The Mystery Behind the Death of Bruce Lee

Bruce Lee is a man who needs no introduction. He was the living embodiment of physical fitness, and to many, the story of Bruce Lee is a rags to riches tale of how a poor Chinese national became an international icon and changed the face of Western cinema forever, before suddenly being found dead at the age of 32 of a cerebral edema, officially caused by an allergic reaction to a single aspirin.

But is that the real story? Many people find it hard to believe that someone in such peak physical condition could have died so suddenly, especially from a simple pain killer he is reported to have taken multiple times before without incident. In fact, growing up I never once heard what Bruce Lee’s official cause of death was.

As a child in the 1980s I of course knew who Bruce Lee was, and the only story I had ever heard was that he was murdered by the Triads, the Chinese mafia. Even though such conspiratorial talk might instantly raise skepticism, this theory persisted for so long because, until a few years ago, nobody really had a better explanation. As it turns out though, there was a lot that I (and most people in the west) didn’t know about Bruce Lee.

Rather than what we all grew up believing, this is actually the story of a natural born US citizen who was the son of one of the wealthiest families in Hong Kong. He was a sickly child who became a child actor, then a street thug and gang leader, and then an actor again, dying mere weeks before becoming an international superstar and household name.

And what is to blame for that death? Was it an allergic reaction? The Chinese mafia? Ninjas? A curse placed upon his family? Or, and perhaps most likely, was Bruce Lee’s death the result of simple vanity?

Born to Be a Hollywood Star

On November 27, 1940, Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco, California. His official name was Lee Jun-fan, but the doctor recommended that his mother, Grace, give him an American sounding name as well. After all, he was now an American citizen, even if neither of his parents were. Alternatively, some sources say that it was one of the nurses who nicknamed the baby Bruce.

But the family had a different nickname for Bruce. His legal name, Jun-fan meant “return again”. It was chosen either in the hope or out of the belief that he would return back to the United States once he was an adult. However, as a child the family referred to Bruce as Sai Fon. The name means “little phoenix”, but perhaps more important than the meaning of the name was the fact that it was a girl’s name.

Grace was very superstitious, and she had already lost one son in infancy. She was afraid the same would happen to her next son, but by referring to Bruce using a girl’s name, she thought they could trick the gods or spirits or whatever into passing him over. You know, the same way Catholic schoolgirls think they can trick God into believing they haven’t had sex outside of wedlock if they only do it in the butt. Because apparently mystical deities are very stupid and easily tricked.

Anyway, Bruce’s birth took place sometime between 7 am and 9 am, which was the hour of the dragon in the old zodiac system of 12 hour days. The year 1940 was also the year of the dragon, and since he was born in both the year and hour of the dragon, Bruce was eventually given the stage name Li Xiao Long, or Lee the Little Dragon. But that’s enough about Bruce’s many different names for now.

Bruce’s father, Lee Hoi-chuen, was a famous Cantonese opera singer and actor, which is why they were in the United States in the first place. He and Grace had come to San Francisco about a year earlier so he could perform in an international opera tour, though their return trip had to be delayed a few months after Bruce was born since he was too young to bring on a plane. Not from a legal standpoint or anything, his parents and/or doctor just felt they should wait until he was a little older before flying with the baby.

Since they were going to be stuck in America for a few extra months though, there was only one logical thing to do: get Bruce his very first movie credit. Hong Kong directors Esther Eng and Kwan Man-Ching happened to be filming a movie in San Francisco at the time Bruce was born, so Lee Hoi-chuen was able to use his connections to get Bruce a small part in the movie. And so, in May of 1941, Bruce Lee made his American big screen debut in the movie Golden Gate Girl, where he played the role of “crying baby girl” for like 20 seconds or so.

Unfortunately, Bruce’s family didn’t get to see their son’s movie premier because they had flown back to Hong Kong a month before the movie opened. Not seeing the movie was probably the least of their concerns though, as later that year Japan launched a surprise invasion of Hong Kong, occupying it for the next four years.

While this period was obviously a struggle for the Lee family, it could have been a lot worse. Not only were they extremely well off to begin with, but Lee Hoi-chuen’s celebrity undoubtedly resulted in better treatment for the family than many others in Hong Kong received under Japanese rule.

Cantonese opera was extremely popular in Japan at the time, and the movie industry was allowed to continue operating as well. Granted a lot of movies at the time were heavily censored or made as Japanese propaganda, but being a famous actor and opera singer certainly would have been beneficial for the family.

That said, Bruce struggled greatly during this period. He suffered from respiratory problems, and it’s reported that he nearly died during a cholera outbreak as a small child. Some sources also state that he struggled with coordination, and a quote from Grace states that by the age of four, Bruce was unable to walk without stumbling.

That was likely due to his underlying health problems more than a lack of coordination though, and he was described as being weaker and more frail than other children. The difficulty walking also could have been the result of one of his legs being about an inch shorter than the other, something that would later influence his martial arts style.

Once the Japanese occupation finally ended in 1945, Bruce and his family were thankfully able to continue their lives the way Simon would have wanted it: under British rule. By this point Bruce was an extraordinarily energetic child, always running around, getting into trouble, and questioning the authority of adults. Despite the cultural emphasis on conformity, Bruce was a short-tempered individualist.

There was only one way that Grace was ever able to get Bruce to chill the fuck out and sit down, and that was by sitting him down with a comic book. He started with comic books about kung fu, but he quickly moved on to full novels, usually about either martial arts or swords and sorcery. Bruce could read for hours at a time in silence, and it’s said that he read so much as a young child that he developed severe myopia and needed glasses.

That’s not actually how that works and he was clearly going to need glasses anyway, but I guess it’s a convenient lie to emphasize how much Bruce enjoyed reading. I would think the fact that he would grow up to have a library full of thousands of books all containing his personal notes in the margins (as evidence that he actually read them rather than just owning them for show) would be a better way to showcase his love of reading, but what do I know.

Anyway, Lee Hoi-chuen would sometimes bring his family with him to the sets of movies he was working on, and Bruce took an immediate interest in it, much more than his siblings did. This caught the eye of the director, who felt that Bruce had the perfect energy for one of his roles.

Bruce’s first real acting role was in the 1946 film The Birth of Mankind, in which he played a pickpocket. It was a small role, but unlike his role as “crying baby girl”, this was actually a speaking part that involved some amount of real acting. He was a natural, and he appeared in small roles in three more movies over the next few years.

The only potential downside to all of this, beyond the standard perils of being a child actor, was that he was being typecast. In his early roles, Bruce was always playing some sort of street urchin, and portraying those sorts of characters potentially started to rub off on his real life personality. Or maybe the two things were completely unrelated and he was always going to become a troublemaker. Either way, nobody likes to be typecast.

This was also before Bruce was given his “little dragon” stage name, so he was being billed as either New Lee Hoi-chuen or Young Lee Hoi-chuen. Basically, the filmmakers just wanted to make sure audiences knew the kid was Lee Hoi-cheun’s son, because everybody loves a nepo baby.

Even though The Birth of Mankind didn’t do well at the box office, Bruce’s performances in his small roles garnered attention and interest from directors. There was an upcoming movie called The Kid based on a comic book character, Kid Cheung, and director Fung Fung thought that Bruce would be perfect for the role. Fung Fung came to the family home to ask Lee Hoi-chuen for his approval, but much to his surprise Bruce’s father refused.

Until now, Bruce had only been playing small roles, so they were able to treat acting as a hobby. But if he was cast in a lead role for what was going to be a big budget film, this could very quickly turn into his career. Even though Lee Hoi-chuen had been successful as an actor, he wasn’t sure that was the life he wanted for his son.

As a Chinese parent, especially in the 1940s, Lee Hoi-chuen wanted his children to have more respectable careers, like being a doctor or lawyer. He also presumably would have forbid his children from dating until they were 18, at which point he would have constantly asked why they weren’t married and having children yet.

And honestly, who wouldn’t want their kid to have a successful career in a prosperous, stable field rather than gambling their lives on artistic endeavours? Sure, Bruce was a horrible student, but he was also only nine years old at this point. There was still time for him to turn his life around and take his schoolwork seriously.

But Fung Fung wasn’t ready to give up. When all else failed, he offered Lee Hoi-chuen a starring role in the movie as well, which would allow him to watch over Bruce during filming. So…reverse nepo baby? This finally worked, and the two both appeared in The Kid to great critical and commercial success.

This was also the movie in which Bruce was given the stage name Li Xiao Long (little dragon), and he loved it so much that he used it in his real life as well, making all of his friends call him by his stage name. That’s right, Simon, by age nine Bruce Lee was already on like his fifth different nickname, not that I have any reason to think you’d be jealous of that.

Like I said though, Bruce was a horrible student. Even though he could happily spend hours a day reading, he had no interest in what was being taught in school. Instead, school was the place where he went every day to kick some ass.

You see, to his classmates, Bruce was the perfect target for bullying. In addition to being given a feminine nickname, his mother had also pierced one of Bruce’s ears to further convince the evil spirits that the baby was a girl. Not only was this extremely uncommon among boys at the time, but it was the sort of trait that flew in the face of Hong Kong’s traditional values and gender roles.

Then there were the thick glasses Bruce had to wear. Children with glasses are often mocked and bullied, because kids are stupid little assholes. I wish there was more to it than that, but that really is the gist of why it happens.

And if those reasons weren’t enough for the other kids to pick on Bruce, he wasn’t even fully Chinese. His exact heritage is the subject of debate, but there was some sort of European on his mother’s side. It might have been German, Dutch Jewish, or potentially worst of all since he was living in British ruled Hong Kong, English. It didn’t really what brand of European he was though, all that mattered was that he wasn’t purely Chinese, and the other kids weren’t having any of that.

Bruce wasn’t having any of their bullshit either, though. When other kids picked on him in school, he fought back, and he won. And once the other kids realized he wasn’t someone you should mess with and stopped picking on him, Bruce was left with no choice but to start the fights himself.

This behaviour was becoming a real problem, so when the studio greenlit a sequel to The Kid and wanted Bruce to reprise his role, Lee Hoi-chuen absolutely refused to allow it. Bruce was banned from making movies until he fixed his behaviour and improved his grades. At least that was supposed to be the plan. Bruce loved acting though, and his father relented to his persistent begging, allowing him to film another movie about a year later.

