Chasing the dragon

"I, BRUCE LEE, will be the first highest paid Oriental superstar in the United States. In return I will give the most exciting performances and render the best of quality in the capacity of an actor. Starting 1970 I will achieve world fame and from then onward till the end of 1980 I will have in my possession $10,000,000. I will live the way I please and achieve inner harmony and happiness."

This was what the late martial arts superstar confidently and presciently wrote in early 1969 on a piece of paper under a heading he titled 'My Definite Chief Aim'.

Bruce certainly achieved much of those aims, and was well on his way to fulfilling the rest, when he suddenly passed away on July 20, 1973 in Hong Kong, aged only 32, due to cerebral edema, a swelling of the brain caused by adverse reaction to a headache pill called Equagesic. The coroner's verdict: death by misadventure.

Almost four decades later, Bruce continues to inspire new generations of people around the world to be the best they can be, as evidenced by the testimonials of a wide cross-section of mostly young (and some veteran) professionals interviewed for Bruce Lee Lives!, a six-episode half-hour series newly-produced in 2011 and currently screened over Astro's National Geographic Channel 553 on Tuesdays at 9pm.

The first four episodes already screened were titled The Fighter, The Entertainer, The Individual and The Martial Artist, while the remaining two episodes on Feb 21 will be The Trendsetter and The Master. All six episodes will be repeated on Feb 28 from 9pm to midnight.

As the self-descriptive episode titles suggest, Bruce Lee Lives! focuses on the multi-faceted aspects of this global cultural icon who remains unsurpassed in bridging the worlds of martial arts (Bruce was widely acknowledged by peers as the world's greatest martial artist ever) and film-making (actor, writer, director and producer).

His significance was not lost on those interviewed: actors (Seth 'Green Hornet' Rogen, Omar Epps, Michelle Rodriguez and Jamie Chung, among others), film directors (Zack '300' Snyder, and Rob Cohen who directed 1993 biopic Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story with Jason Scott Lee in the title role), champions of extreme sports (wrestler Jesse Ventura, mixed martial arts fighter Kenny Florian, freestyle motocross rider Ronnie Faisst, skateboarder Christian Hosoi, freestyle skier Simon Dumont, snowboarder Matt Ladley, footballer Michael Strahan), fine and performing artistes (magician Criss Angel, musician Carlos Santana, singer Ne-Yo, dancer-choreographer Cristyle, deejay Steve Aoki, film critic David Fear) and Bruce's Jeet Kune Do proteges-cum-instructors (Danny Inosanto, Jerry Poteet).

In a modernistic metaphorical sense, many of these talents are or have been "chasing the dragon", that is, to excel in their respective fields of endeavour.

National Geographic Channel has, since Jan 17, also been re-screening three old but still good 90-minute documentaries, namely, 1973's Bruce Lee: The Man and the Legend, 1976's Bruce Lee The Legend and 1993's Bruce Lee: The Curse of the Dragon, and this flurry of Bruce Lee programming is simply because 2012 is the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese calender and Bruce was born in a dragon year 72 years ago, on Nov 27, 1940 in San Francisco, California.

The first two documentaries were produced by Golden Harvest, the Hong Kong film studio which produced or co-produced all of Bruce's 1970s movies, while Curse was co-produced by Fred Weintraub who had served as producer of 1973's Enter the Dragon, the Warner Bros film which made Bruce the first Asian to headline a big-budgeted Hollywood movie.

Bruce Lee: The Man and the Legend was released in the immediate aftermath of Bruce's death and was a box-office hit as those days there were no round-the-clock TV news channels. It remains a valuable time capsule with its opening 15 minutes devoted to the mass outpouring of grief by tens of thousands of fans at Bruce's public funeral in Hong Kong, and also footage of the subsequent burial of Bruce in Seattle, Washington state in the US where the pall-bearers included Hollywood stars Steve McQueen and James Coburn who were among the many celebrities who took kung fu lessons from Bruce.

Bruce Lee The Legend, updated in 1993 in conjunction with the 20th anniversary of Bruce's death, incorporated brief but interesting interviews with Hong Kong actress Nora Miao who co-starred with Bruce in his first three 1970s actioners and provided some insights into his off-camera persona, as did Taiwanese actress Betty Ting Pei who had never wavered in her testimony that there was no affair between her and Bruce though he died in her flat after she provided him with the headache pill (she and Bruce were due to have dinner that day with Golden Harvest boss Raymond Chow and George '007' Lazenby to discuss a new film project).

