The flowers were white. Chrysanthemums, the kind you buy at the market on Jackson Street for $3 a bundle. The kind with thick stems and heavy heads that droop if you don’t cut them right. Someone had cut these right. The stems were short. The heads sat upright in their vases on either side of the casket, and the casket was open, and the man inside the casket was dead.
Bruce Lee was standing 4 feet from the body. He was wearing a dark suit, not black, dark gray, the kind of gray that photographs as black, but in person reads as charcoal, as smoke, as something not quite committed to morning. White shirt, dark tie. His hands were at his sides and his shoes were leather and the leather was polished and the polish caught the fluorescent light from the ceiling and threw small reflections onto the lenolium floor.
The room was small folding chairs, 30, maybe 35 of them set in rows with an aisle down the center. The walls were wood panled, not real wood, the kind of paneling that comes in sheets and is nailed to studs and pretends to be walnut. The ceiling was low. The air smelled like flowers and floor wax and the particular chemical sweetness that funeral homes used to mask the other smell, the one nobody talks about.
22 people in the room, maybe 24. Bruce was standing near the front on the left side between the second row of chairs and the casket. He was not sitting. Everyone else was sitting or had been sitting and was now standing to greet someone or shifting in the folding chairs trying to find a position that didn’t press the metal bar into the back of the thigh.
Bruce was standing and a man walked through the door. The man was white, tall, over six feet. He had a broad chest and thick arms and he was wearing a suit that didn’t fit him well. The jacket was tight across the shoulders. The kind of tight that means the suit was bought when the man was smaller or the man had been bought when the suit was bigger.
His hair was dark and combed back and his jaw was square and his eyes moved across the room the way a man’s eyes move when the man is looking for someone specific. He found Bruce. The man walked down the center aisle, past the folding chairs, past the seated mourers, past the women in dark dresses, and the men in dark suits and the children who were quiet.
Because children know when a room is serious, even when nobody explains why he walked toward the casket. He walked toward Bruce. Bruce didn’t move. Bruce’s hands stayed at his sides. Bruce’s eyes tracked the man the way a compass needle tracks north. Not a decision, not a calculation, just alignment. The man was moving and Bruce was watching the movement and the watching was automatic and complete.
The man stopped two steps from the coffin. His hand came up. I need to tell you how I know this. Jesse Glover told this story once. Jesse Glover was Bruce Lee’s first student in the United States. I’ve talked about Jesse before. Jesse was there for things that nobody else was there for. The early things, the small things, the things that happened in basements and garages and rented rooms before the world knew Bruce Lee’s name.
Jesse was there before the fame. Jesse was there before the movies. Jesse was there before the magazines and the television and the cover of Black Belt and the screaming in the theaters. Jesse was there when Bruce was just a man in Seattle who moved in a way that other men hadn’t seen a man move. Jesse told this story to a man named David.
David told it to my father. My father told it to me. Four hands. That’s the chain. Bruce’s body in the room. Jesse’s eyes on Bruce’s body. Jesse’s mouth to David’s ear. David’s mouth to my father’s ear. My father’s mouth to mine. I’ll explain how I know this. But first, what happened next? The man’s hand came up.
Not a fist, an open hand. The fingers were spread. The hand was reaching. It was reaching toward Bruce Lee’s chest. And the reach was not fast. The reach was deliberate. The way a man reaches for a door handle. The way a man reaches for a glass of water. The way a man reaches for something he believes he has the right to touch.
Bruce didn’t move. 22 people in the room. Maybe 24. Every one of them was watching. Some had been watching since the man walked through the door. Some started watching when the man walked past the rows of chairs without sitting down. Some started watching when the man stopped two steps from the coffin. All of them were watching.
Now, the hand was reaching for Bruce’s chest. I need to stop here and tell you about the man in the coffin because you can’t understand what happened next without understanding who was being buried and what that person meant to Bruce Lee and why Bruce was standing 4T from the body in the first place. But the hand is still reaching.
Remember that the hand is in the air. The fingers are spread. The hand is two feet from Bruce’s chest and the hand is moving and Bruce is not moving and 22 people are watching and nobody is speaking and the flowers are white and the room is small and the air smells like chrysanthemums and floor wax. The hand is still reaching.
Hold that. We need to go back. The man in the coffin was named Fukyang. And I need to be honest with you about this name. I’m not certain of the spelling. Jesse told this story once, and by the time the story reached my father, the name had passed through two mouths in 20 years, and the vowels had shifted the way vowels shift when a Cantonese name travels through English-speaking mouths.
Fukyong or Fukyong or something close to that. The man who lay in the coffin doesn’t exist in any biography I found. He doesn’t appear in the index of any book about Bruce Lee that sits on the shelf behind me. He is not on the internet. He is not in any documentary. He is not in any interview with Linda Lee or Dan Inosanto or Tei Kimura.
He exists in this story and nowhere else. My father said the man in the coffin taught Bruce something. My father paused when he said this. Not a dramatic pause, a functional pause. The kind of pause a man makes when he’s trying to remember exact words that came to him through exact words that came to someone else. Jesse called him a teacher.
Not a martial arts teacher. A teacher. Something else. Something about the body. About the way the body holds things. something about the body, about the way the body holds things. I don’t know what that means with certainty. I have ideas. I have guesses. I’ll share them with you later. But right now, what matters is this.
Fukyouong taught Bruce Lee something. And Bruce respected the man. And when the man died, Bruce came to the funeral. And Bruce stood four feet from the body in a dark gray suit with his hands at his sides and his shoes polished and his face quiet. Bruce came to pay respect. A man walked through the door and walked down the aisle and stopped two steps from the coffin and reached his hand toward Bruce’s chest.
That’s where we are. That’s the room. Chrysanthemums, folding chairs, lenolum floor, 22 people, a dead man in a box, and a living man reaching for Bruce Lee’s chest with an open hand. Let me tell you about the reaching hand. The hand belonged to a man Jesse didn’t name. Jesse told the story once and he named Bruce and he named Fuk Young and he did not name the man with the reaching hand.
David passed the story to my father and the man had no name in David’s version either. My father passed it to me and the man still had no name. He has a body. He has a suit that doesn’t fit. He has dark hair combed back and a square jaw and arms that are thick. He has a hand with spread fingers that is reaching for Bruce Lee’s chest in a room full of mourners at a funeral for a man who taught Bruce something about the body and the way the body holds things.
He has no name. I’m going to call him the man. That’s what Jesse called him. That’s what my father called him. The man. Not because his name doesn’t matter. because his name didn’t survive the chain. The man stopped two steps from the coffin. Bruce was standing on the left side of the coffin between the second row of chairs and the body.
The man was standing in the aisle facing Bruce. The distance between them was close, close enough that the man’s outstretched hand could reach Bruce’s chest without the man taking another step. Bruce looked at the hand. Bruce looked at the man’s face. Bruce did not step back. The man said something. Jesse told David what the man said.
David told my father. My father told me. The word shifted through the chain. The way words shift not in meaning but in texture. My father gave me the meaning. The meaning was this. The man said that he was a student, that he had studied with Fuk Young, that he was a better student than Bruce, that Bruce had no right to stand where Bruce was standing, that the place next to the coffin, the place of honor, the place of the closest student, the place of the person who mattered most to the dead man, the place belonged to him, not to Bruce.
The man said, “Move.” Not the word, the instruction, the demand. The words my father gave me were, “The guy said something like, “That’s my spot,” or, “You shouldn’t be there,” or “Move.” Jesse remembered it as, “Move, move.” Bruce Lee was standing 4 feet from the body of a man who had taught him something about the body and the way the body holds things.
And another man was standing two steps from the coffin with his hand reaching for Bruce’s chest. And the man was telling Bruce to move at a funeral in front of 22 people with his hand reaching and Bruce looked at the hand and Bruce looked at the face and Bruce did not step back. What Bruce did next is the reason I’m telling you this story.
What Bruce did next is the reason Jesse told this story once and then, according to David, never told it again. What Bruce did next is the thing that traveled through four hands in 20 years and arrived in my ears in my father’s kitchen on a Wednesday afternoon while my father was holding a cup of coffee that he didn’t drink for the next 15 minutes.
But I’m not ready to tell you yet. I need you to understand the room first. I need you to understand the weight of the room. I need you to understand what a funeral means, what a coffin means, what standing next to a coffin means, what being told to move away from a coffin means, what all of that means when you are Bruce Lee and you are 27 years old and you are in Seattle and the man in the coffin taught you something that nobody else taught you and a stranger is reaching for your chest.
I need you to understand the room. So, let me build it. Bruce Lee arrived in Seattle in 1959. He was 18 years old. He had $100. He had a name that wasn’t Bruce. His name was Lee Junfan. And Bruce was the name a nurse had given him at birth in San Francisco because the nurse thought Junfan was too hard for American mouths.
And American mouths needed something they could hold. Bruce, a nurse’s gift. an accommodation, a sound designed to make white people comfortable. He arrived in Seattle and he worked in a restaurant. Ruby Chow’s restaurant. The restaurant was on South Jackson Street in the International District, the part of Seattle where the Chinese families lived, the Japanese families lived, the Filipino families lived, the part of Seattle that White Seattle called Chinatown when White Seattle thought about it at all, which was not
often. Ruby Chow gave Bruce a job and a room above the restaurant. The room was small. The job was washing dishes and waiting tables and carrying plates of chowine and egg fuyang and sweet and sour pork to white customers who came to the international district on Friday nights because the food was cheap and the experience felt exotic and the drive was short and the parking was easy.