Unfortunately, Bruce’s behaviour didn’t improve at all. He continued getting into street fights, and even formed his own gang. It was a far cry from being an organized criminal enterprise the way we think of a lot of American gangs, and it was essentially just a group of Bruce and five or six of his followers who would go out and fight other gangs just for the fun of it.

Specifically they would often fight British kids from the other side of town, because of a rivalry between the British and Chinese. Of course, this does showcase how Bruce didn’t fit well into Hong Kong’s society. Not just because he was a lawless ruffian, but because of his ethnic makeup. He was too European to be accepted by many of his Chinese peers, but he was too Chinese to be accepted by the Europeans; that’s why it was so easy for him to find fights on the other side of town.

This complex straddling of two worlds was something that would follow Bruce throughout his life.

But that’s not what mattered when he and his gang were fighting in the streets. What mattered was that Bruce was the one in charge, and he was living his real life the same way he did in his films: as a violent and rebellious kid.

And at this point, he had no real martial arts training at all. Bruce had begun taking Tai Chi with his father when he was seven, but by that point Tai Chi had already transitioned from being an actual combat style to a form of gentle exercise, particularly for the elderly. Lee Hoi-chuen hadn’t taking Bruce to the lessons to teach him to fight, it was just to strengthen his body (since he had been so sick and was weaker than other children at the age of 7) and hopefully to instill some calm and discipline into the hyperactive child.

So with no real training as a fighter, Bruce was winning all of these street fights thanks to his strength and natural talent. And also thanks to a superpower we’ll get to in a little bit. Not only was he making a name for himself with rival gangs, but with the police as well. Bruce was constantly in trouble with the police, though he was able to avoid serious consequences thanks to his father’s status and connections.

That was all well and good for the time being, but Lee Hoi-chuen couldn’t protect his son forever.

Well, he might have been able to, but he didn’t want to. Bruce was 12 years old now, so it was time for him to cut the shit and start taking his life more seriously, starting with his education. To that end, Bruce was sent to La Salle College for secondary school, or high school to those of us in the US. La Salle was (and still is) one of Hong Kong’s most prestigious schools, the sort of place Bruce never would have been admitted to on his academic merit.

It was also a Catholic school, as he had been raised in a Catholic household thanks to his mother.

Much to his father’s disappointment, things didn’t go much better for Bruce at La Salle. He was still a terrible student, and was still getting into fights. However, there was something about La Salle that made it relatively unique among schools in Hong Kong, something that would help shape the course of his entire future: everything was taught in English.

English was the only class Bruce did well in, and spending years at a school where it was the only language spoken taught him to speak fluently. This was going to be a huge advantage once he returned to the United States. Sure, he still obviously had a Chinese accent, but if you’ve seen Enter the Dragon or any interviews with Bruce, he was easy to understand, like he had been speaking English for over half his life. Which he had been, by that point.

It was also at La Salle where Bruce met his classmate, William Cheung. As far as I can tell, it’s not really clear whether the two were friends, frenemies, or exactly what the deal was. What mattered was that William was a better fighter, and Bruce couldn’t tolerate not being the best. He learned that William studied Kung Fu, and so Bruce wanted to learn it to.

Now, Kung Fu is sort of a catch all term for the hundreds of different styles of martial arts that were practiced in China. They were all described using the general term of Kung Fu, but each individual discipline was very different, with some carrying more prestige than others. In terms of perception, Kung Fu was all about lineage. For example, a person wouldn’t just say they studied Eagle Claw Kung Fu, they would say who their teacher was, who their teacher’s teacher was, and that they were from the Zhang Zhan Wen lineage, for example, as there are three major lineages of Eagle Claw dating back almost 1,000 years.

Of course, all of this only mattered to the people who studied Kung Fu. To most people, Kung Fu was seen as a low brow endeavour, and there was no prestige to any of its different forms. This perception began to shift following World War II as China became more nationalistic and Kung Fu became seen as part of their cultural heritage, and the rise of Kung Fu movies helped to increase its popularity as well. But I’m kind of getting off track here.

William studied Wing Chun Kung Fu under the master Ip Man, and this was the perfect style of Kung Fu for Bruce. The typical stance used was focused on balance, and it happened to work really well with Bruce’s uneven legs. Wing Chun was also focused on extremely close range combat, while other forms of Kung Fu were often longer range or used broad ranges of motion. Since Bruce had such severe myopia, the closer the opponent was to him the better.

Basically, Wing Chun was the perfect martial art to minimize the natural weaknesses Bruce would have had from his eyesight and wonky legs.

William decided to introduce Bruce to Ip as a potential new student. Unfortunately, Ip wasn’t interested in teaching Kung Fu to somebody with European ancestry. But William spoke up on behalf of Bruce, and eventually Bruce was accepted into the school.

His first teacher was Wong Shun-leung, who taught a beginner’s class in Wing Chun. According to Wong, the first thing Bruce asked him was “How long will it be until I’m better than you?” What a little shit. However, in reality the answer was probably “not very long at all”. Bruce was described as being a “kinetic genius”, and once he saw a motion performed, no matter how complicated, he was able to perfectly replicate it.

To be clear, that is an actual fucking comic book superpower. The Marvel villain Taskmaster has this same ability, and it lets him use his shield as a deadly boomerang like Captain America, fire arrows as quickly and accurately as Hawkeye, perform any martial art he’s ever seen, and so on. In comics it’s called “photographic reflexes”, and Taskmaster does not get nearly the respect he deserves.

Obviously there is likely some amount of exaggeration as to Bruce’s ability to immediately copy anything he had ever seen, but not much, as he succeeded in multiple completely unrelated physical endeavours. In 1958, so only like two years into his first formal fight training, Bruce became the Hong Kong schools’ boxing tournament champion by knocking out the previous champion in the finals. A few months later, he won Hong Kong’s Crown Colony Cha-Cha Championship. Because why the Hell not.

If Tupac can dance ballet, I don’t see why Bruce Lee can’t dance the cha-cha.

But despite Bruce’s successes, not everything was going smoothly with the Wing Chun clan. Within about a year of starting his lessons, pretty much nobody was willing to train with Bruce anymore. Not because he was a dick or kept breaking their faces or anything like that, but because they found out about his mixed ancestry. Ultimately this resulted in Bruce being trained personally by Ip Man, something that almost never happened, but it’s still not nice to be shunned by everybody around you.

Ip also wasn’t thrilled with Bruce and some of his other students, either. Yes, the goal was to teach them to fight, but the goal was also to teach them discipline and to chill the fuck out. He forbade his students from fighting in street gangs, but that didn’t take.

I mentioned that Bruce was an individualist who was always questioning the authority of adults, and a big reason for that was that his father became an opium addict sometime during the 1950s. From what I gathered this was pretty common among Cantonese opera performers at the time, but the complicated and strained relationship he and Bruce had as a result of the addiction definitely contributed to Bruce’s refusal to take orders from adults, or anyone, really.

Bruce was not only still fighting regularly, but he was going out of his way to challenge people to fights. The streets were crowded though, so by the time Bruce was a teenager they resorted to staging their fights on the rooftops of buildings, as it was the only way to get some level of privacy and enough room to move around.

A lot of it was challenging other teens learning Kung Fu, but he would also venture across town to the more British area to incite fights. Bruce would dress up in traditional Chinese clothing, then wait until someone made a comment about what he was wearing. Or even for someone to just look at him funny. Once that happened, it was time to fight. But we’ll come back to the fighting in a second.

When Bruce started classes at La Salle, his father made him stop acting in movies for a couple years. Around the same time he began learning Wing Chun, he also began acting again. It was small roles, mostly still playing the same sort of street urchins he always had, but before Bruce finished high school he had already appeared in over 20 Hong Kong movies.

He also didn’t get the chance to finish school at La Salle, on account of getting expelled. For the longest time, it was always stated that Bruce got kicked out for his academic performance. That was certainly part of it, but while researching his 2018 biography Bruce Lee: A Life, writer Matthew Polly interviewed some of Bruce’s former classmates who mentioned a couple specific events that likely accelerated the expulsion.

First, they said Bruce pulled a knife on the phys ed teacher after the teacher hit him. That got him on double secret probation or whatever, and then they said he pulled some sort of prank on another student that was the final straw and got Bruce kicked out of the school. He then transferred to St. Francis Xavier’s College, another Catholic school where everything was taught in English.

Let’s get back to the fighting though, because as Bruce reached his late teens, it was becoming more and more of a problem. Not only were the fights becoming more frequent, but it was clear that Bruce’s violent nature was going to be the end of him. First, he beat the shit out of another teen who turned out to be the son of a Triad member. That could’ve had consequences down the line, especially if it happened more than once, but it was one of those rooftop fights that would ultimately result in Bruce’s exodus from Hong Kong.

The Wing Chun clan was challenged to a fight by the rival Choy Li Fut clan, so they had no choice but to accept. Hong Kong isn’t like this anymore, but at the time people on the street would challenge each other to fights all the time, and you just had to agree, no questions asked. At least as a rival martial arts school they had a reason to fight, but it’s so weird to me just how common this was and that it wasn’t restricted to gangs or trained fighters.

Anyway, once atop the roof, Bruce again beat the shit out of his opponent. This time he beat the guy so bad that he knocked one of his teeth out, so the boy’s parents called the police and Bruce was arrested.

Grace went down to the police station to retrieve her son, though she had to sign a document stating that she would accept full responsibility for his actions if he was released to her custody. The police also made it clear that this shit couldn’t fly anymore. Bruce had been on a juvenile offenders list for years and was constantly causing trouble. The family’s connections had saved him from suffering any real consequences thus far, but if he was caught fighting one more time they may actually have to throw him into jail.

Clearly telling him not to fight wasn’t going to work, so Grace proposed a different solution to Lee Hoi-chuen (who she also decided not to tell about the arrest). He recognized that there wasn’t really any chance Bruce was going to be accepted to any of the Hong Kong universities as things currently were, so he agreed to her plan.

What was her solution, you ask? Well Bruce got into several thousand little fights and his mom got scared and said, “You’re moving with your auntie and uncle in Bel-Air”. And by Bel-Air I mean San Francisco. And by “auntie and uncle” I mean “sister and family friend.” Look, this is one of like three pop culture references Simon actually knows, cut me a little slack.

Anyway, the decision was made, and Bruce was going to be cut off financially and sent back to San Francisco where he came from. Maybe having to fight to survive instead of fighting just for the fun of it would finally teach him the discipline and maturity he so desperately needed.