Bruce Lee: The Curse of the Dragon took a more criticial look at how Bruce was overwhelmed by his fame and success such that he became cocky, and there were enlightening focus on his American-born widow (Linda Lee who authored the revealing 1975 biography The Life and Tragic Death of Bruce Lee, as pictured here) and interviews with his students (James Coburn, Dan Inosanto, Taky Kimura), co-stars (Chuck Norris, Robert Wall, basketball superstar Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and entertainment journalist Alex Ben Block (whose 1974 book The Legend of Bruce Lee was the first-ever biography on Bruce), along with coverage on the accidental shooting death of Bruce's only son Brandon on March 31, 1993, at age 28, during the filming of what would have been Brandon's breakout movie The Crow.

Bruce's cross-cultural persona was shaped by his saddling two worlds: his first 18 years in Hong Kong (from age six to 18, he acted in about 20 Cantonese dramas, usually cast as problematic characters, and he started learning kung fu at age 13), and his final 14 years criss-crossing between the US (his parents sent him there to enjoy the fruits of dual-citizenship and to escape from the law after having fought too many street battles) and Asia.

In the US, he started a kung fu school in 1963 and defiantly taught non-Chinese (and developing his own pragmatic mixed martial arts called Jeet Kune Do, which means 'Way of the Intercepting Fist'); married a Caucasian in 1964 (Linda's family surname was Emery and she and Bruce had two children, Brandon in 1965 and daughter Shannon in 1969 – Linda eventually remarried twice, to Tom Bleecker from 1988 to 1990, and to Bruce Cadwell from 1991 until now); got his first big break in Hollywood by portraying Kato, the karate-skilled sidekick of superhero The Green Hornet in a shortlived 1966 TV series; and finally achieving his long-cherished dream of global fame via a string of Hong Kong actioners in the early 1970s.

Indeed, in Bruce, the twains of East and West finally met.

Western acceptance of Bruce was also coincidentally boosted by the timing of US President Richard M. Nixon's groundbreaking trip to Beijing where he shook hands with Chairman Mao Zedong on Feb 21, 1972, thus ending over two decades of isolating China since the Communist takeover in 1949.

The Hong Kong premieres of Bruce's movies speak for themselves: The Big Boss opened on Oct 3, 1971, Fist of Fury on March 22, 1972, The Way of the Dragon on Dec 30, 1972 and Enter the Dragon on July 26, 1973 (the latter, six days after Bruce's death).

Those born in the mid-1970s onwards will never know what it's like when movie fans here had to physically struggle through huge crowds in order to get a fistful of tickets at a time when even blockbuster hits were screened at only one standalone cinema in each town.

Bruce was at his best as the champion of the underdog: he was a working-class coolie at an ice factory in Thailand in The Big Boss, a kung fu student whose master was murdered in Shanghai in Fist of Fury, a country bumpkin who becomes a waiter in a Rome restaurant in The Way of the Dragon.

For Asian audiences, Enter the Dragon was a disappointment because he played a policeman of sorts, an authority figure.

Looking back, Bruce was an astute actor who knew how to project charisma and charm, was not shy at making himself look silly at times, and when triggered into violent retaliation, he exuded deadly menace with his baleful stares and angry grimaces.

With his amazing triple-kicks, flying leaps and rapid-fire punching, he was simply electrifying, and you knew that, like an animal, if he really chose to, he could easily kill. His Jeet Kune Do was a distillation of what works in various martial arts, and because he even sketched the moves down on paper to make his methods crystal clear, it has become a blueprint which those interested can learn from.

Bruce fought Thais in The Big Boss, Japanese in Fist of Fury and Europeans in The Way of the Dragon, but he came across to audiences around the world as colour-blind, as he also battled Chinese baddies.

Indeed, citizens of Mostar in war-torn Bosnia and Herzegovina considered Bruce as a symbol of the fight against ethnic divisions and on Nov 26, 2005, they unveiled a life-sized 1.68m bronze statue of Bruce in Zrinjski city park – one day ahead of the unveiling of a larger-than-life 2.5m bronze statue of Bruce at Avenue of the Stars at Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront in Hong Kong in conjunction with the 65th anniversary of Bruce's birthday that year.

Is it any wonder that, in 1999, when Time magazine shortlisted the 100 most influential people of the 20th century, they included Bruce Lee.