
I wonder if you could tell us how that came about
and what had transpired in between.
Well, maybe not what had transpired,
but how were things different
when you reconnected with Bruce and with Linda?
-It had been several years.
I went back east to college and then law school, got married.
And my wife and I went to Japan.
She's Japanese.
And I worked in Tokyo in a law firm.
And by then, as far as I knew, Bruce was in Hollywood.
"The Green Hornet" had been on the screen, etc.
And the last I had heard, he was in Hollywood.
But I had an occasion to go down to Hong Kong on business
from Tokyo and I wanted to look up the old -- the family.
So I went to the apartment on Nathan Road
where I'd spent the summer with his family.
And it was a primary school or something there.
And I looked in the phone book for every everybody
whose name I could remember, couldn't find him, so --
-This is like nine years later after you're gone.
-This was in '70 -- about a year -- yeah, '72.
-Seventy-two. Yeah. -Yeah.
And so I had kind of given up
and I was talking to an accountant in his office.
And I mentioned I was looking for an old friend.
And he said, well, who's the friend?
I said, well, he's a very good friend,
but you would know who he is.
Bruce Lee, you probably wouldn't know him,
but his father was a very famous movie star.
And this guy looks at me really weirdly.
He said, you say you're a good friend.
And I said, yeah.
He reaches over to the coffee table and pulls out a newspaper,
opens to the movie section,
full page out of Bruce's second movie
that had just hit in Hong Kong
and outgrossed every other movie up to that point.
He said, he's here in Hong Kong. I said, oh, my God.
You know, so I called the movie studio
and said I was an old friend.
And please, you know, can I talk to Bruce?
Well, yeah, we'll give him a message.
Give me your name.
And so I gave him my Chinese name that Bruce had given me
[speaks Chinese]
which is kind of loose transliteration of Doug Palmer.
And five minutes later, the phone rings and it's Bruce.
And so we re-hooked up. We stayed in --
my wife and I stayed a couple extra days in Hong Kong
and actually at Bruce's house and Bruce and Linda's house.
And it was great.
-Yeah. -You asked what had changed?
Not much.
There was still corny jokes and --
But, you know, it was obvious that fame was --
he was having to be a different person to some extent,
because of the notoriety that he had.
-Tell us a little bit more about --
so Shannon, well, you got to meet Shannon then,
I guess, probably for the first time.
Shannon remembers all of that, I'm sure.
-Crystal clear. I mean, I do remember --
my memories really start in Hong Kong.
You know, I was born in Los Angeles,
but my memories start in Hong Kong.
And I remember our house that we lived in, in Kowloon Tong area.
And I remember going to visit, you know, Golden Harvest,
visit him at the set and Golden Harvest
and just little flashes of memory like that.
And it's not -- you know, I was so little,
but my first memories are, you know, of the dogs that we had.
The dogs and cats
that we had around our house and all of that.
Another thing about Bruce Lee, he loved animals.
We always had animals.
And yeah, so Hong Kong to me
is like -- is home in a way,
you know, like I --
when I go there, I feel a real connection to the city.
You know, as you know it has like its own scent, you know?
And when I smell that smell, I just am like,
I feel really comforted by it, actually.
Yeah. So Hong Kong is very special to me in that way.
-I guess this question is for you, Shannon.
You've really put a lot
into the Seattle community over the years.
You're on the board of the Wing Luke Museum.
You're working with the Seattle Children's Theatre.
You all are going to be putting up a play
next year on your father.
-Yeah. February 19th it premieres.
-It's called Young Dragon.
-Young Dragon, a Bruce Lee story.
-Heard it here first, yeah.
But you've invested a lot in Seattle.
And I'm wondering, sort of, what's -- you know,
what's sort of behind this commitment
that you made this investment that you've made to Seattle?
-You know, Seattle is -- even though I don't live here,
it's very special to me.
After my father died, we came back to Seattle, actually.
