In Bruce Lee, Daryl Maeda found a “bad dude”

Daryl Joji Maeda is dean and vice chancellor of undergraduate studies and professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the author of Like Water: A Cultural History of Bruce Lee, as well as Chains of Babylon: The Rise of Asian America and “Rethinking the Asian American Movement.”
A Sansei (third generation Japanese American), he was born and raised in California, but has lived in Colorado for 17 years and now considers it his home state. Maeda lives with his wife and youngest daughter in Denver, where he enjoys golfing but hasn’t caught up yet. Although his snowboarding was derailed by COVID, he remains firmly committed to getting back on the mountain this winter.

Maeda recently sat down on Zoom with SunLit editor Kevin Simpson to talk about his just-released book about martial arts and movie icon Bruce Lee.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

SunLit: Tell us what first piqued your interest in Bruce Lee and ultimately moved you to the point where you decided to tackle a book about him.

Daryl Joji Maeda: As an Asian American boy growing up in the 1970s, there weren’t many role models visible that were truly heroic, to be honest. So Bruce Lee was one of those people, of course, right? As a young Asian American boy, I could see that he looked like me and was a pretty nasty dude. So I’ve had an interest in Bruce Lee on a personal level since I was young.

As an academic, I have specialized in Asian American history and Asian American culture and Asian American politics in the 1960s and 1970s. And I was looking around for a new project, and I thought Bruce Lee was really interesting because he’s this incredibly transnational figure who has a huge influence on Asia as well as the West and the United States. But so much has been written about him, I decided to just do a quick and dirty biography, which will take me a year. And that was 11 years ago.

So it turned out to be a much more complex project than you thought?

Every time I delved into another aspect of his life, I realized that there were really deep currents here. Far from being just some historical footnote or curiosity from the 1970s, Bruce Lee actually has a lot to teach us about the world we live in, how that world was constructed. And so I just started pulling on each of the different threads and each of them went deeper and deeper and deeper.

And what I found is that ultimately this is a book that is about Bruce Lee as an individual, but much more about a whole world into which he was born. I just became incredibly interested in things like transnational migration, crossing oceans and borders, mixing different cultures and even mixing races. So yes, when I started I thought it would be easy and quick, and what I found was very, very deep.

Have you been working for more than a decade?

There were fits and starts for sure. There were times when I didn’t work as hard on the book as I should have. But it was pretty stable. I started doing research in 2011. I went to Hong Kong in 2014 to do some research there. I did some research in Seattle and the Bay Area. For local history buffs, I’ve also done some research in Wyoming — which is probably the last place you’d think to do Bruce Lee research.

But in fact, the producer of The Green Hornet (a short-lived TV series in which Lee played the martial arts sidekick to the main character, Kato) has documents in the American Heritage Collection at the University of Wyoming. So I went there and found handwritten documents from Bruce Lee, letters to the producer, publicity stills from the Green Hornet scripts, edits where they were actively involved in the script writing process and editing it. Episode budgets, all kinds of things.

You have both a glamorous, high-profile celebrity, but also this cultural icon whose life has been subjected to scientific analysis. So when you sat down to write the book, how did you manage to balance the glitz and glamor against the academic side?

This is a cultural history of Bruce Lee because I want to distinguish it from a mere biography. I envisioned this as a book that would tell you the how and why of Bruce Lee. How did he appear? And what about him and the circumstances into which he was born allowed him to have the impact he did on the world?

So I really want to focus the book on Bruce Lee’s life and career as a narrative that can drive the story. I spend a long time in each chapter really developing the historical background—being a cultural historian by trade, that’s what I do. So I want to prepare readers to understand that yes, Bruce Lee was an extraordinary person. But he would never have had the cultural influence that he had, he would never have had the opportunity that he had, if he hadn’t been born into a world that was structured by very large social, political and economic forces.

It’s obviously a complex figure. How controversial was he?

He was an extremely self-possessed man. He had incredible faith in his own abilities and his own ambitions. So there were definitely Bruce Lee detractors in the world. Most famously, some martial artists found him arrogant, because to say you’re advancing in martial arts is to say you’re finding a new way to do things better. It is a value judgment of what has gone before.

