A Critical Assessment of Bruce Lee's Contribution to Chinese Martial Art
Lau Guan Kim  Updated: 2004-04-12 09:10

Aha, Bruce Lee the Little Dragon!

In an era when Chinese nationalism came to the fore, Bruce Lee personified the frustrated, humiliated and bigoted ignoramus of the warped Chinese sense of chauvinism. Devoid of any marked cultural trait, but one weaned on Western superiority, he must have felt the humiliation of a Chinese playing a second fiddle Japanese Kato to the white supremacist American Green Hornet. The hornet's sting must be so pruritic as to cause the hives of his formative years to surface and metamorphose him into a fantasy machine of one who had been completely deprived of his Chinese psyche.

To impress the Americans and to exploit that mental masturbation of the less talented Chinese, Bruce set out to impress the Westerners with a macabre sense of what the Chinese Kung-fu was. In so doing, he enriched himself and completely forgot how he foisted his surreal world of the Chinese macho and played out his agony of one who had at one time, and maybe innately even to the time of his death, been looked down by the white men.

There is nothing remarkably Chinese about Bruce Lee except he once titillated a vast section of self-imposed inferior Chinese still not woken up to the smug air of Qing China that there was nothing to be learnt from others. Like the opium of 1839-1842, Bruce Lee provided the tranquillizer that dulled some Chinese to a world of make-belief and inability to meet life's challenge.

Bruce Lee was the icon of the Chinese who never made it but achieved it in the smoke-filled opium den of dreams and fantasies. What he did was to powder-puff the bruised Chinese face and make a hilarious Bollywood figure of himself as one who set out to impress the Westerners at the expense of the Chinese.

Wealth and fame came too fast and he grew too big for the mantle thrust upon him by a mesmerised Chinese (and Western) audience. He gave what the frustrated Chinese zealots needed, and he squeezed them for every cent they were worth until the very wealth and depravity that idolised him exacted a payment.

That short spurt that took his life made him famous. Had he lived much longer, he would have been mediocre in the end.

Bruce Lee's acting was a joke!

That sneer on his face was like an American wrestler selling himself before a fake fight. The plots were shallow, pandering to Chinese chauvinism that was assuaged in opium dens.

His films had no themes and made the Chinese look like the characters in Bollywood. It was all so shallow and silly!

When I provoked my sarcasm laced with barbs, the desired effects were to induce in the readers not to wallow too much in the so-called contribution to Chinese pride by a bruised icon of the Chinese martial art who with his simplistic presentation was out to amass a fortune with a distortion of Chinese history and exploitation of the humiliation and frustration of the Chinese at the hands of the Europeans.

He had no message to tell, and that nationalistic feeling he had for Chinese pride was shallower than the waterfront scene of Singapore has he been alive, and certainly would have drowned Chinese true cultural image, like one caught in the deep water of Hawaii's harbour.

It was well that mundane attempt to project the Chinese psyche by this shallow specimen of a practitioner of a martial ballet was stopped in his track by his rather murky death; otherwise a whole genre of martial artists and Chinese actors would be stereotyped in straightjacket role more humiliating to the Chinese in the long run.

With his death, there slowly emerges a fiery desire to put right what people like him through material gain denigrated the Chinese national aspiration to one of stupor and soporific world of the surreal and make believe, which modern Chinese would have thought after 1949 that aura of the Chinese as the sick men of Asia, and the effete and degrading manner China conducted itself in the Opium War, were exorcised for good and vindicated.

Alas, when will a true Big Dragon personify all that is benevolent and civilised about the Chinese?

If I were to give an example, I would class Chow Yuen Fatt as a true champion of Chinese pride and psyche with his artistic approach to acting. In doing so, he leads the way for a class of Chinese acting genre, and a better appreciation of the stoic and proud tradition of the Chinese culled by his 5000-year of tradition, culture and unbroken history.

He sticks to Chow Yuen Fatt and not some camouflage tarpaulin of Charlie, Tony and what-have-you in a sickening attempt to shame his ancestors.

Bruce Lee was as shallow as the personification of Chinese he portrayed, and in the end he found himself in deep water with the discerning and traditionalist Chinese.

What started out as a Little Dragon had in the process shrivelled to a Little Worm.

And what did he give to the Chinese nationalistic and political movement? None. Not even a foundation for the advancement of Chinese culture.

Bruce Lee can never be a Chinese icon. He was a Western fad.

A Chinese fraud.

That's why he was Bruce the Little Dragon, a euphemism for no bigger than a little worm.

The above content represents the view of the author only.

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