And I went to a year of preschool here in Seattle
before we moved back down to Los Angeles.
And of course, my father is buried here.
And now, of course, my brother is also buried here.
So there's always a pull to Seattle for me.
And I know it was a very special time in their lives.
My mom is from here, right?
So it's home for her.
And so there is this pull.
And interestingly, you know, we didn't come up to Seattle a lot
when I was growing up because, you know,
we just didn't travel that much.
And so I didn't get to spend a lot of time in my, sort of like,
elementary, high school sort of years and into college.
But it was always a place we would come occasionally
because this is where my father is, you know?
And so just knowing that this is the birthplace of my family,
right, I have always felt a strong connection.
Even though, as I said, I'm not local or native in any way.
In the sense of like,
I don't know the city all that well and everything,
but my heart -- there's a piece of my heart here.
And actually, you know, more and more as time goes on,
I'm trying to figure out ways to be more connected to the city
and to do more work here.
And I'm really just at the beginning of that, really.
I mean, I am --
I've been on the board of the Wing Luke
now for just under two years.
We've had an exhibit there for several years.
And it's probably been almost close to 10 years
that we've had something there.
And now we're working with Seattle Children's Theatre
and through the Bruce Lee Foundation.
We want to bring our programming here.
And so we're just -- I'm just -- I have to say,
I mean, this is kind of a out there story.
But the last handful of times over the last several years
that I've been up here, first of all, it's a strange experience.
Because when I go to visit my father and my brother,
I have never once in my whole life
managed to be there by myself.
There's always somebody there.
I might get like a minute
and then somebody shows up, you know?
But I start --
there is such an energetic pull there at the graveside.
Like, it's this vortex, you know,
and I've had some really special happenstance experiences.
Like, I was renting an Airbnb somewhere.
I was here for doing some stuff and I just --
you know, the executive director of the foundation and I,
we just went on a walk.
And we're like, oh, where's this trail?
Oh, where are we going now?
And we ended up down at Lake Washington.
And we're standing there looking out the water.
And I look up in the sky and there's this cloud form
and it is absolutely in the shape of a dragon.
-Wow.
-And I take a picture of it and I'm like, whoa.
And then later that evening I'm showing him like,
look at this picture.
And somebody says, you know,
that picture of your dad meditating on the dock.
They're like, it's right there. I know.
And I was like, do, do, do, do, do, do.
Like, what's happening right now?
So -- So yeah,
I just feel like there's this really energetic,
heartfelt connection. And, you know,
my father is buried here because my mom and dad
always said that one day when they were ready to retire,
that they would come back here.
-Wow.
Thank you for telling those stories.
I think we want to open it -- Courtney,
do we have the questions coming in via the QR code?
Maybe we can start going through some of those questions.
I just wanted to say that I,
as somebody coming in from the outside,
born in Honolulu, Hawaii.
And then pretty much coming of age in the Bay Area as well.
San Francisco Bay Area. I feel that feeling, too.
And, you know, that's partly why so much of the book
is dedicated to Seattle.
And we're in a room here full of people who knew your father.
-Yeah. -You know?
Or were influenced by your father or both.
And yeah, there's definitely a different kind of feeling here
in thinking about it.
And in thinking about, you know,
where he was when he arrived here as an 18-year-old.
And then becoming your teacher, the teacher to both of you,
even though he's just a couple of years older.
And then learning all of these different types of things
that he then takes with him to Hollywood,
where he hits the bamboo ceiling.
Needs to go to Hong Kong
and then come back in order to crack it.
And it's just really --
I think we all kind of felt that when you said
that your parents were always intending to end up back here.
Yeah. -Yeah, yeah.
So can I ask you a question?
-Me?
-Yeah.
-Oh. -I'm curious.
I mean, we're here because of you,
because of this book that you've written.
I'm curious what the journey of writing this book
was like for you.
