Bruce Lee's favorite dish was oyster sauce beef, and on the evening of May 7 it was on the menu at UC Merced, alongside a conversation about who Lee really was, why he still matters and what his story says about America.
Jeff Chang, cultural historian and author of “Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America,” was on campus as the featured guest of two events: UC Merced Dining’s Food for Thought Speaker Series and "Storytelling with Jeff Chang" at the Leo & Dottie Kolligian Library.
Chang’s visit as part of Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Month brought together students, faculty and community members for conversations about race, identity and belonging and an ongoing examination about who gets to be seen — and who gets to fight back.
“Bruce Lee put Asian Americans in the conversation,” Chang said. “Bruce built a body of (film) work in which he was always standing with the oppressed. He stood with laborers, with restaurant workers being pushed out by mob bosses, with anti-imperialists.”
The Food for Thought discussion was moderated by Bayani Jol Manilay, director of finance for auxiliary enterprises and fiscal innovation at UC Merced, and, as it turned out, an old friend of Chang's. When UC Merced Executive Chef and speaker series organizer Mitch Vanagten asked Manilay to moderate the event, Manilay mentioned in passing that he and Chang have been friends since their days together at UC Berkeley.
Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America
The evening conversation touched on many threads that define the enduring power of Bruce Lee’s image, but Chang began with a fact that surprised many in the room: Bruce Lee was born in the United States.
In 1940, Lee’s father and mother were traveling in the U.S. as part of a Cantonese opera tour on the eve of war in China. His mother, pregnant during the tour, gave birth to Lee at the Chinese Hospital in San Francisco’s Chinatown before the family eventually returned to Hong Kong.
It was Lee’s move to the United States at the age of 18 that truly shaped him, Chang explained. Living in racially segregated communities in Seattle, San Francisco and Oakland for 12 years, he befriended people who had survived police violence and the Japanese American internment, and those relationships transformed his sense of who he wanted to represent.
Chang connected Lee's rise to the simultaneous emergence of Asian American identity as a political concept.
“Bruce came of age at the same time Asian America was coming of age,” he said. “In 1968, young Asian Americans were organizing against the Vietnam War and trying to develop a politic that felt true to their experience. Someone asked, ‘Why do we call ourselves Oriental?’ If you grow up in Asia or on the West Coast, the Far East is New York City or London. We're Asian and we're American. They came out of those meetings calling themselves Asian Americans.”
For Asians and Asian Americans, Lee's initial rejection from Holloywood, and what he built in response, carried a meaning that went far beyond film. "Before Bruce, images of Asian Americans were very stereotypical and very demeaning," said Chang. "After Bruce, there was a counterbalance to a century of these images of Asians as foreigners … or as a model minority, folks who are basically here just to serve others."
Chang noted that by returning to Hong Kong and becoming a superstar on his own terms, Lee did what Hollywood had insisted was impossible and proved what an Asian leading man could be. Chang described Asian American activists of the era watching Lee's movies alongside Black, Chicano and working-class audiences, with everyone erupting when Lee's characters refused to be humiliated or diminished.
"Bruce made us whole," said Chang. "He embodied us in all these kinds of ways.
