ENTER the LITLLE DRAGON

In the early mornings hours of November 27,1940, a young Eurasian mother gave birth to her fourth child in a crowded maternity ward of San Francisco’s Chinese Hospital.

 The Chinese Year of the dragon was drawing to its chilly close, and already winter winds were gusting down the seven hills of the golden city, yhrough the narrow streets of Chinatown, and out across the bay. Lying in her hospital bed, the young Shanghai born woman felt lost and alone, a stranger in a land cut off from family and frieds. Her husband was hundred of miles to the north, working to earn money to feed the new moth of his family. Her three elder children were lodged with relatives half way around the world in Hong Kong.

As some small comfort in those dark hours, the woman christened her new born son Li Yeun Kam – ‘Protector of San Francisco’. Eight years later he would becomes known to a hardful of Chinese film fans as Siu lung – ‘Litlle Dragon’. Later still, his name would blaze from cinema marquees across the gobe as Bruce Lee.

Looking back to that busy pre war hospital room, it seems that the infant Lee’s destiny was cast from the first hour of his birth. His parents, Li Hoi chuen and his wife Grace, were not just another of the tens of thousands hopeful Chinese couples who had flocked to the China towns of the new world eager for a share in the American Dream. Rather, they were working tourist, part of performing troupe from the Cantonese Opera a form of Chinese theatre comparable to Vaudeville. Born on the road between curtain calls, it was perhaps inevitable that a little of the greasepaint would rub off on their son.

Bruce wielding the stick in Kid Cheung.’Ever since he was a little boy he always liked to be on top.

Li Hoi chuen stareed as the Opera’s lead singer and stand up comedian, and delighted by his father antics, the young Bruce came close to the joining the show himself. It’s one dimensional, but it’s really stylised and very formal……and very groovy indeed,’ was how his described his father profession many years later. Even before he had finished breast feeding. Bruce Lee faced up to his first camera as a squirming pink extra in the movie, Tears of San Francisco. Nobody remember today if Bruce displayed a flair for acting superior to any other dribbling infant of the same age, a like a rock dropped From the Golden Gate Bridge, Tears of San Francisco has sunk without trace.

At the age of three, his parents tour of the United States at an end, Bruce made the first of his many journeys between the country of his birth and his adopted homeland, Hong Kong. Later, a Hong Kong jourmalist would describe Lee as a mid Pacific man who has been back and forth across that ocean enough times to make Ferdinand Magellan green with envy.

Compared with many thousands of other Chinese children Bruce’s early life in the British high rise colony was both secure and comfortable. His father was financially well off, easily able to afford homes in the more exclusive part of the city. By the time he could walk, Bruce had two brothers (Robert and Peter) and Two sisters(Phoebe and Agnes) to keep him amused, togetherwith another boy whom his father had chosen to adopt. At school he found he was popular `with other youngsters. ‘ He was always talking and liked to make jokes so he always had lots of friends.’ recall his brother Peter, now a scientist at Hong Kong’s Royal Observatory.

Besides his natural extrovert charm, Bruce had something more going for him to boost his prestige in the playground – he was the boy in the movies. With the help of his father’s professional contacts, Bruce had been picked at the age of six for the child lead in the Cantonese tearjerker, The Birth of Mankind, an unlikely take of a boy who runs away to climb a magic mountain and winds up back in his hometown picking pocket. One day,he picks his father’s pocket by mistake and in thev pursuit thjat follows, is over run by a truck.

Even to undiscriminating Hong Kong audience, the film flopped like a wet nodlle and its only historical interest lies in that in set the indelible pattern for almost every one of Bruce’s next seventeen films. Year earlier, on a separate continent, another thought midget by the name of Mickey Rooney had made a fortune for his producers by delighting American mothers as Lewis Stone’s screen son, Andy Hardy. After Rooney,child roles with precocious kids outwitting their elders became the rage in the West,and when Hong Kong producers found that the formula worked just as successfully with Asian mum, Bruce was straight-jacketed in the screen image of an Oriental Andy Hardy.

Unfortunately for Lee affcionados,most of those early gems have long since disappeared from the Chinese movie circuit. In those days, Hong Kong film companies were opening and closing faster than swing doors.And when the Cantonese language film industry collapsed under the competition of the more popular Mandarin production, all that remained of Bruce Lee the child star was a scrap book of yellowed film stills and a hardful of even yellower memories.