And how is this book different,
if it is, than other books that you've written?
-That I've written?
I remember when we first met and I had come to you,
I was just really interested in all these linkages.
There's these hip-hop links, you know,
between Bruce's youth and just kids growing up in the Bronx
in the late '60s until 1970s, who started this culture
that we have come to know it as hip-hop.
And so thinking about these kids, you know,
who are like coming over the border
after the Chinese Civil War into Hong Kong
and getting into these fight clubs
and, sort of, forming this ritual type of culture
where they're transforming all of their energies,
all of their anger into actually a creative culture in many ways.
You know?
So I likened the Bamo fight culture
to thinking about the rise of hip-hop
and the competitions that B-Boys and B-Girls would be having,
and graffiti artists would be having,
and DJs trying to out sound each other.
It was just really interesting.
I'm attracted to these stories
where these kids who are all the way on the outside,
or just people who are all the way on the outside,
get creative and completely transform everything.
That's sort of the way I came to the story.
But I think that the journey that I took
was to really find out and learn about why your father has --
still has such an impact on us today.
And it's because of who he became here,
I think, in Seattle. You know?
I think it's because of his journey
into becoming an Asian American,
before there was a term for Asian American.
And so that's what the book ended up kind of being about.
-Yeah.
-Okay, no more questions for me.
Let's see if there's questions from the audience.
-My question.
Do you have plan make it movie -- new movie
where play your father, like ideas?
Like, kind of --
-Oh, I got a lot of ideas. -I can verify that.
-Yeah. -A lot of great ideas.
-Yeah. Yes. Thank you. Yes.
I have a number of film and TV projects in development.
We are -- we have been working for a long time on a new biopic,
you know, biographical film about his life.
I don't know when that's going to come together.
I've also been working on an animated TV series.
So yeah.
Which is really special and really an important medium,
actually, because in animation, Bruce Lee gets to be Bruce Lee.
And he gets to do whatever we can dream him
to do in animation. Right?
Because in a biographical film, it's an actor playing him.
Right?
Or if it's something based on an idea that he created,
he's not actually in it.
It has his imprint.
It has this energy like "Warrior," the TV series,
if you've seen that.
But yeah, we have a number of film and TV projects,
including we're trying to get "Breath of the Dragon,"
the book that I co-authored, made into a film also.
So we got we got lots cooking.
-Thank you very much. Thank you.
-Hi, my name is Akio Wong.
So my question is just as a, you know, freshman in college
that's in University of Seattle,
double majoring in -- well,
planning to double major in psychology and philosophy.
I wonder where that came from.
But anyways, so, well, my question is,
as a young martial artist with way too much ambition and energy
to know what to do with.
What do you think would be Bruce Lee's
one message to a young martial artist like me
and also to many martial artists in the world today?
-What a question. Doug? Yes. Thank you.
Thank you for that question.
Do you want to start and Sue Ann can follow?
-Yeah.
I'd say be open to everything you come across.
Be ready to learn from whoever you meet and practice,
practice, practice.
-Yeah, I got a lot of inspiration
just finishing this book.
Yeah, there's a lot of messages in it.
Learn from Bruce.
-Yeah, and I would add, you know,
my dad said everything that he learned about life,
he learned through the practice of martial arts.
And you know,
part of the work of what we do through the Bruce Lee Foundation
is to empower youth mental health through martial arts,
mindfulness, community based in his teachings.
And I know for myself
that what I learned in martial arts was how to,
you know, remain calm in the midst of the storm.
Right?
How to manage your own inner life and how to know yourself.
I mean, one of the things I talk about a lot
is my father said for real Gung Fu men,
the kicks and punches are aimed at yourself.
They're not aimed at others.
And so that is the work of a lifetime, you know?
So everything they said, like,
just keep going and deepening your understanding.
And where can you make those connections
between the physical, the mental, the energetic, life?
You know, all of it. It's all one thing in the end.