And so, in the spring of 1959 at the age of 18 years old, Bruce Lee boarded a steamship to the United States with nothing but his third class ticket, the clothes on his back, $100 in his pocket, all the other clothes in his luggage, good looks, seemingly superhuman physical abilities, a magnetic personality, all the charisma in the world…yeah, he was gonna be just fine.

Riches to Rags to Small Business Owner

The journey to America took a few weeks, but Bruce finally arrived in San Francisco in April. He began making money by teaching dancing, but he didn’t stay in San Francisco very long. The new school year was going to start in September, and Bruce’s parents did want him to actually graduate from high school.

Lee Hoi-chuen had a friend and coworker living in Seattle, so he called in a favour to get Bruce a pretty sweet deal. The friend was the husband of Ruby Chow, a restaurateur and later a Democratic politician (despite Ted Bundy’s attempts to get her to turn Republican). Bruce was allowed to live in the attic of Ruby’s restaurant, and all he had to do in exchange for his room and board was wash dishes in the restaurant.

Hopefully it was clear, but my description of this as a sweet deal was sarcasm. Don’t get me wrong, having food, shelter, and a job is great, but it’s not like he was getting paid actual money; he was simply working in exchange for the bare minimum necessities of survival.

After living the rather privileged life of a child actor from a well known family who could seemingly do whatever he wanted with no consequences, this new arrangement came as a huge shock to Bruce’s system. He was 18 years old, alone in America, and washing dishes in exchange for an attic to sleep in. This was his life now, and he recognized that, unless something changed, this could be his life forever. That was unacceptable, so he decided he needed to take his studies seriously.

Not only did Bruce decide he was going to become a good student, he was going to become a doctor. But while he was prepared to turn over a new leaf academically, he still hadn’t mastered the art of patience yet. He wrote back to Hong Kong asking exactly what he needed to do to become a doctor in five years, which is simply not a realistic goal.

Even back in the 1950s you usually (but not always) had to complete an undergraduate degree before entering med school, which was four years plus a year of residency. Seeing as Bruce hadn’t even finished high school yet, becoming a doctor in just five years wasn’t going to be possible. Still, he became dedicated to his studies at Edison Technical High School in Seattle and got good grades in all his classes, good enough to get into the University of Washington.

But despite his new focus on education, Bruce hadn’t given up Kung Fu. In San Francisco, his dance students had all been fellow Chinese immigrants. While he was doing demonstrations during his dance classes, he would invariably throw in a little bit of Kung Fu, just for fun. His students were impressed by his Wing Chun and some of them suggested that he teach Kung Fu in addition to dancing, but he wasn’t ready to at the time.

That changed once he was in Seattle. Bruce was working in Ruby Chow’s restaurant, but he picked up other jobs on the side as well so he could have actual money. These were boring and low paying jobs, like stuffing advertisements into the Seattle Times newspaper. I did that a few times as a kid when covering my friend’s paper route, as the newspapers and ads would be dropped at my house separately and I had to personally stuff the ads in before delivering them, and I can confidently say that it is not stimulating or fulfilling work.

Wanting a more rewarding job, Bruce decided to start teaching Kung Fu. He had kept up his training, practicing anywhere that he could. Instead of using training dummies, since he didn’t have one, he would wrap blankets around trees in the park and use those instead. Ruby was also kind enough to let him put a punching bag in the corner of the kitchen that he could use when the restaurant was slow.

Bruce’s very first student was a man named Jesse Glover. Not only was this Bruce’s first student, but Jesse was the first black person to ever be taught Kung Fu, or at least the first one there’s any record of. Given that only being 75% Chinese was a hurdle to Bruce’s training just a few years earlier, it’s likely that Jesse genuinely was the first.

It’s unclear exactly how the two met, but Bruce was looking for street fighters to train with. Jesse was five years older than Bruce, but he was a trained boxer and champion judoka (someone who practices judo). It started with informal sparring sessions in the alley behind Ruby’s restaurant, but Bruce began charging for lessons in Jun-Fan Gung Fu. In case you forgot Bruce’s birth name, he literally named the style “Bruce Lee’s Kung Fu”, despite it just being Wing Chun in those days.

Also, “Gung Fu” is the Cantonese spelling of “Kung Fu”, though obviously the Mandarin spelling became far more popular in the west.

Later that year (still 1959), Bruce put on a demonstration for Seattle’s Asian Culture Day. Bruce’s teachers asked him to give a Kung Fu demonstration, and he agreed, ever the showman. But while martial arts can be practiced alone, it’s easier to demonstrate with a partner. He looked out into the audience for a volunteer to spar with, and spotted a big, athletic looking 21 year old.

What Bruce was unaware of at the time was that this man, James DeMile, was the US Air Force’s heavyweight boxing champ. James looked at the 5 foot 7 Bruce Lee and assumed this would be a very easy fight, but he quickly realized that he couldn’t lay a finger on Bruce. The man was too fast, easily able to dodge, block, or counter any punch James tried to throw. When the demonstration was over, James turned to Bruce and asked to learn some of his moves, becoming another of Bruce’s early students.

It didn’t take long before Bruce had amassed a loyal following of students, even if his lessons were very informal in nature. They were held in the alley or the park or in parking garages, and it wasn’t the rigid structure of traditional Kung Fu instruction. In fact, it wasn’t just about Bruce teaching his students, which was actually something they complained about a little bit.

I already mentioned Jesse and James’ fighting backgrounds, and they weren’t the only ones. It seemed that all of Bruce’s fledgling Team Rocket had experience in amateur boxing and/or judo. And Bruce liked what he saw in those techniques. Rather than saying “this is how we do things in Wing Chun”, he would see these techniques from other fighting styles, like the dynamic footwork from boxing, and figure out how to incorporate it into his own fighting.

This led his students to question whether Bruce was actually there to teach them Kung Fu or if he was just using them to improve his own personal fighting style. They didn’t leave his tutelage because he was still clearly the better fighter so there was plenty for them to learn, there was just some moderate amount of grumbling.

As I said earlier, Bruce did well enough in his American high school to get into the University of Washington, where he started studying in 1961. According to the university his official major was drama, though Bruce (and as a result others) always said that he studied philosophy. That’s not a lie as he did take a couple philosophy classes, and seeing as he never graduated I suppose it wouldn’t be that important to state his official major. That’s all kind of besides the point, though.

It was at the University of Washington in 1963 that Bruce opened his first official Jun-Fan Gung Fu school. When he began as a student at the university he would teach Kung Fu in an unmarked room on campus, hoping to advertise only through word of mouth (though putting a sign on the door still might have been helpful). After a couple years though, he decided he needed a dedicated space for his classes.

He rented a studio near campus, and he lived in the backroom of his school. And when I say “studio”, I mean he rented a small, Chinatown basement with nothing in it but some bare light bulbs hanging from the ceiling.

Even though it was far from ideal, living in the studio where he was teaching freed him from his dishwashing obligations at Ruby’s, allowing him to focus more on his business. And in Bruce’s mind, this was going to be one of the biggest businesses the world had ever seen.

You see, Bruce didn’t half ass things. He put his whole ass into each and everything he did, fueled by ambition and the desire to be the best in the world. Obviously these things didn’t all pan out, as it had now been four years and he was no closer to becoming a doctor, but he was seeing success as a Kung Fu instructor and wanted to keep going. He wanted to become the Ray Kroc of martial arts and franchise Kung Fu studios all over the country.

In addition to taking his college classes and teaching Kung Fu, Bruce would also give guest lectures at local schools about Eastern philosophy. It was at one of these lectures where he caught the eye of 17 year old Garfield High School student Linda Emery. Bruce gave frequent lectures at the school, so Linda would often see him walking through the hallways, always with a different girl at his side. Because Bruce had mad rizz.

It is worth noting how unusual that was though. I know it doesn’t seem strange that an attractive and athletic showman would be popular with the ladies, but you do have to remember that the past was the worst. Interracial dating still wasn’t accepted, and in a lot of states it was still illegal.

Interracial marriage wasn’t legalized on a national level until the 1967 Supreme Court case of Loving v. Virginia, and just because it was legal doesn’t mean it was accepted. So the fact that it wasn’t just Asians but also a bunch of white bitches fawning all over Bruce would have been unusual at the time.

Anyway, Linda was immediately attracted to Bruce, so much so that she sought out his school to begin training Kung Fu under him. And for about a year, that’s all it was. She would attend his classes, they would go out as a group afterwards for food or to the movies, and in 1963 Linda enrolled at the University of Washington, but in all that time the two had never once been alone together.

One day, Bruce and a group of his friends, including Linda, were racing across campus. Bruce and Linda pulled away from the group, and he tackled her to the ground. At first she assumed he was about to teach her a new Kung Fu maneuver, like the “missionary thrust”, but he instead asked her to dinner at the space needle. One very successful date later, the two began dating.

Everything was going great for Bruce. His studies were going well, his skill at martial arts was improving, and his studio was doing so well that he was able to move to a slightly nicer room with actual training equipment and stuff. To top it all off, he had a beautiful, secret girlfriend. At the very least it was a secret to Linda’s parents, who would not have been thrilled about her being involved with an Asian; I’m pretty sure all their friends knew.

Since everything was on track with his business, it was time to abandon his education and move onto the next step in his plan. If he wanted to be the McDonalds of martial arts, it was time to start franchising. That meant that in June of 1964, it was time for Bruce to move on to Oakland, California to set up his second school with the help of fellow Kung Fu master James Yimm Lee (no relation).

But before he could leave, Bruce and Linda had to have sex first. I mean, they had probably had sex many, many times by this point, but they definitely did at the beginning of June. If we’ve learned nothing else about the 1960s from Austin Powers, it’s that only sailors and squares wore condoms, and Bruce Lee was sure as Hell no square.

Bruce moved to Oakland and began setting up a school with the help of James, and although Linda believed in what he was doing both from a business standpoint and as a student of his teachings, she was worried that they may drift apart while he was in Oakland. Much to the contrary, however, he wrote to her frequently. She wrote back as well, and in August she wrote to tell him that she was pregnant.

He traveled back to Seattle, and they decided to elope. What they didn’t realize was that the newspaper published the names of everyone who applied for a marriage license. I thought they only published news about weddings after they happened, and maybe that’s the case now, but either way Linda’s Aunt Sally saw that she had applied for a wedding license despite no one knowing she was even in a relationship.

Linda’s parents absolutely did not approve of this marriage, nor did the rest of the family. There was a big family meeting with Bruce, Linda, and Linda’s entire family explaining all the reasons they shouldn’t get married.