With The Birth of Mankind turning audience away in their thousands, it was undoubtedly more luck than reputation that scored Bruce a second chance at child stardom. Deciding to gamble, the movie moguls of the cast him as a cute sidekick to greatest Cantonese film comedian of the decade, E Chow Shui in the film Kid Cheung. The movie was a sellout, and at the tender age of eight, ‘The Little Dragon’, as he came to be known after Kid Cheung, had established his credentials.

Thought he had been instrumential in unlocking the door to the film world for his young son, Lee’s father was far from happy with having another actor around the house.b A man with a solid, middle-class future already plotted out for his boy, Li Hoi-cheun urged Bruce to set his ambition on a more stable career. ‘Watch out,’ he warned. There are many complications of you if you stick around the movie business.’ He never spoke a truer word.

But however much he disapproved, li Hoi-chuen could never actually bring himself to forbid Bruce from accepting further roles. Maybe, after treading the boards himself for a lifetime, the old man was a secretly pleased that someone in his family was carrying on atradition. Perhaps he had even glimpsed a flicker of the hidden talent his remarkable son would one day display. Certainly Bruce’s elder brother Peter had seen something. ‘I think I always thought Bruce would eventually become a big star.’ He recalls.’Even when he made his early films back in Hong Kong they always popular.’

Hong Kong is a thought town. Rising like a Chinese Manhattan out of the sea, more than just 31/2 million people are packed into just 30 square miles of towering brick and steel jungle. In one suburb alone – Mong Kok – four hundred thousand people crowd shoulder into each square mile- ten times the population density of Tokyo. Survival for most in this city with the highest property values in the world is a matter of working long, hard hours every of every year. In Hong Kong, perhaps more than in any country, you work to eat.

There is one other way of making money in Hong Kong, as in all cities. Crimes is a universal proffesion and in Hong Kong especially there a bound hundreds of teen age street gangs and muggers, packs of junior hoodlums all out for cheap thrills and some extra pocket money.’In any community with more than four million people in a relatively small space, a major concern of the government is public order,’ reads the 1974 Hong Kong Government’s annual report. ‘ The year saw a marked increase in the number of gang fights which frequently resulted in serious injuries. In many cases the fights were caused by Triad factions attempting to expand their areas of criminal influence. Many active Triad gangster were convicted from homicide to blackmail.’ In that particular aspect of Hong Kong’s social behavior, not much appears to have changed in the past twenty years. By the time he had reached his early teens, Bruce Lee had his own gang.

Many of the youngsters who find themselves roaming the streets in mobs during their youth pass through the delinquent stage and setlle down to the long hours necessary to prosper in their overcrowded, over competitive city. Others, the thouger ones, make a lifetime career out of the gangs by joining a shadowy organization gangs by joining a shadowy organization known as the Triad Society-the Mafia of Hong Kong.

Ever since he was a little boy he always liked to be on top,’remember Peter Lee. He was not afraid of anything at all and was always having fight.’As Bruce grew up, his thoughtness and reputation for knuckle justice grew with him. Invetably he graduated from schoolyard squabbles to street gangs and by his eleventh for twelfth birthday was leader of his own pack. With Bruce, it wasn’t the money which lured him out onto the streets. He just loved fighting.

Bruce was a thug,’ says Golden Harvest film excecutive Andre Morgan.’ He was a little villain.’ And Lee himself never hid the fact. I was a punk and went looking for fights,’he told Black Belt magazine years later.’ We used chains and pens with knives hidden inside.’

By the age of thirteen he had turned his back on film world as his father had urged,and was carving out a new career for himself in the back alleys of Hong Kong. Ideal Triad material, Lee came perilously close (as he himself conceded) to winding up a peety gangster throwing punches for the Society. As with everything he did, Lee had to to be the best, and establish himself as the best gang leader meant being able to whip all comers. With this in mind, Bruce Lee signed o n for a course in the lethal Chinese martial art Kung Fu.

In actual fact Bruce at thirteen was no stranger to the martial arts. His father like thousand of other midlle-aged Chinese health enthusiasts, was a practitioner of T’ai-chi ch’uan. T’ai chi,as it is known in the West,is an ancient Chinese mental and phisycal discipline dating back 1,500 years to the Taoist Monk. The key to the Tai chi lies in the softness and slow movement of the exercise,which combine to achieve a balance between the mind, the body and the spirit.

‘T’ai-chi ch’uan movements are so varied so as to put into play every part of the body, from the smallest joints to the largest muscles,with harmonious design and graceful pattern,’explain instructor Daniel Lee in the March 1974 issue of the American martial arts magazine Inside Kung Fu. ‘The result is growing health suppleness in the joints, your blood is stimulated, the nervous system is activated and the respitory system is exercised.’