It's all an ecosystem.
And I think actually martial arts is
a really beautiful practice for learning how to live
and engage with life.
If you -- and it sounds like, you know,
psychology and philosophy, it sounds like you're deep in it.
So yeah, just keep -- just as he would write a lot of times,
he'd say, keep on blasting.
So just keep at it.
-Thank you so much.
-I'd like to add... -Thank you for that question.
-...on the psychology and philosophy,
the history to -- we've come a long way.
There's ethnic studies now.
We have another book on one of the tables written
by one of the Raging Grannies here, Juanita Lott.
And, you know, there's a lot of history
that brought us to where we are.
-Book on the San Francisco State Third World Strike.
Yeah. -Yeah, the strike.
-Yes, thank you.
-For ethnic studies. -For ethnic studies, yes.
-My question would be about the braided chain
or stream that is the Dao. In your book,
you mentioned Fook Yeung bringing young Bruce to Seattle.
I had the opportunity to meet Fook Yeung
because he was best friends with Sherlou, who was a Daoist abbot.
So in your comments there,
you say that -- that Fook Yeung taught him internal Gung Fu
but it's -- that's like two words.
So I know --
do you know anything more about what Fook might
have been teaching Bruce
as opposed to just the Red Boat Wing Chun that Fook had studied?
-No, actually, I don't.
-Okay.
-I'm sorry. -No, that's okay.
-Yeah, I wish I did. I wish I did.
You know, I'll say for me in terms of my research process,
there were so many people that I didn't get to meet.
And in many cases, I got to talk to their students or Andy.
Andy Kimura is in the house.
-Is he? -Taky Kimura's -- yes.
-Yes, he is. Right over there. -With all their children.
And so, you know, I'm part of that,
I guess, third generation of Bruce --
writers about Bruce Lee.
But that's a great question.
I wish I knew the answer.
-We're the grandchildren of your father.
So I've been teaching Wing Chun now for 32 years.
My best friend is a retired police officer trained with Taky
for like over 20 years being part of the police department.
Fook Yeung also trained Jesse Glover
and a bunch of his people and stuff like that.
I met Wally Jay through James DeMile.
He was my first Gung Fu teacher.
So anyway, there's a bunch of braided streams
of the Dao all --
-Love that. Thank you. Thank you for bringing that up.
Yes, sir.
-Yeah. Thank you. -Appreciate that.
Thank you. -Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I'll just quickly add to that that, you know,
the letter that my father wrote to Pearl when he was around 21,
which many of you may have read.
You know, he talks about being able to feel
this innate power within himself.
And that he could hold it in his hand
and that it was, you know, more than faith.
And you know, all of these things.
And in a way,
when I hear that phrase like internal Gung Fu,
I wonder, like,
to what extent is he talking about really being
able to develop the Chi, the life force,
the internal energy that he was able to manipulate
and express so beautifully and devastatingly?
-Yeah.
You're talking about the letter that he wrote to Pro Cho.
-Yeah.
-It's a powerful letter,
and we reprint a fair amount of it in this in this book.
But yeah, just to say that I think one of the things
that -- and this is maybe going to get a little bit
into too much martial arts.
But what he offered to folks,
you know, during this particular period was a,
sort of, curiosity about the internal arts,
about, you know, the sort of so-called soft arts.
And also this idea of
how to try to work all the different angles.
I think this -- and to try to test them out. Right?
And to see what would really work.
And I think that this is what's happening in the classes.
But I don't know enough about, you know,
what you're asking to be able to answer you sufficiently in that.
-More importantly... -Yeah.
-...the United States has preserved a bunch
of Chinese traditions.
-Absolutely, yeah.
-We have a whole bunch of the Gautam Jain tradition
from California, the Daoist school down in San Diego,
and all those guys.
All those people are interrelated.