Bruce washed dishes. Bruce waited tables. Bruce carried plates. Bruce slept in a small room above the restaurant. and Bruce enrolled at Edison Technical School and then at the University of Washington. And Bruce started teaching martial arts. He taught in backyards. He taught in garages. He taught in the park volunteer park on Capitol Hill where the grass was thick and the ground was soft and the trees provided shade in summer and blocked the rain in winter.
Not all the rain. Enough rain. Bruce taught under trees and the rain came through and the students got wet and they kept training because the thing Bruce was showing them was worth getting wet for. Jesse Glover found Bruce in 1959. Jesse was a judo student, a big man, strong, experienced, the kind of man who had been in enough dojoos to know what good looked like and what great looked like and what impossible looked like.
Jesse walked into a demonstration that Bruce was giving and Jesse saw impossible. I’ve told you about this before. Jesse saw Bruce move and Jesse understood immediately that the movement was different from any movement Jesse had ever seen. Not faster, not stronger, different in kind. The way a bird’s flight is different from a throne stone.
Both move through air. Both cover distance, but the mechanism is different. The principle is different. The thing that makes it go is different. Jesse became Bruce’s first student. Jesse brought other students. The group grew. They trained in Jesse’s yard. They trained in garages. They trained in the basement of a Chinese grocery store on King Street.
They trained wherever there was floor space and ceiling height and enough room for Bruce to demonstrate without putting his fist through a wall. This was 1959, 1960, 1961. Bruce was a teenager, then barely a man. He was learning too. Learning from every body he touched, every hand he redirected, every movement he saw that didn’t match his expectation.
Bruce was a student too. Bruce was always a student. And somewhere in this period, somewhere in the early years in Seattle, between the restaurant and the park and the basement and the garage, Bruce met Fuk Young. I don’t know exactly when. The chain doesn’t carry the date. Jesse told the story once and the story began at the funeral, not at the meeting.
The meeting, the first time Bruce and Fukyong stood in the same room, that moment didn’t survive the chain. What survived was the relationship. What survived was the respect. What survived was the thing my father said, Jesse said. He taught Bruce something. Something about the body. About the way the body holds things.
I want to tell you what I think that means. I want to be careful about it because I’m leaving the chain now. I’m stepping outside the thing Jesse said in entering the thing. I think I’m speculating. I want you to know that I’m speculating and I want you to hold the speculation differently than you hold the chain.
The chain is what happened. The speculation is what I think happened. They are different materials. They have different weights. I think Fukyang was a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine. I think this because of the phrase, something about the body, about the way the body holds things. That phrase, when my father said it, when my father repeated Jesse’s words through David’s filter, that phrase sounded like a description of something specific.
Not philosophy, not self-help, not the vague motivational wisdom that gets printed on posters and pinned to gym walls, something specific, something physical, something about the literal body, the muscles, the tendons, the fascia, the bones, the organs, the pathways through the body that Chinese medicine calls meridians and Western medicine doesn’t call anything because Western medicine doesn’t believe they exist.
I think Fuk Young taught Bruce something about how the body stores tension, about where the body holds fear, about what happens in the body when a man is angry and the anger has nowhere to go. About the difference between a muscle that is tight because it is strong and a muscle that is tight because it is afraid.
I think this because Bruce Lee in his later writings in the notes and letters and margin scrolls that survive, Bruce Lee wrote about the body in a way that no other martial artist of his era wrote about the body. Bruce wrote about relaxation. Bruce wrote about softness. Bruce wrote about the water and the cup and the empty mind and the full body.
These ideas are not Bruce’s ideas. These ideas are ancient. They come from Tyoism. They come from traditional Chinese medicine. They come from a tradition of understanding the body that is thousands of years old. But Bruce didn’t learn them from a book. Bruce learned things from people. Bruce was a body learner, a room learner, a man who stood in front of another man and absorbed what the other man knew through proximity and repetition and touch.
Bruce learned Wing Chun from Itman by standing in front of IP man. Bruce learned grappling from Gene Label by standing in front of Gene Label. Bruce learned boxing from watching footage of Muhammad Ali. But then Bruce stood in front of sparring partners and turned the watching into knowing. Turned the eyes into hands.
Turned the image into muscle. I think Bruce learned something from Fukyong by standing in front of Fukyong. I don’t know what the sessions looked like. I don’t know if Fukyou Young pressed his thumbs into Bruce’s shoulders and said, “Here, this is where you hold your anger.” I don’t know if Fukyou Young placed his palm on Bruce’s chest and said, “This is where you hold your fear.
” I don’t know if the sessions were silent or verbal, short or long, weekly or daily. I don’t know any of that. The chain doesn’t carry it. What the chain carries is this. Bruce respected the man enough to come to the funeral. Bruce stood four feet from the body. Bruce wore a suit and polished his shoes and stood with his hands at his sides and his face was quiet.
Whatever Fuk Young taught Bruce, it mattered. It mattered enough for Bruce to stand in a room with chrysanthemums and floor wax and a low ceiling and folding chairs and 22 people and a dead man and to stand there with his hands at his sides and his face quiet and not sit down. Bruce stood. That’s what Jesse saw.
Before the man walked through the door, before the hand, before the reaching, before everything that comes next, Jesse saw Bruce standing 4 feet from the body. And Jesse understood that the standing was not casual. The standing was deliberate. The standing was Bruce saying something to the dead man without words.
The standing was respect made physical. The standing was Bruce’s body doing what Bruce’s mouth could not do, expressing something that lives below language. In the tissue, in the bone, in the place where the body holds things. The place where the body holds things. Maybe that’s what Fukyang taught him. Maybe that’s the whole lesson.
Maybe the lesson was the body holds things. The body holds grief and anger and fear and love and respect and loss. The body holds all of it. And the holding is not passive. The holding is an act. The holding costs something. The holding is work. Bruce was doing the work. Bruce was standing 4 feet from the body and doing the work.
And then the door opened and a man walked in. Let me build the room for you more completely. I want you to be in this room. I want you to feel the folding chair beneath you, the cold metal, the thin cushion, the bar across the back that presses into your spine no matter how you sit. I want you to smell the chrysanthemums, that thick green, slightly bitter smell that cuts through the floor wax and the chemical sweetness.
I want you to hear the room, the quiet of it, the particular quiet that funeral rooms have, which is not silence, but a lowered frequency, a dimming of volume, as if every person in the room has turned their own dial down by half. The room is in Seattle’s International District. The funeral home is small, not the kind of funeral home that has multiple viewing rooms and a chapel and a parking lot with a valet.
This is a neighborhood funeral home. One room, a front door that opens onto the street, a back room where the body was prepared, a single viewing room where the chairs are set and the flowers are placed and the casket rests on a low platform against the far wall. The far wall has the wood paneling. The sidewalls are painted a cream color that was probably white when it was first applied years ago and has aged into something warmer.
The floor is lenolium pale with a faint pattern that might be geometric or might be floral. The kind of pattern that disappears under the feet of 30 people standing and sitting and shifting. The fluorescent lights are overhead. two long tubes in a fixture. One of them buzzes, a low electrical hum that you don’t notice until the room goes quiet and then you can’t stop noticing it.
The light from the tubes is flat and even an unkind. The kind of light that shows every line on every face that turns skin gray that makes the living look closer to the dead than anyone would like. The casket is simple. Dark wood, satin lining, white or off-white. Fukyou young lies inside. I don’t know what he looks like.
The chain doesn’t carry his face. The chain carries his name and his role and the fact of his death, but not the details of his body. He was old enough to die. He was Chinese. He lived in Seattle’s International District. He taught Bruce Lee something about the body and the way the body holds things. I am imagining him now.
And I want you to know I am imagining him. I am imagining a small man. Thin. The kind of fin that old Chinese men become. Not wasted, not diminished, but refined like a blade that has been sharpened so many times that the metal is narrow and bright. I am imagining his hands folded on his chest. I am imagining his face composed in the way that morticians compose faces.
The muscles relaxed, the expression neutral, the appearance of sleep. But this is imagination. This is me in the room that Jesse described, adding details that Jesse didn’t provide. I want you to know where the chain ends and the imagination begins. The chain gives me coffin, room, flowers, folding chairs, Bruce standing, mourner sitting.
The imagination gives me the color of the walls, the hum of the fluorescent lights, the pattern on the lenolium, the thinness of Fukyong<unk>s hands. I’m building the room so you can stand in it. But I’m building with two materials, the chain and the imagination. And I want you to see the seams. The mourers are Chinese. most of them.
This is a Chinese funeral in Seattle’s International District in the mid 1960s. The mourners are people from the community, from the restaurants and the grocery stores and theories and the import shops and the herbalist offices and the apartments above the shops and the houses in the surrounding blocks. These are people who know each other.
These are people who walk past each other on Jackson Street every morning and nod. These are people who buy vegetables from the same stalls and send their children to the same schools and sit in the same restaurants on Sunday mornings drinking tea from small cups and reading newspapers printed in Chinese. There are a few non-Chinese faces in the room. Jesse was there. Jesse was black.
There may have been one or two other non-Chinese students of Bruce’s. The room was mostly Chinese, but not exclusively Chinese, and the non-Chinese faces stood out the way they always stood out in the international district. Not unwelcome, but visible, noticed, registered. The man who walked through the door was white.