Most of it was centered around Linda and how she was making a mistake by marrying a Chinaman. Not only was he Chinese, but as far as they could tell he had no way to support a family. It’s weird to think of now, but people in America knew next to nothing about China or Chinese culture. Actually, I guess it’s not that weird since that’s still kind of the case.

One of the most amusing things about the whole situation with the TikTok ban was that it led to a bunch of American kids downloading a Chinese app to interact directly with the youth of China. Every conversation was essentially:

“Hey, is this stuff about China true?”

“No, what the fuck are you talking about. But also is this stuff about America true?”

“Not even a little bit.”

So yeah, I guess we still really don’t know one another very well. But it was even worse back then, as the average person in the US had never even heard of Kung Fu. So when Bruce said that he worked as a Kung Fu teacher, Linda’s family had no idea what he was talking about. All they heard was “I am making up Chinese words to trick you and am just an unemployed loser who will never be able to provide for your daughter.”

Not everything was meant to change Linda’s mind, though. They also tried to convince Bruce that she was unsuitable to be a wife, because she couldn’t even do basic domestic tasks like cooking. By her own admission that was true, but it didn’t matter. Having a wife who both studied Kung Fu and believed in him when nobody else would was far more important to Bruce than having an obedient little tradwife who would greet him at the door everyday wearing nothing but an apron and a smile.

Despite the best efforts of Linda’s parents and her entire extended family, the couple would not be dissuaded, so on August 17, 1964, they got married. I’m unsure if they ever mentioned the pregnancy, or if they were just going to say their child was born a couple months premature, something that was extremely common of Catholic babies at the time.

Bruce and Linda then went back to Oakland where they lived with James Yimm Lee for a bit. James’s wife died either shortly before or shortly after Bruce and Linda moved in, so Linda took over caring for James’s two children and doing housewife stuff (poorly, according to her parents) while Bruce and James worked running the Kung Fu studio.

The business was going really well, in no small part thanks to an exhibition Bruce put on at the Long Beach International Karate Championship that August, so almost immediately after they got back to Oakland. Bruce was invited to do an exhibition, and he showed off his incredible martial arts skills.

But there were two things he did that really caught people’s attention, something they had never seen before. First, Bruce demonstrated his two finger pushups. Using only the thumb and pointer finger of his right hand, Bruce did several one armed pushups as if they were nothing, to thunderous applause. This was also the event where he unveiled his one inch punch.

If you’ve never seen it, it’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Bruce held his fist one inch away from his partner, then, without drawing back at all, thrust forward with a punch so powerful it sent the man tumbling over the chair he was supposed to fall into and onto the floor. It was a unique display of raw power the likes of which had never really been seen before, and people were enthralled.

Much more controversial than his physical displays was the speech that Bruce decided to give. He had been incorporating other fighting styles into his own Kung Fu basically from the moment he arrived in the US, and his speech was dedicated to criticizing classical martial arts for not taking a more modern approach. Giving this speech at a tournament dedicated to people competing with classical styles of karate was a bold strategy, and it received mixed results.

Some people really took Bruce’s message to heart, recognizing that modernizing combat styles was probably a good idea. Others thought he was an arrogant little shit that needed to be put in his place, and many took it as an open challenge.

And that was more than fine, because Bruce was never one to back down from a challenge. In December of that year, a 23 year old martial artist and recent immigrant to America, Wong Jack-man, came to Bruce’s Kung Fu studio carrying an ornate scroll signed by all the sifu (King Fu masters) in Chinatown. They demanded that he stop teaching the secrets of Chinese Kung Fu to foreigners, or else he would have to do combat with Wong. Obviously Bruce wasn’t going to stop teaching westerners, so he accepted the challenge to fight.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to know for sure exactly what happened. It was a private match, with very few people known to have witnessed it. Of those that were present, there are three different accounts of what happened.

According to Wong and his buddy, the match lasted a grueling 25 minutes. There was no decisive blow that ended the match, instead it ended when Bruce became too winded to continue.

Bruce, Linda, and their friend told a much different story. According to them, the match was over in less than three minutes. Bruce was absolutely destroying Wong, who tried to run away. Bruce caught him and took him to the ground, at which point he mounted him and kept punching until Wong begged for mercy.

Now if there’s anything I’ve learned from TV sitcoms, it’s that in cases when two parties with vested interests give completely different accounts of events, you have to go to a neutral third party to find out what really happened. There wasn’t anyone truly neutral who bore witness to this event, at least none that I know of, but the closest we have is the account of David Chin, the man who organized the match on Wong’s behalf.

In an interview with Matthew Polly, David basically described the fight as being completely one sided, but also as kind of a shit show. According to David, when Wong approached Bruce to perform the customary pre-fight pleasantries, Bruce forewent custom and instead immediately launched an all out assault. This caused Wong to turn and run, as he was not yet fully prepared to fight, with Bruce chasing him around the room.

After being chased for a bit Wong tripped, at which point Bruce mounted him and began punching down on him until the fight was broken up. So it was much closer to the story that Bruce’s camp told, except with the added detail of some severely unsporting conduct at the start of the fight.

Realistically, I suspect this is the most accurate version. The idea that Wong, a guy nobody has ever heard of other than as “that guy who once challenged Bruce Lee and was never heard from again”, was able to go the distance and outlast Bruce in a fight is fairly ludicrous. I’ll get into his training regiment a bit later, but there’s no way 25 minutes was going to wear Bruce out to the point of exhaustion. I think we can throw this story out as a guy trying to make a name for himself.

And seeing as this was a challenge against Bruce, one which he insisted would be no holds barred, it’s not unreasonable to think he would immediately start throwing fists without bothering to touch gloves first. Don’t forget, he had spent his entire childhood as a street fighter. When he was fighting rival gangs on the rooftops of Hong Kong, I’d wager they didn’t have a lot of pre-fight formalities and just immediately got to business. You could debate whether this would have merely been a faux pas or if it was cheating douchebaggery, but either way I think it’s safe to assume that Bruce kicked Wong’s ass.

However, despite two of the three accounts stating that it was an easy victory for Bruce, he wasn’t happy with how the fight went. He won, but it should have been easier. He said the fight took less than three minutes, but it should have been over in mere seconds. Even though he had been incorporating aspects of other martial arts into his style to some extent, Bruce was still practicing and teaching Wing Chun.

But after the fight with Wong, he decided something needed to change. It was time to create his own martial arts style, something fully modernized that included elements from all types of combat. Bruce began reading everything he could find on various styles of martial arts, trying to formulate what would later become known as Jeet Kune Do, or the “way of the intercepting fist”.

As it turned out though, video of Bruce’s exhibition at the Long Beach karate championship had made it much further than he expected. One of the men in attendance at the competition had been Jay Sebring, a hair and makeup artist from Hollywood. While doing the hair of Hollywood TV producer William Dozier, Jay mentioned seeing Bruce perform in Long Beach. As a fun little aside, a few years later Jay was murdered by the Manson Family while he was inside the home of Roman Polanski.

William had been looking to cast someone as the son of Charlie Chan for an upcoming TV show he was planning to make, so he checked out video of Bruce’s exhibition. This was exactly the guy William was looking for, and so the call was made.

On February 1, 1965, Bruce and Linda’s son Brandon Lee was born. Three days later, Bruce had his very first Hollywood screen test. And a few days after that, Lee Hoi-chuen died in Hong Kong…it was a busy week.

Life on the D-List

Chances are the vast majority of you are unfamiliar with Charlie Chan, which is arguably for the best. Charlie Chan was a fictional Chinese detective living in Honolulu, theoretically based on the real life of detective Chang Apana. It began as a series of books, then in the 1920s there were two silent film serials.

And since you also might not know what a serial is, these were things that were shown in movie theaters before the main attraction. There would be several episodes containing a serialized story (hence the name) to encourage people to come back to the movies every week. And if you’re unfamiliar with what a silent film is, then Jesus Christ, read a book or something.

Anyway, a number of different people portrayed Charlie Chan on the big screen between 1926 and 1949, which had been the last time a Charlie Chan movie was made at the time this was happening. In the two silent serials, Chan was played by two different Japanese actors. That was all well and good for serials, but once Chan became a main attraction with his own feature length movies, the role would have to go to a bunch of white guys instead.

Charlie Chan was intended as a counterpoint to the “yellow peril”, an Asian hero that Americans could get behind instead of a negative stereotype. Sure, the character was still a one dimensional racial stereotype, but at least he was the good guy instead of being a sneaky villain. And the American public seemed to embrace this idea with open arms.

But casting an actual Asian in the role was a bridge too far back then. The public wasn’t ready for that yet. Don’t forget that during this time period, instead of a high school drama club putting on a performance of L’il Abner or The Pirates of Penzance, they might just host an honest to God minstrel show.

Long story short, Charlie Chan was a Chinese detective portrayed almost exclusively by white dudes, and William Dozer was looking to make a TV show, Number One Son, about the son of Chan who was presumably also going to be a detective. The screen test went well, so William went ahead and signed Bruce to an option for $1,800. As I understand it, an option basically meant that Bruce didn’t technically have the part yet, but he should keep his schedule open and couldn’t work with another TV or film studio until the option expired.

When Bruce’s father died a few days after the screen test, he used the option money to take himself, Linda, and baby Brandon to Hong Kong to stay with his family for a bit. It was the first time that Grace and the rest of the family had ever met Linda, who was probably expecting a similar reaction from his family that they had received from hers. While Bruce’s family would have preferred if he married a Chinese woman, they still welcomed Linda with open arms.

Unfortunately, Bruce got the news that the studio would not be going ahead with Number One Son. When William pitched it to executives, they immediately shot down the idea. They believed that Americans weren’t ready for a TV show with a Chinese leading man, and that the show would have been ratings poison. As disappointing as this was, William had another potential job for him, one that the studios wouldn’t say “no” to because his wasn’t the leading role.

The only catch was that whether or not the show would ever materialize all depended on the success of William’s other show that had just begun filming. So the fate of Bruce Lee’s acting career all hinged on a TV show he wasn’t even part of. It was a silly little comic book adaptation starring Adam West and Burt Ward, a show called Batman.

In September of 1965, Bruce and his family moved back to Seattle and stayed with Linda’s mother for a few months. This gave her a chance to actually get to know Bruce as a human being instead of as “that sneaky Chinaman that knocked up my daughter”, and she really grew to love him as a son in law.