A part from growing health.tai-chi, according to Prof.Lee is also a path to spiritual bliss. With the harmony of body and mind, the chi (life energy) to flow. When the flow of chi is free and uninhibited, spiritual energy begins to develop, which ultimately leads tone to the attainment of spiritual enlightenment. Through practice of T’ai-chi chuan,one develops deep inner awareness, he is touch with himself and the universe.

In the recent years, Tai-chi has become a hard core cure amongst Western youth seeking a little more spiritual development a long side their phisycal exercises than push-ups can provide. Back in 1953 however, not too many teenage hoodlums on the streets of Hong Kong were in search of nirvana. Certainly Bruce Lee couldn’t have cared less about communicating with the universe. What he wanted was a better way of beating people up.

‘One day I wondered what would happen if I didn’t have a gang behind me I got into a fight, ‘ Bruvce told Black Belt magazine in 1967.’ I decided to learn how to protect myself and I began to study Kung Fu.’

In another interview he told Jack Moore: ‘Aside from a few child actor roles in Cantonese movies, I wasn’t the show business sort. What I was really interested in was self defence. We Chinese have been developing and perfecting methods of armed and unarmed combat for thousands of years, and the study of martial arts is a venerable and respected one. It is also very handy if you happen to live in a tough neigbourhood like I did.

The tough neigbourhood’ line may have been Lee stretching the facts a little.’ We lived in Tsim Tsa in Hong Kong right from the beginning and that’s not a poor neighborhood, laughed Peter Lee, and it’s probably nearer the truth that Bruce led his gang to tougher areas of the city in search of action, rather than that he stayed close to home defending his own territory. But However his reasons,- selg defence or planed attack- the muscles- struck young Lee took to Kung Fu as if born with a clenched fist.

Like all arts of any value, Kung Fu is no overnight sensation; many months of rigorous training are needed before an initiate even begins to glimpse it’s true possibilities. With the martial arts craze currently sweeping dozens of countries both West and East, there have been many calls for restrictions on students enrolling in Kung Fu classes. Experienced instructors, however, argue convincingly that those who have enrolled with ulterior motives automatically weed themselves out of the course after one or two lessons. Young thugs who join merely to add a little flashly footwork to their mugger’s arsenal soon drift away, bored and disillusioned by the basic training. Only those who see more in Kung Fu than broken teeth and easy pickings remain. And so it was with Bruce Lee. Attracted at first to the art by the fancy fistwork , Kung Fu gradually took over his life until he had left back alleys and bloody noses far behind.

Candid portrait taken during a Saint Francis Xavier school picnic.

Even as a primary schoolboy Bruce had been proud of his body, knowing from the coy glances of young girls in class that he had ‘looks’. ‘ He always had a lot of girls going for him,’ recalls Peter, and now, urged on by those adolescent admirers, he had found a way of building his physical attraction. As a grown man, the standart Lee greeting to one of his female frinds remained the invitation to’ feel my muscles’. It was this search after fitness, a search which in later life developed into an obsession, that kept Lee at Kung-Fu classes while his fellow street artists fell by the wayside.

‘He became fanatical.’ Says Peter Lee. ‘ He practiced diligently day and night.’ At mealtimes Bruce would thump his free hand against the leg of his stool to toughen it as he ate. Alone in his room, he would perform his exercise and strike Mr. Universe poses in front of a wall mirror.

Wing Chun Kung-Fu Master Yip Man and his star pupil.The spectacles Bruce has in his pocket are the oncehe used as a disguise in Fist of Fury. When he died they were buried with him.

Fortunately for Bruce, the master he had chosen for instruction was the patriach of the modern Wing Chun school of Kung-Fu, a though, wiry old Chinese immigrant from Kwantung Province by the name of Yip Man. It was Yip Man who had brought Wing Chun behind the Bamboo Curtain to Hong Kong and had spent his life practicing and refining the art. In the eager young Lee he found a deroted discipline and the two formed a close friendship. When Yip Man died in 1973 aged well into his seventies, Bruce attended the old man’s funeral and signed the ceremonial register.

Not the either Yip Man or Kung-Fu changed Bruce from punk to monk overnight. ’When I first learned martial art I too challenged many establish masters, ’Lee confessed on Radio Hong Kong when asked about the young Kung-Fu hotheads who persisted in challenging him to fight after he had become famous. More than that, however, after a few lessons with Yip Man had added basic Kung-Fu to his street fighting tricks, Bruce would prowl the alleys looking for trouble at the end of a session to test what he had just learned. Just what sort of trouble can be seen from a story Linda Lee once related.