I’ve told you this already, but I want you to feel it in the room. The man was white and the man was tall and the man walked through the door of a Chinese funeral home in Seattle’s international district and walked down the center aisle past Chinese mourners in folding chairs and the whiteness and the tallness were facts of the room the way the chrysanthemums were facts of the room and the fluorescent lights were facts of the room.
I am not saying the whiteness mattered. I am not saying the whiteness didn’t matter. I am saying the whiteness was there. It was a physical fact. The man’s skin was white and his body was large. And he moved through the room with a particular kind of confidence. The kind of confidence that large white men carried in Seattle in the mid 1960s.
The kind that was not earned but inherited. The kind that came with the body the way the body came with the chromosomes. I’m going to talk about this more later. the whiteness, the size, the confidence, what those things meant in that room, in that year, in that city. I’m going to talk about it because it matters and because the story doesn’t make full sense without it.
But right now, I want to stay in the room. I want to stay in the room with the flowers and the chairs and the casket and the humming fluorescent light and the 22 people in Bruce Lee standing 4 feet from the body. The man walked down the aisle. The man’s shoes made a sound on the lenolium. I am imagining this sound.
The chain doesn’t carry it, but the sound was there. Every step on lenolium makes a sound. A small sound, a scuff, a tap, a whisper of leather on composite. The sound of the man’s shoes was louder than it should have been because the room was quiet. The room was funeral quiet. And the man was walking with purpose, with weight, with the kind of stride that doesn’t adjust itself for the circumstances.
The man walked through the funeral the way the man would have walked through a supermarket or a parking lot or a bar. People turn to look. Not everyone. Some people in funeral rooms keep their eyes forward because keeping your eyes forward is the etiquette of grief. You look at the casket. You look at the flowers.
You look at the person beside you. You don’t crane your neck to see who walked in late. That’s the etiquette. But some people looked. Some people turned in their folding chairs and watched the man walk down the aisle. And their faces registered something. Surprise, confusion, curiosity, discomfort, some combination of all four. A white man, tall, broad, walking down the aisle of a Chinese funeral with the stride of a man who was not here to mourn.
Jesse was watching. Jesse was sitting. I believe Jesse was sitting. The chain doesn’t specify, but Jesse was in the room, and the room had folding chairs and most people were sitting. Jesse was watching the man walk down the aisle. Jesse knew something was wrong. Jesse knew because Jesse had been in enough rooms with Bruce to know the feeling that precedes a confrontation, the change in the air, the tightening, the way the room’s frequency shifts from low to lower, from quiet to tot.
Jesse watched. The man reached the front of the room. The man passed the last row of chairs. The man was now in the open space between the chairs and the casket. The space where Bruce was standing. The space where the flowers were arranged. The space that belonged to the dead. The man stopped two steps from the coffin.
His hand came up. The hand was open. I want to be precise about this because the openness of the hand is important. A fist is a declaration. A fist says, “I am here to fight.” A fist communicates intention clearly and the clarity of the intention allows the recipient to respond clearly. You raise your own fists. You step back.
You call for help. You do one of the things that a fist invites you to do. An open hand is different. An open hand is ambiguous. An open hand could be a greeting. An open hand could be a push. An open hand could be a reach for your shoulder, for your arm, for your chest, for the space in front of you. An open hand could be a palm strike, or it could be a pat on the back, or it could be a hand raised in peace.
An open hand is a question without a question mark. An open hand makes you wait. An open hand makes you watch. An open hand suspends the moment between peace and violence and holds you in the suspension. The man’s hand was open and the hand was reaching for Bruce Lee’s chest. Bruce watched the hand. I want you to think about what Bruce’s eyes were doing.
Bruce Lee’s eyes, the fastest eyes in the history of martial arts. The eyes that could track a hand moving at full speed. The eyes that could read an opponent’s shoulder and know what the opponent’s fist was going to do before the opponent’s fist knew. The eyes that were trained and refined and sharpened by a decade of fighting and a lifetime of watching.
Those eyes were on the man’s hand. And Bruce was reading. Bruce was reading the hand the way you read a sentence, not word by word, all at once. The position of the fingers, the tension in the wrist, the angle of the forearm, the alignment of the shoulder behind the forearm, the alignment of the hip behind the shoulder, the alignment of the foot behind the hip.
Bruce was reading the whole body through the hand. And the body was telling Bruce a story and the story was, “This man is not going to hit me. This man is going to push me. This man is going to put his hand on my chest and push me.” Bruce read that in less than a second. Bruce read the open palm and the spread fingers and the slow deliberate reaching and the angle of the wrist and the weight distribution in the man’s feet and the absence of torque in the man’s hips.
And Bruce knew this was not a strike. This was a push. This was a man putting his hand on another man’s chest and moving him. The way you move a child. The way you move a piece of furniture. The way you move something that you believe has no right to be where it is. The man was going to push Bruce Lee. At a funeral in front of 22 people, two steps from the coffin.
The man’s hand reached Bruce’s chest. I need you to understand the physics of what happened next because the physics matter. The man’s hand opened, spread, deliberate, made contact with Bruce Lee’s chest. The palm pressed against the dark gray fabric of the suit jacket. The fingers spread across the lapel and the shirt beneath the lapel and the chest beneath the shirt.
The hand pressed and Bruce didn’t move. The hand pressed in Bruce’s body absorbed the press the way a wall absorbs the press of a hand. The man pushed in Bruce’s feet stayed on the lenolium and Bruce’s weight stayed centered in Bruce’s body did not shift, not an inch, not a millimeter. The hand pressed and the body behind the hand pressed and the feet behind the body pressed into the lenolium and the lenolium pressed into the concrete beneath and the force traveled from the man’s shoulder through the man’s arm through the man’s hand into Bruce’s
chest and stopped. It stopped. The force stopped because Bruce Lee’s body stopped it. Not with a block, not with a technique, not with a counter move, with stillness, with rootedness, with the specific kind of structural integrity that martial artists spend lifetimes trying to develop. The ability to receive force without being moved by it.
The ability to be pushed and not go anywhere. The ability to stand. And I need to tell you something about this that matters. Bruce Lee weighed 138 lbs. The man weighed more. How much more? I don’t know. The chain doesn’t carry exact numbers. But the man was over 6 feet tall with broad shoulders and thick arms. And the suit was tight across the shoulders.
200 lb, maybe 210, maybe more. The man outweighed Bruce by 60 or 70 lbs. And the man was taller by five or 6 in. And the man was pushing and Bruce was not moving. Not because Bruce was strong. Bruce was strong. Bruce was extraordinarily strong for his size. But this wasn’t strength. If this were strength, the bigger man would win. That’s what strength means.
The bigger force moves the smaller force. That’s physics. That’s Newton. That’s the law. Bruce wasn’t using strength. Bruce was using structure. Bruce was using the thing that Wing Chun teaches. The thing that if man spent decades refining, the thing that the system is built around, the ability to align the body so that force passes through the bones and into the ground without engaging the muscles.
The ability to root. The ability to be a pillar instead of a wall. A wall can be pushed over. A pillar transfers force downward into the earth. A pillar doesn’t need to be heavier than the thing pushing it. A pillar needs to be aligned. Bruce was aligned. Bruce’s feet were on the lenolium and the lenolium was on the concrete and the concrete was on the earth.
and Bruce’s bones were aligned from the feet through the ankles through the knees through the hips through the spine through the chest and the man’s hand was pressing against the chest and the force was traveling through Bruce’s aligned structure into the floor and the floor was holding. The man pushed harder. Bruce did not move.
The man’s face changed. I want to talk about the man’s face because Jesse talked about the man’s face. Jesse told David. And David told my father. And my father told me that the man’s face changed when the push didn’t work. Jesse said the man’s expression went from confident to confused. That’s the chain’s language.
Confident to confused. The man had walked down the aisle with confidence. The man had reached for Bruce’s chest with confidence. The man had pushed with confidence. And then the push didn’t work and the confidence left the man’s face. And what replaced it was confusion. The confusion of a man who has just pressed his hand against something that he expected to move and the something did not move.
It’s a particular kind of confusion. It is physical confusion. The body’s surprise at the failure of its own expectation. The man’s muscles had generated a force. The man’s brain had predicted the outcome of that force. The smaller man would step back, stumble back, move back. The outcome did not occur. The man’s body had made a promise to the man’s brain, and the body broke the promise, and the breaking registered on the face as confusion.
And then the confusion became something else. Jesse didn’t name what the confusion became. Jesse described it to David who described it to my father who described it to me and the description was the guy’s face got tight. The guy’s face got tight. That word tight. The face got tight meaning the muscles of the face contracted.
The jaw clenched. The eyes narrowed. The brow lowered. The lips pressed together. The face went from open and confused to closed in tight. And the tightness was anger. The man was angry because the push didn’t work. The man was angry because Bruce Lee, who weighed 138 lb, who was 5’7, who was standing in a dark gray suit at a funeral for a Chinese man in Seattle’s International District.
Bruce Lee had not moved. The man had put his hand on Bruce’s chest and pushed in. Bruce had not moved and the not moving was an insult to the man’s body and the man’s body was angry. The hand was still on Bruce’s chest. The man pushed again. Bruce did not move. The man’s hand dropped. The man stood there.
The man was standing two steps from the coffin with his hand at his side. The hand that had just failed twice to move a man 60 lb lighter. And the man was looking at Bruce’s face. And Bruce’s face was looking at the man’s face and neither face was speaking. This is the moment. This is the moment Jesse carried. This is the moment that traveled through four hands in 20 years and arrived in my father’s kitchen and then in my ears and then now in yours.