After a few months they moved back to Oakland and stayed with James Yimm Lee again. The Kung Fu studio they had been running together was still open, but it wasn’t doing well. The studio’s failure is usually attributed to Bruce being overly selective about their students, as he only wanted to teach people who were serious about becoming the best they possibly could be. The decision was made to shut the studio down, especially since Bruce was again going to be MIA.

On January 12, 1966, the first episode of Batman aired. It was an instant success, and the nation was immediately overcome with “batmania”. The studio had originally planned to wait out the full first season of Batman before making the call on William’s next superhero adaptation, but after seeing Batman’s overwhelming success, they wanted to strike while the iron was hot. And so in March of 1966, Bruce got the call from William. His next TV show, The Green Hornet, was good to go.

The Green Hornet was originally created for radio rather than for comic books, but it was still a masked hero with an alter ego. In fact, it was almost exactly like Batman. Britt Reid, the secret identity of the Green Hornet, was just a rich dude with no superpowers who put on a mask at night to fight crime. The only real difference was that Alfred and Robin, Batman’s butler and sidekick, were essentially rolled into the single character of Kato for The Green Lantern.

Kato was Britt’s Filipino chauffer who would put on a mask to fight crime alongside him, and that was the role that William envisioned for Bruce Lee. Because as far as the average American knew or cared in the 1960s, Chinese and Filipino were the same thing.

Bruce wasn’t thrilled with this development, and he often joked that the only reason he was even offered the part of Kato was because he was the only Chinese actor they found who could pronounce the name “Britt Reid”. But joking aside, Bruce was unhappy that instead of starring in his own show, he was instead relegated to the role of sidekick. So if he was going to play Kato, he had a couple demands.

First, he wasn’t going to be the typical, subservient Asian that American audiences were used to seeing. Even though Kato was very literally Britt Reid’s servant, Bruce wasn’t going to be constantly bowing to him and calling him “master” and whatever else Americans had come to expect of their Asian characters.

More importantly, he was going to fight using Kung Fu. If you’ve ever seen Batman, the original Star Trek which began airing that same year, or really any other American action shows or movies from that era, you’ll know that the action was terrible. It was a lot of slow movement and haymaker punches that very clearly fell several feet short of actually making contact. This was the fighting style that the studio wanted Bruce to use, but he refused.

They relented, and Bruce not only was allowed to use Kung Fu in his role as Kato, but he became the fight choreographer for his own scenes. He wasn’t credited as such, but he was still responsible for meticulously designing all of his own fights, something he took very seriously.

This worked in The Green Hornet’s favour, as most Americans had never seen Kung Fu before. Kato’s fighting style was something completely novel, and it really fueled Bruce’s popularity in America. In designing the fights, though, he quickly learned that he would have to make concessions as well.

Most notably, he had to slow the fuck down. I mentioned his screen test for Number One Son from the previous year, and you can easily find videos of it online. If you watch it, you’ll see that his movements are far too quick to be properly picked up by the camera. The inability of the camera to keep up is most noticeable when Bruce demonstrated his tiger stance.

To give better context for those listening as a podcast, Bruce is stated to have been able to punch nine times or kick six times in a single second. Colour TV is broadcast at 29.97 frames per second, which would be three frames per punch (and a fourth frame on every third punch). Trying to animate several consecutive punches using only three snapshots each would result in a visual mess that was confusing and impossible to follow.

Even with the action slowed down, the fight scenes were still impressive, especially compared to the wild haymakers people were used to seeing in fight scenes. The first episode aired in September of 1966, and fans of the show absolutely loved Kato. After a few episodes, Bruce was receiving more fan mail than Hollywood heartthrob Van Williams, the man playing Britt Reid.

Unfortunately, fans of the show seemed to be few and far between. Many people saw it as an overly campy knockoff of Batman, a show that was already famously campy. Others found it to be too unrealistic, which is ironic considering Bruce couldn’t even show off his actual ability on camera. Bruce’s portrayal of Kato may have made him the star of the show, it just happened to be a show that not enough people were watching. After only a single 26 episode season, The Green Hornet was canceled.

Bruce began teaching Kung Fu again in early 1967 while the show was still airing, probably before they knew it was canceled. He opened a new studio in Los Angeles, still charging the same $22 per month for students he had been charging since opening his first studio in Seattle.

Originally the LA studio taught Jun-Fan Kung Fu, but the controversial fight against Wong Jack-man was still weighing heavily on him years later. Regardless of exactly what happened in the fight, Bruce felt that it took too long and was too sloppy. He needed a better way of fighting, something more efficient than the rigid structure of Wing Chun or any other martial art. This led him on his physical and philosophical journey to develop his own style of Kung Fu, which he called Jeet Kune Do.

When Bruce first started filming The Green Hornet, he was described as still having a little bit of baby fat. Although since he was 26 years old at that point, I think it would just be called fat. Obviously he wasn’t overweight or anything, but he wasn’t the shirtless, shredded God of fighting that he would later become.

Up until that point, American media had always portrayed Chinese as being frail weaklings. Both to destroy that stereotype and to become the strongest fighter he could possibly be, Bruce began a somewhat insane training regimen. He would run multiple miles every day, perform 5,000 punches, do like 1,500 pushups, and the list goes on.

He also began lifting weights, which was pretty unusual at the time. The benefits of weights and strength training were starting to become known by the end of the 1960s, but for the most part the only people lifting weights were bodybuilding freaks. Even NFL players didn’t lift weights at the time, as it was believed the giant muscles would make them too slow and inflexible.

Not only was he lifting weights, but he was buying all the weightlifting and physical fitness magazines he could find, making sure he stayed on the cutting edge of fitness techniques. If the magazines recommended vitamins or supplements, Bruce would begin taking them. As long as there was a perceived benefit, pretty much nothing seemed to be off the table except like anabolic steroids.

While training, he was also reading constantly. Linda remarked that she would often see Bruce with a book in one hand and a dumbbell in the other. In addition to all of the fitness and training resources, was also studying both western and eastern philosophy. He had been describing Kung Fu in philosophical terms for a few years now, and in his 1965 screen test video he compared martial arts to water, sort of a precursor to his famous “be water” speech.

All of this led to him combining elements of all different types of martial arts into his new style, Jeet Kune Do, or “the way of the intercepting fist”. It incorporated elements of Wing Chun, boxing, judo, karate, fencing, and anything else he found effective. Originally he envisioned it as a structured system the way the various styles of Kung Fu were designed, but he eventually decided Jeet Kune Do was essentially a style without a style. He believed Kung Fu was a fluid and changing thing, and the right style was whatever worked best for the person using it.

For example, in his movies you would frequently see Bruce kick people in the head, largely because it looks cool. When one of his famous students mentioned that, as he got older, he was losing his flexibility and could no longer kick high enough to hit someone in the head without warming up first, Bruce basically said, “Well why the fuck are you trying to kick someone in the head?” It was slower and inefficient, and Bruce believed the person should fight in the style that worked best with their own physical limitations, just like his poor vision and uneven legs had helped lead him to Wing Chun in the first place.

This was truly innovative thinking, the precursor to modern MMA (though various forms of MMA had existed for thousands of years), and it showed that Bruce wasn’t just an incredible athlete but a brilliant thinker as well. Unfortunately, cool ideas don’t pay the bills. The $22 per month wasn’t going to cut it, especially since not that many people were interested in learning Kung Fu in the first place. The Green Hornet was most of America’s first exposure to Kung Fu, and considering what a ratings disaster the show was it’s fair to say that most of America still had no idea what it was.

But in early 1967, after The Green Hornet finished filming but probably before they knew it was canceled, Bruce was having lunch with the show’s assistant director, Charles Fitzsimons. Charles recommended that, instead of relying on the meager income from his studio, he could charge big bucks to travel to celebrities and teach them Jeet Kune Do in the comfort of their own homes. Instead of $22 per month, he could charge up to $250 per hour (over $2,300 today) for private lessons.

This was a huge success, with Bruce teaching the likes of Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Chuck Norris, Joe Lewis, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Lee Marvin. Even Roman Polanski paid to fly Bruce to Switzerland for private lessons.

During this time, Bruce was also trying to write and develop his own TV show called The Warrior. He wanted it to be about a mercenary Shaolin priest living and fighting in the old West. In a 1971 interview, Bruce said that both Warner Bros. and Paramount were interested in the script, but they wanted it set in modern times, as the age of the Western was largely past.

Bruce contended that the show only made sense as a western, because when else in American history would people be engaging with one another in unarmed combat? If you tried to fight a bunch of people in New York City with Kung Fu, you would just get shot. As a reminder for anyone confused, the Wild West was really big on gun control, so if you were fighting someone within city limits it was probably going to be unarmed.

Although The Warrior never got made, Warner Bros. said that they coincidentally had already been working on something nearly identical to Bruce’s pitch. He was given no credit for the idea and was not cast in the show, with the role of the Shaolin monk instead going to David Carradine. The studio executives thought that Bruce was too Chinese to portray a Shaolin monk on American TV. The past, ladies and gentlemen.

Things weren’t going great, but Bruce did manage to pick up the odd guest appearance here and there. He refused to do anything that would have turned him into a stereotype though, so his options were limited.

Amidst all the chaos and uncertainty of his career, Bruce and Linda’s daughter Shannon was born on April 19, 1969. Work continued to trickle in, with Bruce getting maybe one TV appearance every eight months or so and doing some fight choreography work as well.

In 1970, disaster struck for Bruce when he was lifting weights and fucked up his back, injuring his fourth sacral spinal nerve. Doctors said he would never fight again, and he spent the next three months bedridden. Eventually he was able to move again and resumed training, getting back to his old self. It was a remarkable physical recovery, but it still wasn’t helping his career.

By 1971, Bruce’s acting career was nearly dead in the water. The Green Hornet was supposed to be a springboard to bigger and better projects, but since then his career had been sliding backwards instead of moving forward. To help him out, his friend and student, writer Stirling Silliphant, got Bruce a four episode guest spot on his TV show Longstreet. Bruce played the martial arts instructor of the show’s main character, and Stirling worked a lot of the philosophy of Jeet Kune Do into the script.

Unrelated to any of this, the decision was made for Bruce and Brandon to go visit Hong Kong and arrange for Grace to move to the United States to live with them. It was meant to be a short and uneventful trip, but instead it turned out to be the surprise and opportunity of a lifetime. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go accept my award for “Most Hackneyed Segue of the Year”.