Bruce had been challenged to a duel by a rival gang leader, the culmination of a bitter struggle for gang supremacy between the two youths. ‘ The other boy chose the location and the rules: ‘ We’ll fight on a rooftop and the winner can toss the loser over’. Buce agreed and they met on the flat roof of a Kowloon apartment block five storeys high. As Bruce was laying the down his jackets his opponent leaped at him in the eye. This infuriated the Toung Lee and with flashing fists and feet he proceeded to break both his antagonist’s arms and fracture his femur. Instead of throwing the defeated youth sixty feet to the boy’s relatives who took him to hospital.

But the years passed, Kung-fu became a steadying influence on Lee, channeling at least some of his fire into more manageable directions. By 1956, after leading his parents an exasperating chase through the headmasters’studies of a string of Kowloon schools, he setteled down to study at the exclusive Saint Francis Xavier College.

When he stopped cutting classes and picking school groung brawls, his parents could scarcely believe it.’ Hia mother came here quite often,’ says Bruce’s former master, an old German missionary, Brother Edward. ‘ She wanted us toi look after the boy, but he was no disturbance when he was here. He was though but he didn’t smoke and he wasn’t a bully, which is what some people think.

Part of the reason for Lee’s sudden transformation was that. For first time he could his uses his fighting skill legally. Brother Edward, himself an ex-boxer, loves the art of self defences and he encouraged the youth, even thogh Bruce was far from brilliant with his school work. ‘After all.’ Says the missionary pugilist, ‘ a boy who likes to build up his body has very little to study much. But I was sure that someday he would be somebody.

‘ When he came to our school I knew at once he was a boxer…he was already that good. We once had a boxing match at the rival St. George’s school and, although Bruce didn’t no much about European boxing, he challenged their champion. In the ring he was so quick that he slipped in some Chinese style and the referee did not see anything. Bruce was the new champion.’

The reformed Lee enjoyed his three years at St. Francis Xavier. He made several lasting friends, including his long-term comerade Samuel Hui, now a Hong Kong pop star. He was interested in girls and they were certainly interested in him; according to Peter Lee he would spend hours in front of the mirror fixing his greasy hair. In 1958 he was even crowned the Cha-Cha King of Hong Kong.

These were happy years for Lee and he remembered them. On February 28th 1973 he returned to his old school to present the sport day prizes. ‘There was a phonecall from Bruce,’ recall the college principal, Brother Gregory. ‘ I just mentioned the prize giving and immediately he said: ‘ Of course, I’d be delighted’’. And I think that is what impressed the boys more than anything else; the fact that, famous as he was. He came back as a sign of gratitude to his old teachers. He was a real friend…a hero.’

As we shall see later, the few hours he spent at his old school that day were an oasis in a sea of personal and professional troules surrounding him. But back in the familiar schoolground in front of hundreds of young admirers, Lee relaxed and opened out. By the time the prize giving was underway, he had stripped to the waist under the Hong Kong sun, flexing his muscles, laughing and joking for his young fans. Perhaps he was thingking of violent struggles on a Kowloon rooftop all those years ago.

In the last at the college, Bruce once again turned to acting, and was offered the lead role in another Cantonese heart-breaker, Orphan Ah Sam. Part of storyline could well have been lifted straight from Lee’s own life. A young boy, orphaned during the war, accepts the job of pickpocket for a street gang. He is caught and given a choice:gaol or school. He takes school and, under the guiding hand of a benevolent school master, turns over a new leaf. When urged by his gang to take part in one last raid, he declines although his refusal costs him his ears which are souvenired by his old friends in true West Side Story fashion.

Brother Edward, Yip Man and Kung-Fu may have conspired to cool the fiery tempered young Lee to the extent of his reconsidering a screen career, but nothing could stop him fighting altogether. By his seventeenth year his brawling had erupted into serious rifts with other street gangsters. Bruce was fast, though and cheeky, and many of his contemporaries resented it. It was time to move on.’ He thought that because of his nature, because of the fights and so on, it would be better for him in a different environment,’ says Peter Lee.

‘I know he caused his parents terrible heartache and sleepless nights,’ says Linda, his American wife. ‘ They knew he was out prowling the street at night. I think his wild prowling was the reason for his parents sending him back to America.’

In late 1958, shortly after the successful Hong Kong premiere of Orphan Ah Sam, Bruce Lee packed his bags, put one hundred dollars in his pocket and booked a passage on a cheap freighter. His destination was the United State of America.