The man was looking at Bruce and Bruce was looking at the man and neither of them was moving and the room was silent except for the buzzing fluorescent light and the room was still except for the chrysanthemums trembling slightly on their stems from the vibration of the building’s furnace somewhere below the floor.
And then the man said something and then Bruce said something and then something happened that I have never been able to explain. Something happened that Jesse could not explain. Something happened that David could not explain. Something happened that my father could not explain. Something happened that nobody in the chain could explain.
And the inability to explain it is not a failure of the chain. The inability to explain it is the point. But I need to build one more thing before I tell you what happened. I need to build Bruce’s hands. Let me tell you about Bruce Lee’s hands. Not the fists, not the 1-in punch, not the speed, not the power, not the two-finger push-ups, not the thing that people talk about when they talk about Bruce Lee’s hands.
I want to tell you about the hands themselves, the physical objects, the meat and bone and skin of them. Bruce Lee’s hands were small, small for a man, small for a fighter, small for the myth that would grow around them. His fingers were not long. His palms were not wide. His knuckles were prominent, not because the knuckles were large, but because the fingers were lean and the skin was tight, and there was nothing between the bone and the world except a thin layer of tissue that looked like it had been stretched over
the skeleton by someone who believed in efficiency. Bruce’s hands were calloused. The calluses were on the knuckles and on the ridge of the palm below the little finger and on the fingertips. The calluses were thick. Not the kind of thick that comes from holding a hammer or pulling a rope, but the kind of thick that comes from hitting things, hard things, wooden dummies, canvas bags filled with gravel, iron palm bags filled with shot.
The calluses were layers of dead skin built over years of impact, and the layers were Bruce’s history written on his body. I am telling you about the hands because of what the hands did. The man’s hand dropped from Bruce’s chest. The man’s push had failed twice. The man’s face was tight and the man was standing two steps from the coffin and the man was looking at Bruce and Bruce was looking at the man and Bruce raised his hands not into fists, not into a fighting stance, not into a guard.
Bruce raised his hands the way a man raises his hands when he wants to show you something. palms up, open, the fingers relaxed. The hands were at chest height between Bruce’s body and the man’s body, and the hands were open and the hands were still. Jesse told David what Bruce’s hands looked like. David told my father.
My father told me and the description was the chain’s description was Bruce put his hands up open like he was holding something like he was showing the guy what he was holding like he was holding something like he was showing the guy what he was holding. I have thought about this description more than any other part of the story.
I have sat with it. I have turned it over. I have looked at it from every angle. The way you look at a stone you found on the beach, not because the stone is beautiful, but because the stone has a shape you can’t explain, and you keep turning it, trying to find the angle that makes the shape make sense. Bruce raised his hands, palms up, open at chest height, as if he were holding something, as if the hands contained something.
As if the empty space between the fingers was not empty, but full, full of something that Bruce could see, and the man could not see, and the 22 people in the folding chairs could not see. What was Bruce holding? I don’t know. I don’t know. And the chain doesn’t know. And Jesse didn’t know, and David didn’t know, and my father didn’t know.
Nobody in the chain knew what Bruce was holding in his open, raised, still hands at a funeral in Seattle in the mid 1960s. But the man saw something. The man looked at Bruce’s hands and the man saw something. And the man stepped back. One step, then another. Then the man turned and walked back up the aisle, past the folding chairs, past the mourers, past the women in dark dresses and the men in dark suits.
And the man walked through the door and the door closed and the man was gone. No punch. No kick. No strike. No block. No throw. No wrist lock. No arm bar. No sweep. No technique of any kind that could be named or categorized or placed in his system. Bruce Lee raised his hands. Open. still holding nothing and the man left.
My father put his coffee down when he told me this part. I remember the sound of the cup on the counter, a small ceramic sound. Precise, final. My father put his coffee down and he looked at me and he said, “I don’t know what that was.” David didn’t know what it was. Jesse didn’t know what it was. But Jesse said the guy went white, not scared, not angry, just white, like the blood left his face.
Like the blood left his face. A man who had walked into a funeral with confidence, who had walked down the aisle with purpose, who had reached for Bruce Lee’s chest with a hand that expected to push a smaller man out of the way. That man looked at Bruce Lee’s open hands and the blood left his face and the man stepped back and the man turned and the man left.
What did the man see? I’m going to tell you what I think the man saw. I’m going to tell you three theories, three explanations that I have constructed over the years since my father told me this story. Three ways to understand what happened in that room. I want to be clear. None of these theories came from the chain. The chain gives us the event.
The theories are mine. Theory one, the man saw skill. Bruce Lee’s hands, even in an open and passive position, communicated something to a trained eye. If the man was a martial artist, and the man claimed to be a student of Fuk Young. So the man had some training. Then the man’s I could read Bruce’s body the way Bruce’s I could read the man’s body.
And what the man’s eye read was this person is dangerous. Not because the hands were in a fighting position. Because the hands were perfectly relaxed. Because the wrists were perfectly aligned. Because the fingers were perfectly still. Because the body behind the hands was perfectly balanced. And perfect relaxation in a moment of confrontation is the most terrifying thing a trained martial artist can see because perfect relaxation means perfect readiness.
Perfect relaxation means the body is not preparing for action. The body is already in the state from which action comes. The body is not coiling. The body is not tensing. The body is the spring before the spring knows it’s a spring. The man saw this and the man understood in his body, not in his mind, that if he took one more step, the open hands would stop being open.
Theory two. The man saw intent, not skill, not technique. Intent. The man looked into Bruce Lee’s eyes. I haven’t talked about Bruce’s eyes because the chain talks about the hands. But the eyes were there above the hands and the eyes were looking at the man and the man saw in Bruce’s eyes the absolute unequivocal crystallin intention to act.
Not aggression, not anger, not rage. Intention the purest form of it. The kind of intention that doesn’t need volume or movement or expression. The kind of intention that sits in the eyes like a fact. The man saw in Bruce’s eyes the following fact. If you touch me again, I will respond. And the man calculated consciously or unconsciously the probable nature of that response and decided that the cost of touching Bruce again exceeded the value of the coffin side position.
The man made an economic decision. The man ran a costbenefit analysis in the seconds between Bruce raising his hands and the man stepping back. The man’s body ran the numbers and the numbers said, “Leave.” Theory three. The man saw something else. Something I can’t name. Something that doesn’t fit in the categories of skill or intent.
something that lived in the space between Bruce’s open palms. The space that appeared to be empty, but that Bruce held as if it were full. I don’t know what this is. I don’t know what this is, and I don’t pretend to know. I have spent years studying martial arts. I have spent years studying Bruce Lee. I have spent years studying the stories that travel through chains of mouths and arrive in kitchens and are told over coffee.
And I have encountered in the literature, in the oral traditions, in the dojo, in the moments that happen between techniques, I have encountered the suggestion that some martial artists develop a quality that is not skill and not intent, but something else. Something that the Chinese tradition callsqi, something that the Japanese tradition calls key, something that the Western tradition doesn’t have a word for because the Western tradition doesn’t believe it exists.
I am not saying Bruce Lee had magical powers. I am not saying Bruce Lee could project energy from his palms. I am not saying Bruce Lee was superhuman. I am saying this. A man looked at Bruce Lee’s open raised still hands in a funeral home in Seattle and the blood left the man’s face and the man walked out of the room.
And I don’t have an explanation for that. And the chain doesn’t have an explanation for that. And maybe the explanation is simple. Maybe the man was a coward. Maybe the man saw skill. Maybe the man calculated odds. Maybe. Or maybe the man saw something in Bruce’s hands that I will never be able to explain because the thing he saw doesn’t live in the language I speak or the categories I think in.
This is the uncomfortable place. This is the place in the story where the ground goes soft. This is the place where I have to tell you I don’t know. I genuinely honestly from the bottom of my chest do not know what happened in that room when Bruce raised his hands. I know the result. The man left. I know the mechanism.
The hands were open. I know the chain. Jesse to David to my father to me. But the connection between the mechanism and the result, the thing that links open hands to a man’s retreat, that connection lives in a place I cannot reach. My father said the same thing. My father said, I asked David. David said he asked Jesse.
Jesse said he didn’t know. Jesse was there. Jesse saw it. And Jesse said he didn’t know what Bruce did. Jesse was there. Jesse saw it. Jesse didn’t know. Four words. Jesse didn’t know. The man who was Bruce Lee’s first student. The man who had trained with Bruce for years. The man who had seen Bruce do things that other men couldn’t do.
the man who understood Bruce’s body better than almost anyone alive at that time. That man watched Bruce raise his open hands. And that man, Jesse Glover, first student, chief witness, did not know what Bruce did. And that’s what Jesse carried. Not the funeral, not the flowers, not the coffin or the folding chairs or the man in the ill-fitting suit.
Jesse carried the not knowing. Jesse carried the open hands and the man’s retreat and the impossibility of connecting the two. Jesse carried the gap. The gap between what he saw and what he understood. The gap between the event and the explanation. That gap is the story. That gap is why I’m telling you this. But I skipped something.
Between the failed push and the raised hands, Bruce said something and the man said something. And the words matter. The words matter because the words are the frame around the hands. The hands are the painting. The words are the frame. And you can’t see the painting properly without the frame.
The man pushed Bruce twice. Bruce didn’t move. The man’s face went from confident to confused to tight. The man’s hand dropped and then the man spoke. The chain gives me the meaning, not the words. My father said the guy said something about being the real student, about Bruce not belonging there, about the dead man.