Enter the Dragon

A funny thing happened while Bruce had been living in Los Angeles, something that he was totally unaware of. Hollywood likes to export shows and movies to other countries, and a couple of the shows Bruce appeared in got sent to Hong Kong. One of those shows was Batman, which had a horrible crossover episode with The Green Hornet. The other show that was broadcast in Hong Kong was known as The Kato Show.

That’s right, fuck Van Williams and Britt Reid. As far as the people of Hong Kong were concerned, Kato was the star of the show. Even if he was technically the sidekick, it didn’t matter. Bruce was one of their own, and he traveled to America and made it in Hollywood. As far as they knew, anyway. As we’ve discussed he was struggling to find work and at this point he couldn’t pay the mortgage for his house in Bel Air, but nobody in Hong Kong knew that.

Bruce was a star, and everybody wanted a piece of him. The first to approach him was Shaw Brothers Studios, the biggest film studio in Hong Kong and definitely not blatant copyright infringement of Warner Bros., as evidenced by their logo here:

Shaw Bros. offered Bruce a seven year contract at $2,000 per movie, which he rejected. He was then approached by Raymond Chow, founder of Golden Harvest. Raymond made the much more appealing offer of $15,000 for two movies. Bruce was pretty sure that the movies were going to be terrible and nobody would see them, but he really needed the money. And hey, maybe if the movies weren’t total shit he could always show them to his Hollywood contacts and use them as leverage to jumpstart his career back west.

The first of these two movies was The Big Boss. It was filmed in Bangkok, and was a miserable experience for Bruce. It was the middle of a heat wave, there wasn’t enough food for the cast, there were roaches everywhere, the city was so loud that Bruce lost his voice having to shout his lines over the noise, and he injured himself during a stunt.

On the bright side, Golden Harvest set up a house in Hong Kong for Bruce’s family to stay in during filming. So instead of Grace moving to America, the family came to Hong Kong. Brandon even attended La Salle College, just like his father had. This meant that Linda was able to attend the opening premiere of The Big Boss with Bruce, which was a pretty nerve wracking experience.

Hong Kong movie audiences have a lot of opinions, and you’re definitely going to hear them. In the 1960s and ’70s in particular, it wasn’t uncommon for moviegoers to bring knives with them to the theater so they could stab the seats if they didn’t like the movie. Since Bruce believed this was going to be a terrible pile of crap he only did for the money, needless to say he was terrified about the bedlam that was likely about to unfold when the movie ended to total silence in the theater.

Then, all at once, the audience jumped to their feet in elation. Everybody loved the movie, and Bruce, who was already famous in Hong Kong, was about to be bigger than Elvis, the Beatles, and Jesus combined. Over the next three weeks, the movie made over 3 million Hong Kong dollars, breaking the box office record.

Just a few months later in March of 1962, Bruce’s second film with Golden Harvest, Fists of Fury, was released. Not only did it break the box office records that had been set by The Big Boss, but it was a big source of income for ticket scalpers as well. Fists of Fury was sold out everywhere, and it was so popular that people who bought tickets for $1 could resell them for as much as $50.

Having completed his contract with Golden Harvest, Bruce was a free agent now, and one with a metric fuckton of leverage for negotiations. Offers were coming in from all over the world, but Bruce decided to partner with Raymond again, though it wouldn’t be with Golden Harvest. Instead, they united to form a new production company, Concord Production Inc.

During the course of filming for Fists of Fury, Bruce had a number of disagreements with the director, Lo Wei, and so as soon as the production company was created he announced to the press, “No Way, Lo Wei”. He wasn’t going to deal with someone he thought was a shitty director again, so for his next movie, Way of the Dragon, Bruce was going to do everything himself. He would write, direct, choreograph, and star in the movie. He even did the percussion for the soundtrack, because why the fuck not.

This wasn’t just about the negative experience with Lo Wei, though, it was deeper than that. Bruce thought that Hong Kong cinema was kind of terrible. To put it bluntly, he thought the scripts were bad. They were formulaic, usually based on old legends, and filming would start before the script was even finished. They’d film a bunch of stuff, then just kind of work out what the story was halfway through.

That sort of halfhearted attitude wasn’t going to fly with Bruce, so he wanted to make sure the story was fully fleshed out. Everything had to be perfect, to the point that his choreography for a single fight could be 20 pages long. He also installed mirrors all along one of the walls in the house, and he would practice the choreography with Linda, using the mirrors to help him identify the best camera angles for specific sequences.

The final showdown between Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris was even used as a demonstration of his Jeet Kune Do philosophy. The fight began with Bruce using traditional Wing Chun and Chuck using Tang Soo Do, a Korean martial art based on karate. The fight began with Chuck kicking Bruce’s ass, making him realize he had to become more fluid and adapt his fighting style to the situation.

This ultimately led to Bruce’s victory in the fight, but what did you expect? It was his movie. In fact, when he called Chuck Norris and offered him the role, that’s the exact answer he gave when Chuck asked who was going to win (though he did promise to make it a back and forth fight).

You might thing giving a perfectionist total control over a movie would mean it never got released, but the movie was done filming in a matter of months, being released in December of 1972. It was all done on location in Rome for a budget of just $130,000, and Bruce kept telling everyone that it was going to be the first Hong Kong movie to make over 5 million Hong Kong dollars at the box office. People thought he was insane, until the movie made 5.5 million.

After filming for Way of the Dragon was done and postproduction was doing their magic, Bruce planned to take a break for a bit. He was working on a script for his next movie with Raymond, Game of Death, but he really needed a break from filming. In August he started working on the script, but in October he got news that his former student, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, was in Hong Kong.

This was an incredible opportunity, as who wouldn’t want to see Bruce Lee have a martial arts contest against someone who was over a foot and a half taller than he was? Even though the script wasn’t done yet, it was a pretty simple premise. There was going to be a pagoda, with each floor run by a master of a different martial art. Bruce would have to fight his way to the top of the pagoda to retrieve some sort of treasure.

There’s actually an entire genre of movies like this known as “attack the tower” movies, but Game of Death was one of the first (if not the first) movie to use this structure. I know the premise may sound a little silly, but you’re really just watching these for the action. And once in a while one of these movies will even have a surprisingly detailed and coherent plot, like The Raid.

Anyway, Bruce filmed his fight with Kareem, but then production on Game of Death had to stop. Hollywood had caught wind of what a massive star Bruce had become, and Warner Bros. decided to offer him the lead role in Enter the Dragon, which would be a joint production between WB, Golden Harvest, and Concord. It was finally happening; Hollywood was making their first ever Kung Fu movie, and it was going to star Bruce Lee.

Everything he had worked for had led to this, so Game of Death was put on hold while Bruce filmed Enter the Dragon. The movie was filmed in Hong Kong between January and April of 1973, and then it was back to work finishing the script for Game of Death. Unfortunately, the movie would never be completed.

At least it wouldn’t be completed while Bruce Lee was alive, and the movie that resulted was a bit of a travesty that included footage from other movies, cardboard cutouts of Bruce, and even footage of Bruce’s funeral, including his actual corpse. Speaking of Bruce’s death, you didn’t forget over the past 84 minutes that this is a Decoding the Unknown about his unsolved cause of death, did you, Simon? The Mysterious Death of Bruce Lee On July 20, 1973, Raymond Chow came to visit Bruce at his home at around 2 pm.

They were discussing the script for Game of Death, and after a couple hours they left to visit the apartment of Betty Ting Pei, a Taiwanese actress and Bruce’s alleged mistress. Betty was set to play the lead female role in Game of Death, so they wanted to discuss the film with here as well. Inside Betty’s apartment, Bruce discussed the script the same way he always did: by jumping up from his chair and acting out all of the action.

After passionately acting out his movie for an indeterminate amount of time, Bruce took a sip of water, probably thirsty from all of his physical exertion. He suddenly felt dizzy, so he sat down. He began complaining about a headache, so Betty offered him a prescription painkiller called Equagesic.

It was a combination of aspirin and meprobamate, a drug commonly used back then as a mild tranquilizer. If you’re old enough, you may recognize meprobamate by the brand name Miltown, though by the time this happened it had already largely fallen out of use in favour of benzos, especially because meprobamate could be both addictive and toxic at doses that weren’t much higher than the recommended therapeutic dose. After taking the pill, Bruce went to lay down and Raymond left.

The exact timeline of what happened from this point is a little unclear, but nobody realized anything was wrong until Bruce and Betty failed to show up for dinner. They were supposed to meet Raymond and James Bond actor George Lazenby for dinner to discuss a potential upcoming collaboration between Bruce and George. But Bruce didn’t show up for dinner.

Raymond called Betty’s apartment, at which point she said that Bruce was still sleeping. She went to wake him up so they could go to the dinner meeting, but was unable to do so. Concerned, Raymond came to Betty’s apartment where he found Bruce completely unresponsive.

So there, in the apartment of Bruce’s mistress, Bruce’s business partner stood over his body and did what any sensible person would do in that situation. He recognized that this looked really fucking bad for him and Betty, and did everything he could to avoid calling the police or an ambulance. Raymond called Bruce’s personal doctor at least 20 times with no response, at which point he called Betty’s personal doctor.

The doctor arrived, and he identified that Bruce wasn’t breathing and didn’t have a pulse. After attempting CPR to no avail, the doctor finally called an ambulance. At around 11 pm, several hours after Bruce’s initial headache, he was declared dead on arrival at the hospital.

Bruce died from cerebral edema (swelling of the brain), and the official cause of death was listed as an allergic reaction to the single aspirin he had taken. This remains the official cause of death, but most people aren’t buying it. Not only is a deadly reaction to aspirin extremely unlikely, but Betty claimed that she had given Bruce Equagesic for headaches in the past without any sort of reaction.

Note that the entire discussion was centered around aspirin rather than meprobamate, because as far as I can tell the latter was considered harmless and almost like an inactive ingredient at the time in Hong Kong. More importantly, the timeline didn’t make sense. Bruce only took the Equagesic pill after experiencing dizziness and headache, which are symptoms of cerebral edema.

If the symptoms of his fatal condition were present before he took the pill, then how could an allergic reaction to the pill have caused that condition? It’s a very unsatisfying answer, and one that has led to endless speculation and alternate theories about Bruce’s death. It certainly didn’t help that when Raymond initially announced Bruce’s death via a Golden Harvest press release, he said that Bruce had died in his home.