But we've preserved things
that basically don't exist in China anymore
because they were outlawed or banned, and --
-Right. That's right. Yeah. Thank you for that.
Yeah, we'll take these last two questions actually here
and then we're going to need to wrap up.
Go ahead. -Okay, great. Thanks.
As we all know, women hold up half the sky,
if not most of it.
-Yes.
-And so I would love to ask Sue, what is her experience
with Linda being the partner of Bruce Lee?
And who was she to him?
-Linda was the rock, I would say.
I read in your book how when he was really down or was rejected,
that she would come and do the telephone calls.
So she had a -- she was the yin to his yang,
or yang to his yin,
but -- so it was a couple that -- a power couple.
-Yeah.
-Okay. -Hi, this is for Jeff.
-Okay.
-There was a book about Jimi Hendrix
that said Jimi Hendrix and Bruce Lee
met at a raider Avenue bowling alley.
I just wondered if you knew anything about that.
-Wow.
-Or as far as you know, did they ever do they ever meet?
-You know, I didn't find anything to that extent.
I think that if I had been there and taken a picture,
that would have been amazing.
I mean, did they bowl? Did they both bowl?
Is that what you were saying?
-They were too poor to even go into the bowling alley.
They just happened to meet each other there.
That's what the source says. -Wow.
Let's find out -- where, Imperial Lanes did you say?
-It was a book by Charles Cross.
-Oh, Charles. Okay. -Yeah.
-Charles does his research.
And so --
-But he's not the one that said it.
But he quoted somebody that said that.
-Oh, he quoted somebody that said that?
Okay. Yeah. -Okay.
Whoo, world's colliding.
What a powerful moment.
I think that the whole universe could have come
to an end right then.
-They have the same birthday too.
-Right. Yeah.
And that they were in the same neighborhood,
that they came out of the same neighborhood
still trips me the heck out.
Yeah. Thank you all so much.
I actually want to ask this one last question,
if I may, of all of you, which is,
you know, we're living in a moment
in which there's a lot of division, strife, rancor.
A lot of the wrong people are on the wrong side of the weapons,
guns, and forces.
What do you think is the best of the lessons
that you learn that you might be able to equip,
especially younger folks with, for now?
I notice that there's two generations here,
and then there's two generations after us
who are fans of Bruce Lee.
But what have you learned that you might be able to give
and sort of impart to, especially younger generations
that you learn from Bruce Lee for this moment?
That's for Doug and Sue Ann.
And actually also for Shannon.
-He was epitomized,
open mindedness and hope to all kinds of people.
His students were from all walks of life.
And he used to say,
I don't want to be thought of as a Chinese or an American,
but as a human being, because we're all basically the same.
And he really lived that. He walked that walk.
-Yeah.
-I hang around with a lot of young people
who have grown up and they call themselves the elders.
Not now, not elders, but young elders, yelders.
-Yelders, oh God, okay.
-But what I see in the group
is that they have their own skills, their artistry,
their mastery of organizing.
And let's see where I'm going with this.
But one of them said to me,
there's so many that could become like Bruce Lee,
if we weren't yanking them off the streets
and putting them in detention, and deportation.
And that -- That really resonated with me.
Yeah.
-You know, I love listening to the both of you
talk about the things that you learned from my father.
And I'm so grateful that he was such a recorder
of his own experience.
So that I also got to learn from him,
even though he died when I was four years old.
And so I do feel like I've also learned from him in some way.
And I think more and more
the thing that I work on
and that he talked about all the time is self-actualization.
Right?
But more easily said,
I think it's that you change the world by changing yourself.
And all of the things we've said here tonight,
you know, about how he just was who he was.
You know, people ask my mom all the time,
well, what was Bruce Lee like?
And she said, you know, the guy you see in the movies?
He was like that. You know?
-That sounds like a very Daoist thing to say.
-It's a -- But I think what she meant is like,
yes, he was acting and putting -- you know,
playing a role in all of that.