About Fuk Young being his teacher, his not Bruce’s. His, not Bruce’s. The man was claiming Fuk Young. The man was claiming the dead man the way you claim a piece of land by standing on it and saying, “Mine.” The man was saying, “This man in the coffin was mine. He taught me. He chose me. I am the one who deserves to stand here.
” Not you. Not you, the Chinese kid in the gray suit. Not you, the martial arts teacher with the students in the park. Not you. Me. The word underneath the man’s claim was ownership. The word underneath was possession. The man was treating the dead man as property, intellectual property, spiritual property, body knowledge property.
And the man was asserting his deed, his title, his right. And this is where the whiteness matters. I said earlier that I would talk about the whiteness and the size and the confidence and what those things meant in that room, in that year, in that city. This is where I talk about it. Seattle in the mid 1960s was a city divided. Not violently, not the way Birmingham was divided, where Selma was divided, or Watts was divided.
Seattle was divided quietly. Seattle was divided by geography and economics and custom. The international district was where the Asian families lived. The central district was where the black families lived. The rest was where the white families lived. And the borders between these districts were not walls. You could cross them.
You could walk from one to another. You could eat in any restaurant and sit in any park. But the borders were there. The borders were in the eyes that followed you when you crossed them. The borders were in the silence that greeted you when you entered a room where your face was not the face that belonged. A white man walking into a Chinese funeral home in the international district in the mid 1960s was crossing a border.
The man had the right to cross it. There were no laws against it, no signs, no guards. But the crossing was a fact. The crossing was noticed. The crossing was felt. And the man crossed with confidence. The man crossed with the stride of a man who did not see the border. The man crossed with the body of a man who had never been stopped at a border, who had never been questioned at a border, who had never been asked to justify his presence on the other side of a border.
That confidence, that specific embodied, inherited confidence was the confidence of a white man in America in the 1960s who believed that every room belonged to him. Every space was his space. Every dead man’s coffin was his coffin to stand beside. Every teaching was his teaching to claim.
I am not saying the man was a racist. I don’t know the man. The chain doesn’t carry his beliefs. The chain carries his actions. And his actions were walking into a Chinese funeral, walking down the aisle past Chinese mourers, stopping in front of a Chinese man named Bruce Lee, putting his hand on Bruce’s chest, pushing and saying, “Mine.
” Those actions have a shape. That shape has a name. The name is entitlement. And Bruce Lee knew entitlement. Bruce Lee had lived with entitlement since the day he arrived in America. Bruce Lee had been the Chinese kid washing dishes in Ruby Chow’s restaurant. Bruce Lee had been the Chinese kid teaching martial arts in the park.
Bruce Lee had been the Chinese kid who married a white woman, Linda Emory, who Bruce married in 1964. And the marriage had drawn stairs and comments and silences. Bruce Lee had been the Chinese kid who was told he could not teach Chinese martial arts to non-Chinese students. A controversy that would follow him from Seattle to Oakland to Los Angeles.
A controversy that was not about teaching, but about ownership, about who had the right to give what to whom. Bruce knew entitlement because Bruce had felt it pressed against his chest his entire life. Not literally, not until this moment, not until this man’s hand, but figuratively, spiritually, socially, the hand on the chest, the push, the demand to move.
Bruce had felt all of it before in a thousand small ways, every day since 1959. So when the man spoke, when the man said mine in whatever words the man used, Bruce heard more than the words. Bruce heard the shape of the words. Bruce heard the entitlement in the shape. Bruce heard a man claiming a dead Chinese teacher the way a man claims a plot of land.
And Bruce heard the echo of every white hand that had ever been placed on a Chinese chest and pushed. Bruce heard all of it. And Bruce spoke. The chain gives me one word. One word that Jesse remembered precisely. One word that survived the chain intact. Not in meaning, not in summary, not in paraphrase, but in the exact sound that Bruce Lee’s mouth made in a funeral home in Seattle in the mid 1960s.
Bruce said, “Don’t.” One word, don’t. Not don’t touch me. Not don’t push me. Not don’t tell me to move. Not don’t claim this man. Not. Don’t disrespect the dead. Not. Don’t come to this funeral and put your hand on my chest and tell me to move. Don’t. One word that contained all the other words. One word that held every instruction, every warning, every boundary.
One word that was complete. One word that did not need a second word because the first word was whole. Don’t. My father said. Jesse remembered that word. Jesse said Bruce said it quietly. Not a whisper. Not a shout. Quiet. Like he was telling the guy the time. Like he was saying it’s 4:00. That quiet like he was telling the guy the time.
That’s the frame. Don’t spoken at the volume of a clock reading. Spoken without emphasis. Spoken without heat. Spoken the way water fills a glass smoothly, completely without effort. And then the man spoke again. The man said something else. The chain doesn’t carry the exact words, but the meaning was challenge.
The meaning was make me. The meaning was, “I’m not leaving and you can’t make me leave.” The meaning was the thing that men say when their push has failed and their words have failed and the only thing left is escalation. The man escalated. Not physically. Not yet. The man escalated verbally. The man raised his voice.
Jesse said the man’s voice got louder. Loud enough that the people in the back rows could hear. loud enough that the children went quiet, loud enough that the room contracted around the sound the way a room contracts around a sudden noise. The man’s voice filled the room and Bruce’s voice did not fill the room. Bruce’s voice stayed where it was at the volume of a clock reading at the volume of 4:00 at the volume of a man who does not need the room to hear him because the only person who needs to hear him is standing two steps away.
And this is the moment. This is the moment that the hands came up. The man escalated. Bruce raised his hands open still, holding nothing, holding everything. And the man looked at the hands. And the blood left the man’s face. And the man stepped back. And the man turned, and the man walked up the aisle, and the man walked through the door, and the door closed, and the room was quiet.
And Bruce lowered his hands. And Bruce turned back to the coffin. And Bruce stood there four feet from the body, hands at his sides, shoes polished, face quiet. The chrysanthemums trembled on their stems from the vibration of the furnace beneath the floor. Jesse watched. 22 people watched. Nobody spoke. The fluorescent light hummed.
The dead man lay in his coffin and Bruce stood. The room held its shape for a long time after the man left. By held its shape, I mean nobody moved. Nobody spoke. Nobody shifted in their folding chairs or cleared their throat, returned to the person beside them and said, “What just happened?” The room stayed in the configuration that the man’s departure had created.
A room full of people facing forward, facing the coffin, facing Bruce, with the silence pressed against them like something solid. I am guessing at the duration. The chain doesn’t carry time. My father said Jesse described a long silence. Long could mean 10 seconds. Long could mean a minute. Long could mean 3 minutes.
In a funeral home, in the wake of a confrontation, with the door still settling in its frame, in that context, 10 seconds feels like a minute. A minute feels like 10. The emotional clock and the mechanical clock separate from each other, and the emotional clock runs slow. I think the silence lasted about 30 seconds. I think this because 30 seconds is the approximate duration of a held breath.
The average human lung can hold air for about 30 seconds before the need to exhale becomes urgent. And I think the room was holding its breath. I think 22 people inhaled when the man walked through the door. And I think 22 people held that breath through the aisle walk and the push and the words and the hands and the man’s retreat and the closing door.
And I think after 30 seconds, the room exhaled. Collectively, not literally, not all at the same moment, not a synchronized gust, but approximately. The room exhaled approximately together, the way an audience exhales after a difficult scene in a play. The tension broke, the silence softened. The folding chairs began to cak again as people shifted.
Someone coughed. Someone whispered something to the person beside them. Someone My father said Jesse mentioned this. Someone in the back row started to cry. The crying was not about the man. The crying was not about the confrontation. The crying was about the dead. The crying had been building before the man walked through the door.
building the way grief builds slowly, silently in the chest, in the throat, behind the eyes. And the confrontation had frozen the grief the way cold freezes water. The grief was still there, still present, still accumulating, but the confrontation had suspended it. And when the door closed and the room exhaled, the grief thawed.
The crying started, the tears fell, the grief resumed its business. This is what violence does to mourning. This is what confrontation does to grief. It interrupts. It freezes. It takes the room’s attention, all of it, every ounce, every eye, and redirects it from the dead to the living. The dead lie in their coffins and wait. The dead are patient.
The dead have no schedule. The living fight and the dead wait. And when the fighting is over, the dead are still there, still patient, still waiting for the room to return to them. Fukyong waited. Fukim lay in his coffin with his hands folded in his face composed in whatever expression the mortician had arranged on his features.
Something neutral, something peaceful, something that was not quite sleep and not quite death, but the space between them. That expression did not change while the man walked down the aisle and pushed Bruce. And Bruce said, “Don’t.” and Bruce raised his hands and the man left. The expression did not change because the expression could not change.
Fuk Young was dead. His face was set. His story was finished. Except it wasn’t. His story was still being told. His story was being told by the confrontation because the confrontation was about him. The man wanted to stand next to Fuk Young’s coffin. Bruce was standing next to Fuk Young<unk>s coffin. The confrontation was about proximity to the dead man, about the right to be close to the dead man, about the claim of relationship with the dead man.
Fukyouong was the center of the confrontation the way the sun is the center of the solar system. Everything orbited him. Everything was pulled toward him. Every force in the room was a function of his gravitational pull. Even in death, Fukyong was the teacher. Even in death, men fought over the right to be his student.
There’s something in this, something that I want to stay with. The idea that a man’s teaching outlives the man. that the knowledge a man places in another man’s body continues to generate force, social force, emotional force, physical force after the teacher’s body has stopped generating anything. Fukyouong was dead and two living men had just contested their relationship to him.