It was later revealed to the public that he died in Betty’s apartment, leading to even more speculation that the official reporting was covering something up. The Theories Even though sources in Hong Kong refuse to deviate from the official story, to most the true cause of Bruce’s death has remained an open mystery. Many of the theories do acknowledge cerebral edema as the ultimate cause of death, they just seek to provide a more realistic explanation for what could have caused this.

I mean come on, aspirin is one of the most common over the counter pain medications in the world (even if Equagesic was a prescription medication). Are we really to believe not only that Bruce had never once taken aspirin in his 32 years on Earth, but that the first time he took it he had an acutely deadly allergic reaction? And that this allergic reaction caused death without any other symptoms like hives, anaphylaxis, or swelling of the face and throat instead of just the brain?

It really doesn’t make sense, but neither do the first two theories. And that brings us to curses, because this wouldn’t be an episode of Decoding the Unknown if there wasn’t some theory involving supernatural bullshit. There are a bunch of variations of this, but one such theory is that a curse was placed on Bruce’s family because his father was given a Catholic funeral service.

This theory became even more prominent following the death of Brandon Lee during the filming of The Crow. Brandon was killed by a metal fragment that had somehow gotten lodged inside a prop gun, and his untimely death was supposedly part of the curse. Despite the fact that both of Bruce’s brothers were still alive at the time, his younger brother, Robert, believed in this curse.

He and the elder brother Peter weren’t dead, but they were both divorced which Robert took as evidence that clearly they must have fallen victim to the curse as well. Obviously curses and magic aren’t real, so I’m not going to take any time debunking this one. I still had to mention it though.

The next theory, and the one I had always heard as fact, was that the Triads killed Bruce. There are a couple different theories as to why this would have happened. The first is that Bruce was revealing the secrets of Kung Fu, specifically Wing Chun, to westerners.

Once upon a time, Wing Chun was referred to as “gangster fist”, because it was the most popular fighting style among the Triads. I mentioned earlier how Wing Chun was particularly focused on short range, and this made it ideal for street fights in crowded cities. And sure, theoretically this could be possible.

Other Kung Fu masters tried to shut Bruce’s studios down because he was teaching non-Chinese students, leading to the fight with Wong Jack-man, though it’s not like they were trying to murder him. And while he was among the first and most notable people to do it, it’s not like Bruce was the only Kung Fu master who moved to America and began reaching white people. Besides, Bruce died in 1973.

Do you really think the Triads gave a shit if foreigners were familiar with their precious Wing Chun at that point? They had fucking guns, lots of them. Enough that they had significant influence over much of Hong Kong (though corrupt politicians and police forces helped them gain influence as well).

The idea that the Triads would have been angry enough about white people watching Kung Fu movies to murder Bruce feels like a very specific type of mid-20th century racism that is difficult to articulate. Also, immediately after Bruce died, Hong Kong movie executives tried to turn Jackie Chan into the next Bruce Lee. This wasn’t successful because Bruce and Jackie had very different fighting styles and personalities, but they sure tried to force Jackie to be a clone of Bruce.

Fortunately when he made Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow, Jackie was allowed to add more of his personality and comedic slapstick into the action scenes, a style that led to his massive international fame, but it wouldn’t make sense for Hong Kong studios to immediately try to replace Bruce with another martial artist if they knew the Triads had murdered him for showing Kung Fu to the west. And that’s without even getting into the entire genre of “Brucesploitation” films that Hong Kong started producing immediately following Bruce’s death. The other explanations for why the Triads would have murdered Bruce both involve money, which would make far more sense as motivation.

The first idea was that Concord Productions borrowed money from the Triads to fund their movies and then refused to pay it back. While it’s the sort of thing that could theoretically be possible, I’m guessing this was born from a misunderstanding of events. As we discussed, while Concord was a new production company founded by Bruce and Raymond to make his Hong Kong movies, it’s not like they didn’t have access to money.

Raymond still owned Golden Harvest, which had just produced the two highest grossing movies in Hong Kong history. Concord wasn’t a fledgling company Bruce tried to build from nothing, a situation that might have necessitated borrowing mafia money. It was mainly just an agreement made between Bruce and Raymond to placate Bruce’s desire for artistic control over his upcoming projects.

The alternate money explanation was that the Triads were making a ton of money off of Bruce’s Hong Kong movies, and they were pissed off that he was going to start making movies in Hollywood instead. As far as I can tell, a lot of this stems from alleged connections between director Lo Wei and the Triads. Regardless of whether or not the Triads stood to financially benefit from Bruce filming movies in Hong Kong, this theory seems to ignore the fact that Bruce planned to continue doing so.

Game of Death was being filmed in Hong Kong, and there wasn’t reason to believe that he wouldn’t make more movies there as well. We all forget because he’s such an iconic figure today, but few people outside of Hong Kong had ever heard of Bruce Lee before he died. The people who saw him on The Green Hornet loved him, but the show was a failure that few people watched.

It wasn’t until Enter the Dragon released that Bruce truly became an international star, and that didn’t happen until three weeks after his death. While these theories make a lot more sense than a curse does, there are still a lot of holes in the logic. Also, by every account I can find, the Triads loved Bruce and his movies.

He was bringing honour and respect to the Chinese, something that they were big fans of. Oh yeah, and since this is also thrown out there as a reason that the Triads would kill Bruce, did he beat up some Triad members or their children when he was a punk kid? Sure, probably.

There’s at least the one account I mentioned earlier where that is reported to have happened. But do you think the people that happened to were gonna hold a decades-long grudge culminating in murder, or were they just gonna tell all their friends and colleagues about the epic street fight they had with Bruce Lee back when they were both teens? That said, I did find one piece of evidence that, while not directly supporting the theory, does help explain why it became so popular.

In the April 1978 issue of Fighting Stars magazine, there was an interview with Van Williams, Bruce’s costar from The Green Hornet. Near the end of the interview when talking about Bruce, Van said “He had a lot of problems. The Chinese mafia approached him about certain things.

I don’t know what the whole story was.” Obviously that’s extremely vague and isn’t proof of anything, but for somebody who worked closely with Bruce to claim he had issues with the Triads was certainly fuel for speculation. In fact, being so vague was probably beneficial to this theory, as it allowed more room for wild speculation.

Next are the allegations that Betty and/or Raymond killed Bruce, potentially via poisoning. You know, that thing they were afraid people would think happened when they were the ones to find him dead in Betty’s bed. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence supporting this, and the motives are tenuous and generic.

The purported and ironic motivation for Betty was jealousy, though I’m not even sure what alleged motive people think Raymond had. The basis for this theory seems to be the fact that they tried to hide what really happened by announcing that Bruce died at his own home rather than at Betty’s. Once again, there really isn’t a ton to go on here.

I understand why people would have been skeptical about anything that came out of Raymond’s mouth, but to make the leap from them trying to hide Bruce’s affair to one or both of them deliberately poisoning him is quite a bit of a stretch. While the previous theories certainly leave a lot to be desired, they remained so popular for so long because there wasn’t a better answer. Did it make sense for the Triads to murder Bruce?

Not really, but it still made more sense than a single aspirin murdering him. It wasn’t until the last several years that new information was brought to light which finally produced some more reasonable logic behind his death. And that brings us to the much more believable theories.

The first is that Bruce died as a result of a drug overdose, and the doctors tried to cover it up by falsifying his autopsy. It was well known that Bruce was a big fan of hashish. His autopsy even revealed small amounts of hash in his stomach at the time he died.

For a long time, this was the known extent of Bruce’s drug use. While some overzealous anti-drug crusaders tried to argue that he died from an overdose of marijuana, a thing that has literally never happened, most people believed that he simply used edibles as a way to relax. It was also argued that he ate hash for its anti-inflammatory properties, even though this wasn’t something that was really known about at the time.

However, in July of 2021, 40 handwritten letters from Bruce to his Fists of Fury costar Robert “Bob” Baker were auctioned off via Heritage Auctions for over $450,000. Congrats to the seller, as it’s reported that they found the letters at a flea market. These letters included requests for Bob to mail Bruce things like cocaine, pain killers, LSD, and magic mushrooms for his personal use.

The early letters were discreet, requesting Bob to airmail him “Coca-Cola” in an inconspicuous package, but as the years went on the letters became much more direct. It had long been speculated before the discovery of these letters that Bob was Bruce’s dealer, but it was always assumed that his drug use was limited to hash. Based on the letters, it seems that Bruce may have had a pretty severe cocaine problem.

That said, while this certainly does paint a more complex picture of Bruce’s life, cocaine use wouldn’t really explain the symptoms Bruce experienced. Assuming that the autopsy report was accurate and not doctored to hide the real cause of death, as many people have argued it was. But finally it’s time for the two most realistic and likely theories.

I told you the events immediately surrounding Bruce’s death, but I didn’t mention anything that happened before that. This was intentional, because that’s all that the doctors in Hong Kong looked at when making the determination that the cerebral edema must have been caused by an allergic reaction to aspirin. However, there is some very important context from the months leading up to this that would have been important for doctors to know.

I talked a bit about how Bruce went all in on his training to get the best looking physique he possibly could. Not only did he want to be strong, but he wanted to look ripped on camera. He certainly succeeded in that regard, but there was another issue Bruce felt that he needed to address so he could look better on camera: hyperhidrosis.

Hyperhidrosis is a condition where a person sweats excessively, even in cool temperatures and when they’re being inactive. A person with hyperhidrosis may sweat up to four times as much as a typical person. Bruce was never officially diagnosed with this condition, but he is still well documented to have had an issue with excessive sweating.

His family and coworkers alike talked about how sweaty Bruce could get, even when it was cool and he wasn’t working out or performing action scenes. That’s not ideal for anyone, but especially not for someone who wants to be a movie star. Bruce felt that having sweaty armpit stains on his shirts didn’t look good on film, understandably so, and so about six months before his death he had the sweat glands in his armpits removed.

This is a common treatment for hyperhidrosis, and it’s considered a safe, outpatient procedure. That said, there certainly are risks, especially for someone as active as Bruce. Sure, he wouldn’t have giant sweat stains on his shirts anymore, but it meant his body would become worse at regulating temperature.

Under normal conditions this isn’t a huge risk, as there are still plenty of other sweat glands all over your body, but there’s still some increased risk. That brings us to the events of May 10, 1973, events that the doctor who declared the cause of death seemed to be completely unaware of. In the 1965 screen test, Bruce was asked about filming in Hong Kong.