So when he learns new movement styles, when he synthesizes fighting moves from around the world and brings them into conversation with each other, he gets to the point where he says, you know, the old martial arts are dead. At other times, he said that the “no style” style was actually a superior way to fight, and that would rub some people the wrong way.

He is also controversial in the sense that he has certainly broken norms and barriers in the United States. He married a blonde white woman at a time when interracial marriage was still illegal in 17 states. He also caused controversy in Hong Kong with his lifestyle as a playboy and movie star. So there were certainly detractors of Bruce Lee when he was still alive.

One of the complexities surrounding Bruce Lee is: Which country can claim him? It has deep roots in both the US and Hong Kong. How did this dispute develop?

To engage with it is to miss the point. Bruce Lee cannot be tied down to one place. He can be found most clearly in the transition between localities because he has always been in this process of going and coming. In some ways, he always has been returnsometimes he returns to places he has never been before.

While born in San Francisco, he returned to Hong Kong with his parents as a child. He grew up there in Hong Kong, then moved back to California and finally to Seattle. He returned to Hong Kong after being disillusioned in Hollywood. And then he went back to Hollywood after making it big in Hong Kong and finally back to Seattle, which is his final resting place.

He was always in this process of crossing borders, crossing oceans. And I argue in the book that he was constantly in the process of crossing boundaries between cultures, ideas and philosophies. So his physical movement was always mirrored by intellectual movement.

What were some other ways he influenced you personally, even as an adult?

Just knowing that he was an invincible hero and everyone knew not to joke with him, the first Asian-American badass I’d ever seen on screen, right in the public sphere. So I’m going to tell you something funny. When I started doing research for the book and started writing, I realized that this book is about ideas and also about embodiment.

One of the arguments I am making here is that his embodied self was indeed also crossing different boundaries as he learned to move his body in ways, in styles and forms of (martial arts) that were pioneered by different parts of the world. So I actually took Wing Chun (Kung Fu style) lessons for about a year. And I found that extremely helpful, because even this little bit of embodied training helped me understand a little more clearly what he was doing as a martial artist.

His image in the public eye is, of course, widely reflected in his films, such as Enter the Dragon. Did you watch them again?

I watched all his films very carefully with new eyes—and I hadn’t seen them in decades. So it was like a fresh new experience for me, especially watching them as someone who earned a Ph.D. in American culture and is a professor of ethnic studies with a completely different set of concerns and things I’m looking for. So that was a revelation.

And that was one of the things that convinced me at the beginning of the project that this was worth pursuing. What I saw was that each of his films had specific thematic issues they were trying to address that played into this bigger picture that ultimately fed into the book as a whole. I also watched The Green Hornet — and oh boy, it’s pretty bad.

Going back to the dichotomy of making this book about a movie star, but also about the cultural forces that shaped it—how did you approach the actual writing?

When I started writing this book, I had already published two academic books. And so I know how academic history textbooks are written. It’s not a mystery to me. But what I don’t know how to do is write for a wider audience. And so I really struggled to find my voice. What language should I use? What sentence structures should I include? What academic framework should I put into the book? I went back and forth and felt so insecure. And that was one of the reasons the writing was so slow at first.

I ended up finding out that I had taught a class on Bruce Lee three times at CU Boulder. And so I said, you know what, the general interest audience is probably similar to students in terms of what I should aim for in terms of accessibility. Once I started thinking of my students as my audience, it freed me up a bit. In an undergraduate class, we teach academic ideas, but we do so in a way that is accessible to students. And that became kind of my leverage that I was going for, to talk about complex ideas in a way that was accessible to someone who was willing to do the work of reading a book.

What was your writing routine like for this particular book?

After dinner and after spending time with my wife, around 10 o’clock, I would sit down to write at the kitchen table, put on my headphones, choose the right music for writing and play it while being productive. I kept very close track of the number of words I wrote each day. And my goal was to write at least 250 words, which is about one page, and I was hoping to write 500 words, or about two pages.

What was “proper music writing” in this case?

I listened to an awful lot of 70s music to get me in the mood. The other thing I was listening to was Lalo Schifrin’s Enter the Dragon soundtrack — it was just on repeat. So that fits and makes sense, right? The music that I thought didn’t make much sense but certainly helped me write was that I was listening to Pink Floyd, “Dark Side of the Moon.”

But you know, the song that really connected with me was “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” Because to me it’s about Bruce Lee.