Fukuy Young was dead and his teaching was still producing confrontation, still producing drama, still producing the specific human electricity that happens when two people believe they have a right to the same thing. What had Fuk Young given these men? to the man, the white man, the tall man, the man with the ill-fitting suit Fuk Young had given something that the man wanted to own, something the man believed was his by right of studentship, something the man valued enough to walk into a funeral and push a stranger and make a claim in front of 22 people.
Whatever Fuk Young had given the man, the man wanted to keep it. The man wanted to be the only one who had it. The man wanted to close the door behind him and lock it and put the key in his pocket and say, “This is mine.” To Bruce, Fuk Young had given something else, something that Bruce held differently, not as property, not as possession, not as a deed or a title or a claim.
Bruce held what Fuk Young had given him the way a cup holds water openly completely without grasping. The water was in the cup and the cup did not squeeze the water and the water did not try to escape the cup. The relationship between the cup and the water was not ownership. It was containment. It was holding.
The body holds things. the way the body holds things. Maybe that’s what Fukyouong taught both of them. The same lesson, the same words, the same practice. And maybe the difference was not in the teaching, but in the receiving. The man received the teaching and held it like a fist, tight, closed, mine. Bruce received the teaching and held it like an open hand, relaxed, present, available.
Two students, one teacher, two ways of holding, and the teacher was dead, and the two ways of holding had just confronted each other in a room with chrysanthemums and folding chairs, and the way of the open hand had one without striking. I want to sit with that. I want to sit with the image of Bruce’s open hands and the man’s clenched face and the coffin between them and the dead man inside the coffin who had given them both the thing they were fighting over.
I want to sit with it because I think it’s the most important part of this story, not the confrontation, not the push, not the blood leaving the man’s face. The most important part is the two ways of holding. The fist and the open hand, the claim and the containment, the mind and the don’t. These are the two ways human beings relate to knowledge.
These are the two ways human beings relate to power. These are the two ways human beings relate to anything worth having, anything that was given to them by someone who knew more than they did. You can hold it like a fist or you can hold it like an open hand. Fukyang’s funeral was the place where these two ways met and the open hand won.
Not because the open hand was stronger. Not because the open hand was faster. Not because the open hand had more technique or more training or more experience. The open hand won because the open hand was true. The open hand was the correct response to the teaching. The open hand was what the teaching was about. The body holds things. The open hand holds things correctly.
Jesse Glover told this story once. Once. I want to stay with that fact. Jesse Glover was a man who told many stories about Bruce Lee. Jesse wrote about Bruce. Jesse gave interviews about Bruce. Jesse spent decades answering questions about the early years, the Seattle years, the park years, the garage years, the years before the world knew.
Jesse was generous with his memories. Jesse understood that he was a witness to history and he took the responsibility of witnessing seriously. Jesse talked except about this. Jesse told this story once to David and then according to David, Jesse never told it again. David asked Jesse about it later. Years later, David said, “Tell me about the funeral again.” And Jesse said no.
Not I don’t remember. Not not I’d rather not. Jesse said no. One word. The same kind of one-word answer that Bruce gave the man. Don’t. No. Complete. Final. A period at the end of a sentence that didn’t need a second sentence. Why? Why would Jesse tell this story once and then refuse to tell it again? I have three ideas.
I’m going to share them the way I shared the three theories about the hands as ideas, not as facts, as speculation, not as chain. I want you to hold them accordingly. Idea one, Jesse was protecting Bruce. Jesse understood that this story, if it traveled widely, would become something other than what it was. Stories about Bruce Lee have a tendency to mutate.
Stories about Bruce Lee enter the world as events, things that happened in rooms between bodies and exit the world as legends. The mutation happens in the telling. Each mouth that carries the story adds a layer, a detail, an embellishment, a dramatic emphasis. And by the time the story has passed through 10 mouths, it is no longer the event.
It is the legend of the event. The event in the legend looks similar the way a man and his reflection look similar. Same shape, same proportions, reversed. Jesse might have told the story once and then realized what would happen to it. Jesse might have seen the future of the story, the exaggeration, the mythologizing, the transformation of a quiet moment at a funeral into a supernatural feat.
And Jesse might have decided that the story was safer in silence, that the story was more true in silence, that telling the story again would move it further from the event and closer to the legend. And Jesse didn’t want the legend. Jesse wanted the event, so Jesse stopped telling it. Idea two, Jesse was protecting himself. Jesse didn’t understand what he saw.
Jesse was there. Jesse watched. Jesse saw Bruce raise his open hands. And Jesse saw the man’s face change. And Jesse saw the man leave. And Jesse, Bruce, Lee’s first student, a man who had been watching Bruce for years, didn’t understand what happened. Jesse didn’t know what Bruce did with his hands. Jesse didn’t know why the man left.
Jesse didn’t know what the open hands contained. And not knowing was uncomfortable. Not knowing was perhaps more than uncomfortable. Perhaps it was disturbing. Perhaps what Jesse saw at the funeral was the first moment or one of the first moments when Jesse realized that Bruce was operating at a level that Jesse could not access.
Not a level of technique. Not a level of speed or strength or reflex. A level of something else. a level of understanding about the body and about force and about the space between two people that Jesse had not reached and perhaps could not reach and perhaps was not meant to reach. And that realization, the realization that your teacher can do something you cannot understand.
That the gap between you and your teacher is not a gap of degree but a gap of kind. That realization is lonely. That realization isolates. You are standing in the same room as the person who taught you and you are watching the person do something and you do not understand what you are watching and the not understanding is a wall between you.
Jesse might have told the story once and then stopped because the telling reopened the wall. The telling put Jesse back in the room with the open hands and the retreating man and the not understanding. And the not understanding was something Jesse didn’t want to visit twice. Idea three, Jesse made a promise. This is the simplest idea and in some ways the most plausible.
Jesse told this story once to David. And perhaps the telling was a mistake, a moment of openness, a moment of trust, a moment when the story escaped Jesse’s containment and entered the world. And after the telling, perhaps Jesse decided that the story should not have been told. Perhaps Jesse felt that the story belonged to the funeral and to the dead man and to the room with the chrysanthemums and to Bruce and that taking the story out of that room was a violation.
Perhaps Bruce asked Jesse not to tell it. I don’t know this. The chain doesn’t carry this, but it’s possible. It’s possible that after the funeral, after the mourers left and the flowers were collected and the coffin was closed and carried to the hearse, Bruce turned to Jesse and said something. Not don’t tell anyone.
Bruce wouldn’t have said that. Bruce was not a man who made explicit requests for secrecy. But perhaps Bruce said something smaller, something indirect, something that communicated without commanding, the way Bruce said don’t to the man. One word that contained all the other words. Perhaps Bruce looked at Jesse after the funeral and Jesse understood the look.
And the look said, “This stays here. This stays in this room. This stays with the dead man and the flowers and the folding chairs and the lenolium and the humming fluorescent light. And Jesse honored the look. Except once except David. Except the one time the story slipped through Jesse’s containment and entered the world and then Jesse closed the door.
No, I don’t know which of these three ideas is correct. Perhaps all three. Perhaps none. Perhaps the reason Jesse told the story once and never again is a reason I haven’t imagined. A reason that lives in Jesse’s body and Jesse’s history and Jesse’s relationship with Bruce in a place I cannot access from the outside.
What I know is this. Jesse told the story once. The story traveled through David to my father to me. Four hands, one telling. And the telling was enough to carry the story across decades and deliver it into this room. This room where you and I are sitting now. This room made of sound and screen and the particular kind of attention that you give to a story when the story has traveled far to reach you.
Jesse’s one telling was enough. One telling is always enough if the story is true. I want to talk about the chain itself. Not the story the chain carries. The chain, the mechanism, the technology of human memory and human speech that allows an event to travel from a funeral home in Seattle to your ears right now.
The chain has four links. Link one, Jesse Glover present in the room. Eyes on the event, ears on the words, body in the air of the room, the chrysanthemums, the floor wax, the chemical sweetness, the humming fluorescent light. Jesse’s experience of the event was total. Jesse was there. Jesse’s body was there. The event entered Jesse through every channel the body has.
sight, sound, smell, touch, the proprioceptive sense that tells you where your body is in relation to other bodies, the emotional sense that tells you what the room feels like. Jesse received the event in full fidelity. But Jesse didn’t tell the story for years, maybe decades. The event lived in Jesse’s memory, and memory is not a recording.
Memory is a living thing. Memory changes. Memory shifts. Memory edits. Memory adds and subtracts. Memory blurs the things that don’t matter and sharpens the things that do. And the determination of what matters and what doesn’t. That determination is made by the rememberer, not by the event. Jesse’s memory of the funeral sharpened the hands.
Jesse’s memory sharpened the push. Jesse’s memory sharpened the word don’t. Jesse’s memory sharpened the blood leaving the man’s face. And Jesse’s memory blurred other things. The color of the walls, the number of chairs, the expression on Bruce’s face before the man walked in, the name of the man, the exact words the man said.
The sharpening and the blurring are not errors. They are memories craft. Memory is a sculptor. Memory receives a block of experience and carves away everything that is not the story. What remains the sharp parts, the clear parts, the parts that survived the carving. Those are the story. Those are what Jesse carried. Link two.