But that charisma, that light, that energy,
that you know, wanting to play and have fun and joke and laugh
and, you know, all of that.
And he was fierce and intense and like,
that's what he was like, you know?
And so I think,
you know, it's what he would say,
which is his work on being who you really are,
and then just walk in the room as who you really are.
And it takes courage to do that, you know?
And you've got to develop that courage because,
you know, just as you said so beautifully just now, like,
if Bruce Lee hadn't been so committed
and dedicated to himself,
if he hadn't believed in himself when nobody else believed in him
and nobody else was giving him a chance,
then we wouldn't be here.
We wouldn't be talking about him today.
So we all have that ability. But we got -- a lot of times
we got to get a lot of junk out of the way first
in order to do that.
Yeah. Can I ask you, what have you learned from Bruce Lee?
-Well played, Shannon. Well played.
I mean, you know, I think you all dropped the mic.
You know, I'm just struck.
You know how long I've been working on this book?
-Yes, I do.
-And, and -- -Is it 10 years?
-It's a lot longer than that,
but it's interesting
that this -- this book should come out now
in this particular environment.
Like, even if it came out like whatever,
you know, like 12 months ago.
Right? As opposed to now.
But I think just like what you all said,
you know, Bruce was open.
Bruce was somebody who, you know,
I don't think that he was colorblind,
so much as he was understanding that the deep connections
that we need to make are direct to each other.
Right?
And I think that, you know, during the pandemic, right?
When we were feeling very vulnerable,
when we were feeling attacked, when we were feeling afraid,
that's when the image of your father
comes back up in huge ways.
And that was what, kind of, gave me a focus to be able to say,
oh, that's what the book needs to kind of be about.
And so, you know, for me,
it's just to be able to see in his journey
to self actualization,
that he actually becomes a way
for all of us to be able to understand
how we can get to who we need to be.
And that we have to move out of the way all of these structures
that are keeping us back. Right?
That we have to be continually open to others,
to reach out for solidarity.
And that that is all part of this process,
like you say, of becoming more and more human.
And so Bruce Lee's message is no more different
than what we've learned from James Baldwin, you know,
or, you know, or Octavia Butler,
any of the other folks
who have just urged us to become more human, so --
-I have a question for you.
-Wait, we're supposed to end this right now.
-This is an easy one.
-It's like we're over -- it's literally like --
-No, this is an easy one. -Oh, okay.
-Was it you that said
that we wouldn't have Bruce Lee without birth right citizenship?
-Well, yeah, because he was born in the US
and he has then, you know, the rights to be a citizen
because of the Black freedom struggle.
Right? That results in the 14th Amendment.
And because of that,
we get to this point now where people want to take that away.
So if we are looking at,
you know, President Trump's executive order,
Bruce and his parents would have been deported right away.
Right?
And that executive order is still being fought
in Supreme Court.
We're going to see, kind of, what happens because of that.
But, you know, this is something
that some people haven't wanted to talk about that.
I've put it out there and people have been like,
well, Bruce was an American, end of story.
You know? It's not that simple. -No.
-Right?
People are like, debating whether Bruce was an immigrant
or an American online and, you know, in these places.
And I'm like, duh, he was both. -Both, yeah.
-And the fact that we can't have a discussion about
how he is and many of us are, you know,
both now in this particular political climate, is telling.
Yeah?
So yeah, so I think that in that way,
if you really look at your father's story,
it still points us towards looking at these questions of
how we get free and remain free. Yeah.
-It is -- you know, on his gravestone it says,
your inspiration continues to guide us
toward our personal liberation.
-Right.
-Yeah. -Yeah.
-So -- -He was about freedom.
-Yeah. -Yeah.
-And that's a great place to end it.
Thank you so much, Doug Palmer, Sue Ann Kay, Shannon Lee.
Thank you all for coming tonight.
-And Jeff Chang.
[ Applause ]