He explained how most movies were filmed between 12 am and 5 am, because Hong Kong was a noisy city with 3 million people, so that was the only time there was relative quiet. But by the time Enter the Dragon was filmed, this wasn’t necessarily the case. Too many movies were being made in Hong Kong at the same time to rely exclusively on early morning hours for filming, so instead they filmed when they could and replaced the dialogue using something called automated dialogue replacement (ADR), also known as looping.

This has been pretty standard in just about every movie since the 1970s, and it’s where actors will dub some or all of their dialogue after filming for a movie has finished. Basically, anything that is filmed on location relies on ADR for dialogue, as there will be too much ambient noise anywhere that isn’t a closed, indoor shoot. It varies by movie, but it’s not uncommon for 80- 90% of dialogue in a movie to all be ADR.

Some actors are better at this than others, but nobody is perfect. If you carefully watch the lips of everyone talking during a movie, it’s easy to see that the audio doesn’t actually match their mouths. So enjoy that cursed knowledge, as it will now ruin movies for you until you are able to forget you knew this.

Anyway, that’s what Bruce was doing on May 10, rerecording all of his dialogue for Enter the Dragon inside the Golden Harvest studio. According to the historical weather data I can find, it would have been somewhere between 85 and 95 degrees Fahrenheit (30-35 degrees Simon temperature). Despite the heat, the air conditioners and fans had to be turned off so that they wouldn’t be audible in the newly recorded dialogue.

During the recording, Bruce went to the bathroom and fainted. He then returned to the recording studio where he collapsed again, vomited, and began having a seizure. He was rushed to the hospital where he was diagnosed with cerebral edema, which they successfully treated.

One doctor also said that his blood test showed a possible kidney malfunction, but they don’t appear to have looked too deeply into what caused this incident, likely just chalking it up to stress and overexertion. The fact that he had to be rushed to the hospital for a cerebral edema just two months before dying from another one certainly seems like something that the autopsy doctor should have been aware of and taken into account, but that doesn’t appear to have happened. That said, this additional information gives us the two best theories as to why Bruce actually died.

One of these was presented by Matthew Polly in his book, as he appears to have been the one to discover the letter from Bruce’s doctor to his life insurance company detailing the sweat gland removal procedure. His theory was that Bruce’s death was caused by heat stroke. The symptoms Bruce experienced while doing ADR in May line up with heat stroke, and the conditions were right for it.

It was extremely hot outside, hotter in the studio, and Bruce’s body was now less able to regulate its temperature. It all seems to line up nicely, and it also helps explain why it may have been overlooked. Although humans have had a vague conceptualization of heat stroke for thousands of years, it wasn’t well understood yet.

Serious research had begun earlier in the 1900s, but it wasn’t really until the ’80s and ’90s that heat stroke was understood to be the severe medical emergency that it is. Not only would this explain symptoms like vomiting, seizures, and cerebral edema, but we now know that once a person has one heat stroke, they are more likely to have them again. I don’t know what sort of cooling system Betty had in her apartment, but according to the historical weather data it was 95 degrees or hotter in Hong Kong that day.

If Bruce was being his usual, animated self while acting out his plans for the Game of Death script, this physical exertion in hot temperatures could have been enough to result in another heat stroke. He received immediate medical attention the first time because of the seizure, but in the absence of that symptom, he was allowed to lie down until the cerebral edema killed him. It makes a lot of sense, but in 2022 another theory was proposed in the form of a research paper by a group of nephrologists in the Clinical Kidney Journal.

And surprise, surprise, the kidney doctors think that Bruce died because of his kidneys. More specifically, they believe that the cause of death was hyponatremia. Basically that’s the same thing as water poisoning, except caused by your body not filtering out water properly rather than by you drinking too much in a short period of time.

According to the researchers’ analysis of publically available data, they believe that damage done to his kidneys, likely by drug use, resulted in a decreased ability to get rid of excess water in his body. This would have been exacerbated by the removal of his sweat glands, as that’s even more water that wasn’t being excreted. When the body takes on more water than it’s able to get rid of, it fucks up the body’s electrolyte balance.

This can result in death from cerebral edema in a matter of hours. While Bruce isn’t believe to have consumed enough water in a short period of time to have triggered water poisoning, like happened in those radio contests, the researchers believe that his death was the result of chronic over-hydration combined with damage to the kidneys. It’s worth mentioning that there are lots of instances of people talking about how much water Lee drank, which is pretty noteworthy.

Drinking water is one of the single most mundane things a person can do, so remembering someone as “that guy who drank water” probably means they were doing it a potentially excessive amount. It would be like if you were asked about a person and replied, “Oh yeah, I always remember that guy breathing”. Chances are that person was always either wheezing or inexplicably out of breath, because why the Hell else would you remember something like that.

While this explanation does make sense, I’m not convinced it’s a better fit than heat stroke is. The more recent revelation that Bruce was taking a whole bunch of drugs that can cause serious kidney damage does lend some credence to this theory, so it’s hard to say for sure. My gut instinct is that the first instance of cerebral edema makes more sense as heat stroke, while the second feels more like an underlying condition.

I don’t know how hot Betty’s apartment was though, and she did claim that she and Bruce took part in some rather vigorous exercise that day as well, so it is possible. Plus, the first heat stroke would have made another more likely, so it probably didn’t need to be quite as hot to trigger another one. Then again, the hot studio could have caused Bruce to drink more water than usual, triggering hyponatremia (which can cause seizures as well).

Wrap Up So what do you think, Simon? Did Bruce succumb to hyponatremia, or was that just sensationalistic nonsense used to push more copies of Clinical Kidney Journal? Or maybe you believe it was one of the other theories, like a curse.

Personally, I think I’m on the side of heat stroke, though I wouldn’t completely rule out the kidney stuff either. But perhaps we’ll get a more definitive answer someday. Like I said, before 2018, we didn’t have a single reasonable theory as to what caused Bruce’s death.

There have been multiple revelations since then, and it’s possible more information will come out in the future that gives a definitive answer. Even though Bruce died at a young age, mere weeks before achieving his goal of Hollywood stardom, he still managed to change the world forever. Not only did his influence help shape both western and eastern cinema, but his efforts played a major role in the global expansion of Kung Fu, and martial arts in general.

That, more than anything, may be the true legacy of Bruce Lee. US veterans who were stationed in Japan during and immediately after World War II brought karate back to the States, but it was still a very niche thing. Thanks to Bruce introducing Kung Fu to Hollywood, martial arts became a cultural phenomenon.

If you drive through any town in America, you’re all but guaranteed to see at least one martial arts studio, and probably multiple. And so his legacy is not just as an actor and martial artist, but as a source of greater cultural appropriation in America. I mean appreciation…cultural appreciation.

Since I alluded to it earlier, I’ll leave you with Bruce Lee’s famous quote from a 1971 interview on The Pierre Burton Show in which he explained the philosophy of Jeet Kune Do, a philosophy that clearly went straight over the head of the show’s host: “Empty your mind. Be formless. Shapeless, like water.

Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot.

Now water can flow, or it can crash. Be water, my friend.” Here’s hoping excess water isn’t actually what killed him.

Key Takeaways Bruce Lee was a US-born child actor who became a street fighter and gang leader before returning to the US. He developed his own martial arts style, Jeet Kune Do, which incorporated elements from various disciplines. Lee’s acting career struggled in the US until his Hong Kong films made him an international star.

His sudden death at 32 from cerebral edema sparked numerous theories, including allergic reactions, curses, and mafia involvement. Recent evidence suggests his death may have been due to heat stroke or kidney issues from drug use and excessive water intake. Frequently Asked Questions What was Bruce Lee’s official cause of death?

Bruce Lee’s official cause of death was cerebral edema, caused by an allergic reaction to a single aspirin. What was the popular conspiracy theory about Bruce Lee’s death? The popular conspiracy theory about Bruce Lee’s death was that he was murdered by the Triads, the Chinese mafia.

What was Bruce Lee’s birth name? Bruce Lee’s birth name was Lee Jun-fan. What was Bruce Lee’s stage name?

Bruce Lee’s stage name was Li Xiao Long, or Lee the Little Dragon. What was Bruce Lee’s first acting role? Bruce Lee’s first acting role was in the 1941 movie Golden Gate Girl, where he played the role of “crying baby girl” for about 20 seconds.

What martial art did Bruce Lee initially learn? Bruce Lee initially learned Wing Chun Kung Fu under the master Ip Man. What was the name of Bruce Lee’s first official Jun-Fan Gung Fu school?

Bruce Lee’s first official Jun-Fan Gung Fu school was opened in 1963 at the University of Washington. What was the name of the TV show that Bruce Lee starred in as Kato? The TV show that Bruce Lee starred in as Kato was The Green Hornet.

What was the name of Bruce Lee’s first Hong Kong movie? Bruce Lee’s first Hong Kong movie was The Big Boss. What was the name of the movie that Bruce Lee was filming when he died?

Bruce Lee was filming Game of Death when he died.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was Bruce Lee’s official cause of death?

Bruce Lee’s official cause of death was cerebral edema, caused by an allergic reaction to a single aspirin.

What was the popular conspiracy theory about Bruce Lee’s death?

The popular conspiracy theory about Bruce Lee’s death was that he was murdered by the Triads, the Chinese mafia.

What was Bruce Lee’s birth name?

Bruce Lee’s birth name was Lee Jun-fan.

What was Bruce Lee’s stage name?

Bruce Lee’s stage name was Li Xiao Long, or Lee the Little Dragon.

What was Bruce Lee’s first acting role?

Bruce Lee’s first acting role was in the 1941 movie Golden Gate Girl, where he played the role of “crying baby girl” for about 20 seconds.

What martial art did Bruce Lee initially learn?

Bruce Lee initially learned Wing Chun Kung Fu under the master Ip Man.

What was the name of Bruce Lee’s first official Jun-Fan Gung Fu school?

Bruce Lee’s first official Jun-Fan Gung Fu school was opened in 1963 at the University of Washington.

What was the name of the TV show that Bruce Lee starred in as Kato?

The TV show that Bruce Lee starred in as Kato was The Green Hornet.

What was the name of Bruce Lee’s first Hong Kong movie?

Bruce Lee’s first Hong Kong movie was The Big Boss.

What was the name of the movie that Bruce Lee was filming when he died?

Bruce Lee was filming Game of Death when he died.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The Mystery Behind the Death of Bruce Lee
• Hero image source by Stephen Firrincieli / Swfunc / openverse, by.