David received the story from Jesse’s mouth. Did not see the event. Did not smell the chrysanthemums. did not hear the humming fluorescent light. David received the story in one channel, only Jesse’s voice, Jesse’s words, Jesse’s pauses, Jesse’s emphasis. Jesse’s face as Jesse told the story, the micro expressions, the eye movements, the tightening of the jaw at the difficult parts, the softening of the voice at the quiet parts.
David received a transmission, not an experience. And the transmission was filtered through Jesse’s memory, already carved, already sharpened and blurred, and then filtered again through David’s reception. David’s brain received Jesse’s words and translated them into David’s own images. David imagined the room.
David imagined the flowers. David imagined Bruce’s suit and the man’s face and the open hands. David’s images were not Jesse’s images. David’s images were constructed from Jesse’s words using David’s own visual vocabulary, David’s experience of funeral homes, David’s experience of confrontation, David’s experience of Seattle, David’s experience of the bodies of men.
The story changed in David’s hands, not in meaning, in texture, in color, in the specific grain of the images. The story was the same story, but the images were different images, and the difference is the cost of transmission. Every link in the chain costs something. Every mouth that carries the story pays a tax. The tax is texture.
The tax is grain. The meaning arrives intact. The grain changes. Link three. My father received the story from David. Same process, same cost, same tax. My father received David’s transmission. David’s words. David’s emphasis. David’s images of Jesse’s images of the event and my father translated the transmission into my father’s own images.
My father imagined the room. My father imagined the flowers. My father imagined the hands. My father’s hands were the hands of a man who had studied martial arts. My father’s hands had been open and closed in training. My father’s hands had pushed and been pushed. My father’s body had the physical vocabulary to translate David’s description of Jesse’s description of Bruce’s hands into something specific.
My father’s body knew what open hands look like when a martial artist raises them. My father’s body knew the difference between open hands that are passive and open hands that are ready. My father’s body added a layer of understanding to the story that David’s body and perhaps even Jesse’s body did not add because my father’s body was a different body with different training and different experience.
The chain doesn’t only degrade. The chain also enriches. Each link adds something. Each link brings a body and a history. And a vocabulary and the body and the history and the vocabulary add meaning to the story. Even as they subtract texture, the story loses grain and gains depth. The story loses specificity and gains resonance.
The story becomes less like a photograph and more like a painting. Less precise but more true. Link for me. I received the story from my father in his kitchen on a Wednesday afternoon. My father was holding a cup of coffee. The coffee was black. The cup was ceramic, white with a thin blue line around the rim.
The kitchen was bright afternoon sunlight through the west-facing window, the kind of light that makes surfaces glow. The counter was clean. The refrigerator hummed. My father stood on one side of the counter and I stood on the other. And my father told me the story. I remember the light. I remember the cup.
I remember the hum of the refrigerator, which was not so different from the hum of a fluorescent light in a funeral home. A low electrical drone, a machine’s breath, a constant sound that becomes silence if you stop noticing it. I received the story and I did what every link in the chain does. I translated it. I imagined the room. I imagined the flowers.
I imagined Bruce’s hands. I added my body and my history and my vocabulary. I added the years of martial arts training. I added the years of studying Bruce Lee. I added the years of listening to my father tell stories about men who moved in ways that other men couldn’t explain. And now I am giving the story to you.
Link five. You you are the next link. You are receiving this story from my mouth through a screen through speakers or earphones through the particular technology of recorded voice that allows my mouth to reach your ears across distance and time. You are receiving this transmission and you are translating it and you are imagining the room and you are imagining the flowers and you are imagining the hands.
Your images are not my images. Your images are not my father’s images. Your images are not David’s images. Your images are not Jesse’s images. Your images are your own built from your own visual vocabulary. Your own experience of funeral homes and confrontation and open hands and the bodies of men.
The story changes in your hands. The meaning stays. The grain changes. The tax is paid. The chain continues. And this is how stories survive. Not in books. Not in documentaries. Not in Wikipedia articles or YouTube videos or academic papers. Stories survive in chains. Stories survive by passing from mouth to mouth, body to body, kitchen to kitchen, afternoon to afternoon.
Stories survive by being told once Jesse’s once and then carried carried through David through my father through me through you. One telling is enough. The chain does the rest. I want to go back to the phrase something about the body about the way the body holds things. I’ve been circling this phrase since my father said it.
Circling the way a dog circles a spot on the floor before lying down. Not because the spot is unfamiliar, but because the lying down requires preparation. The body needs to check the ground. The body needs to turn and turn and turn until the ground feels right. The ground doesn’t feel right yet, but I’m going to lie down anyway. The body holds things.
Start with the obvious. The body holds bones. The body holds blood. The body holds water. 60% of the body is water. And the water is held in cells and between cells and in the blood and in the lymph and in the spaces that don’t have names. The body holds organs. The heart in its cage of ribs.
The lungs in their plural sacks. The liver under the right side of the diaphragm, the spleen under the left. The body holds the brain, the most protected organ encased in bone, floating in fluid, wrapped in membranes that are named like robes. Duramater, the tough mother. Pomater, the tender mother. The brain is held by mothers. But the body holds other things too.
The body holds memory. Not the memory of the brain, not the hippocampus, not the neurons firing in patterns that encode the faces of people you love and the streets of towns you lived in and the lyrics of songs you heard when you were 12. That memory lives in the brain and the brain holds it and that’s understood and accepted and nobody argues about it.
The other memory, the body memory, the memory that lives in the muscles and the fascia and the tendons and the joints, the memory that your body carries without your brain’s participation, the memory of how to ride a bicycle, the memory of how to tie a shoe, the memory of how to throw a ball or swing a bat or catch a falling glass before it hits the floor.
These memories are not stored in the brain or not primarily in the brain. These memories are stored in the body, in the patterns of muscle contraction, in the timing of nerve signals, in the proprioceptive maps that tell your hand where your hand is without your eyes checking. Martial artists know body memory. Martial artists spend years building body memory.
repetition. Thousands of repetitions, tens of thousands. A punch thrown 10,000 times becomes a punch that throws itself. The brain initiates the punch, but the body executes the punch. And the execution is body memory stored in the shoulder and the elbow and the wrist and the fist and the hip and the foot and the floor beneath the foot.
Bruce Lee’s body held more memory than almost any body in the history of martial arts. Bruce had thrown more punches, more kicks, more strikes than anyone could count. Bruce had trained his body to respond to stimuli with a speed and precision that approached the automatic. The body’s response preceding the brain’s command. The body deciding before the mind could deliberate.
But body memory is not what Fukyong taught. I don’t think so. I think Fukyong taught something different. something adjacent to body memory but not the same. Something that exists in the same territory, the territory of the body, the territory below conscious thought, but that occupies a different region. I think Fukyong taught Bruce about the things the body holds that the body does not want to hold.
tension, fear, grief, anger, shame. The things that enter the body through experience and lodge there in the shoulders, in the jaw, in the belly, in the chest, in the hands, the things that the brain does not store because the brain cannot process them. The things that the experience was too large or too sudden or too painful for the brain to contain.
So the brain sent them downstairs, sent them into the body, sent them into the muscles and the fascia and the tendons and told the muscles and the fascia and the tendons, “Hold this for me. I’ll come back for it later. Except later never comes.” The brain never comes back. The brain sends the difficult thing into the body and the body holds the difficult thing and the holding becomes permanent.
The holding becomes structure. The shoulders tighten and the tightness becomes the shoulder’s default state. The jaw clenches and the clenching becomes the jaws resting position. The chest contracts and the contraction becomes the chest’s architecture. The body builds itself around the thing it is holding.
The way a tree grows around a nail. The bark envelopes the nail. The wood accommodates the nail. And after enough years, the nail is inside the tree, and the tree doesn’t know it’s there. But the nail is affecting the shape of every ring. Bruce Lee had nails. Bruce Lee was a man. Bruce Lee had a body. Bruce Lee’s body held things.
I’ve talked about this before in other videos, in other stories. Bruce’s relationship with his father, Lihoy Chen, the Cantonese opera singer, who was absent in the way that performing artists are absent. Present in the house, but not present in the room, present in the family, but not present in the moment.
Bruce’s childhood in Hong Kong. The street fighting, the rooftop fighting, the police station visits, the parental anxiety, the decision to send Bruce to America before Bruce’s fists got him into trouble that fists couldn’t get him out of. Bruce’s body held all of it. The father’s absence, the street fights, the crossing of the ocean, the $100, the dishwashing, the small room above the restaurant, the park in the rain.
The faces of white men who looked at him and saw a Chinese kid, saw a body they could dismiss, saw a size they could dominate. Bruce’s body held all of it. And the holding shaped Bruce’s body the way a nail shapes a tree. And maybe Fuk Young could see the nails. Maybe Fukyouong looked at Bruce Lee’s body, the tight shoulders, the coiled readiness, the jaw that clenched in photographs even when Bruce was smiling.
And Fukyouong could see where the nails were. Maybe Fukyong put his hands on Bruce’s shoulders and said, “Here, this is where you’re holding your father. And here, this is where you’re holding Hong Kong. And here, this is where you’re holding the ocean crossing and the $100 and the dishwashing and the small room and the rain.
And maybe Fuk Young taught Bruce how to let the nails go, not remove them. You can’t remove a nail from a living tree without damaging the tree. But you can change the tree’s relationship to the nail. You can teach the tree to grow around the nail differently, not tightly, not constricted, but openly with space with room for the sap to flow past the nail instead of being blocked by it.
Maybe that’s what Fuky Young taught. something about the body, about the way the body holds things, about the way the body can hold things differently. I am speculating. I have been speculating for several minutes now and I want to acknowledge that the speculation has taken me far from the chain. The chain gives me Fuk Young taught Bruce something.
The chain gives me something about the body and the way the body holds things. Everything else, the nails, the tree, the shoulders, the jaw, the father, Hong Kong, the ocean crossing, everything else is mine. My imagination, my framework, my attempt to fill the gap between what the chain carries and what the chain doesn’t carry.
I’m filling the gap because the gap needs filling, not because the gap needs to be closed. The gap should stay open. The gap is the honest space between what we know and what we don’t. But because the gap needs furniture, the gap needs something in it. A chair to sit on while you look across the gap at the other side.
A lamp to see by. Not a bridge, not a wall. Just enough to make the gap habitable. That’s what I’m building. Furniture for the gap. And the furniture says, “Fukong taught Bruce Lee something about the body that was not martial arts, but that made Bruce Lee’s martial arts better. Something about relaxation, something about release, something about the difference between holding tight and holding open.
” And when Bruce stood at the funeral with his hands open, palms up, fingers relaxed, holding nothing, holding everything, maybe Bruce was demonstrating the teaching. Maybe Bruce was showing Fuk Young’s teaching to the room, not performing it, demonstrating it. The way you demonstrate a principle by embodying it.
The way water demonstrates fluidity by being fluid. Bruce’s open hands were Fukyong<unk>s lesson. Made visible. The fist is mine. The open hand is here. The dead man taught the difference. My father put his coffee down. I told you that. I told you about the ceramic cup and the blue line around the rim and the sound of the cup on the counter.
I told you about the afternoon sunlight through the west-facing window. I told you about the hum of the refrigerator. I didn’t tell you what my father said next after the story. After the man walking in and the push and don’t and the open hands and the man leaving, my father stood on his side of the counter and he was quiet for a while.
Not the long held breath quiet of the funeral home. A different kind of quiet, a thinking quiet, the quiet of a man who was just told a story and is now listening to the story echo in the room and is deciding whether to say one more thing. My father decided. My father said, “You know what gets me about that story? I waited. Not the hands.
Not the guy leaving. Not any of that. I waited. What gets me is that Bruce went to the funeral. I didn’t understand at first. I made a face.” the face you make when someone says something that sounds obvious and you’re trying to figure out where the non-obvious part is hiding. Of course, Bruce went to the funeral.
Bruce knew Folk Young. Bruce was a student of Folk Young. Bruce respected Folk Young. Bruce went to the funeral. My father saw the face and shook his head. No, think about it. When this happened mid60s, Bruce was already busy. Bruce was already teaching. Bruce had students. Bruce had a wife. Bruce was trying to get into movies.
Bruce was in Ed Parker’s orbit. Bruce was doing demonstrations. Bruce was moving. Bruce was always moving. Every minute of Bruce’s day was a minute he could spend on the career, on the dream, on the thing he was building. And Bruce stopped. Bruce put on a suit. Bruce polished his shoes. Bruce drove to the International District.
Bruce walked into a small funeral home. Bruce stood next to the coffin. 4 hours. My father picked up his coffee, put it down again without drinking. That’s the story. That’s the real story. Not the hands, not the guy, the hours. Bruce Lee stood next to a dead man’s body for hours because the dead man mattered. In the middle of everything, in the middle of the building, in the middle of the hunger and the drive and the ambition, Bruce stopped and stood still and honored a man who taught him something about the body.
My father looked at me. How many people would do that? How many people in the middle of building what Bruce was building, how many of them would stop? How many of them would put on the suit and polish the shoes and drive to the funeral home and stand there? Not for a half hour, not for a quick appearance. 4 hours.
My father’s question was not a question. My father’s question was a statement with a question mark at the end. The answer was not many. The answer was almost nobody. The answer was the kind of ambition that Bruce Lee carried to the world-consuming schedule filling every minute counts ambition.
The kind of ambition does not usually coexist with that kind of reverence. The ambitious man sends flowers. The ambitious man makes a phone call. The ambitious man says, “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there. I had a commitment.” The ambitious man does not stand next to a coffin for hours. Bruce stood. Bruce stood because standing was the lesson, not the martial arts lesson, not the technique, not the skill, the human lesson, the lesson that says when a person who matters dies, you stop.
You stop whatever you are building. You stop whatever you are chasing. You stop and you stand and you honor the dead with the only currency the dead can receive, which is time. Your time. The time you could have spent building. The time you could have spent advancing. The time you could have spent on yourself.
You give that time to the dead man. You stand in the room with the flowers and the folding chairs and the humming fluorescent light and you give the dead man your hours. That’s respect, not the word. The act. Bruce Lee’s respect was not verbal. Bruce Lee’s respect was not a social media post. Bruce Lee’s respect was not a tribute or a eulogy or a speech.
Bruce Lee’s respect was his body in the room. His shoes on the lenolum, his hands at his sides, his face quiet, his presence, presence as respect, body is honor, standing as love. My father said that’s the thing I carry from this story, not the martial arts part. the standing part, the hours part, the I’m here and I’m not leaving part.
And then my father picked up his coffee and drank it. The coffee must have been cold by then. My father didn’t seem to notice. My father drank the cold coffee and put the cup in the sink and turned on the water and rinsed the cup and turned off the water and put the cup upside down on the dish towel next to the sink and the story was over.
Except it wasn’t because my father said one more thing as he was turning away from the sink as he was drying his hands on the towel. As he was about to walk out of the kitchen and back into the rest of the day, he said one more thing, and this is the thing I remember most, more than the open hands, more than the man leaving, more than the chrysanthemums, more than any part of the story that traveled through four hands in 20 years to reach me.
My father said, I wonder who stood at Bruce’s funeral. And then he walked out of the kitchen. Bruce Lee died on July 20th, 1973. He was 32 years old. The funeral was in Seattle. Not Hong Kong, where Bruce died. Not Los Angeles, where Bruce lived. Seattle, the city where Bruce had arrived with $100. The city where he met Jesse Glover.
The city where he taught in parks and garages and basement. The city where he married Linda. The city where somewhere in the international district in a small funeral home with folding chairs and chrysanthemums, Bruce had stood next to Fukyang’s coffin with his hands at his sides and his face quiet. Bruce came back to Seattle in a coffin.
The funeral was held on July 25th, 1973 at Butterworth’s mortuary. The pawbearers were Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Dan Inosanto, Tiki Kimura, Peter Chin, and Robert Lee, Bruce’s brother. McQueen and Coburn were there. Hollywood was there. The famous and the powerful and the photographed were there. But I don’t want to talk about the famous.
I want to talk about the other people. The people who were in the room the way the mourers were in the room at Fuk Young<unk>s funeral, seated in chairs, faces forward, hands and laps, breathing quietly. The people who were not paulbearers and not celebrities and not photographers and not reporters. The people who came because Bruce had taught them something.
The people who came because Bruce had placed his hands on their shoulders and said here and they had felt the something and the something had changed them. I want to talk about the people who stood not at the service. At the service everybody sits. I mean before and after. I mean the arriving and the waiting and the standing outside the building because the building is full and there are too many people and not enough chairs and the overflow spills onto the sidewalk and the sidewalk is full of people who came because Bruce mattered
to them. Those people stood. Tiki Kimura was there. Tiki was Bruce’s second student in Seattle after Jesse. Tiki was a man who had survived the internment camps. The Japanese American internment during World War II, the national shame, the constitutional violation, the thing America did to its own citizens because their faces look like the faces of the enemy.
Ti survived the camps and came out diminished not physically but spiritually. The way a man is diminished when his country tells him he is the enemy. Tiki carried that diminishment in his body the way a tree carries a nail. And then Tiki met Bruce and Bruce looked at Tiki and Bruce saw the nail and Bruce did not remove the nail, but Bruce taught Tiki to grow around it differently.
Tiki stood at Bruce’s funeral. Tiki stood at Bruce’s grave every year after that. Every year on the anniversary of Bruce’s death, Tiki drove to Lake View Cemetery in Seattle and stood next to the headstone and honored the dead man with his body in the space. Tikki did this for decades. Tiki did this until Take Tea himself was old and slow and the drive was difficult and the standing was painful and Tiki did it anyway.
Tiki stood the way Bruce stood at Fuk Young’s funeral. Hours presence body is honor standing as love. I don’t know if Tiki knew the story of Fukyong<unk>s funeral. I don’t know if Jesse told Tikki. I don’t know if Tiki learned to stand from Bruce or if Tiki already knew how to stand and Bruce simply confirmed it.
I don’t know any of that. What I know is this. The standing traveled from Fuk Young to Bruce. From Bruce to Tei. The lesson, the lesson of presence, the lesson of the body in the room. The lesson of ours given to the dead. The lesson traveled from teacher to student to student. The chain is longer than the chain I’ve been telling you about.
The chain of Jesse to David, to my father, to me, to you. The chain carries the story. But there is a parallel chain, an older chain, a deeper chain that carries the lesson. And the lesson chain goes Fukyong to Bruce. Fukyong stood. We don’t know where Fukyang stood. We don’t know whose funeral attended, whose coffin Fukyou Young honored with his body, but Fukyouong knew how to stand.
Fukyong knew the lesson well enough to teach it. And Fukyong taught Bruce by being the kind of man whose death made Bruce stand. Fukyou Young taught Bruce the lesson by dying. Not intentionally, not as a pedagogical strategy, but by dying, Fukyou Young created the occasion for Bruce to practice the lesson. The death was the final exam.
The funeral was the examination room. And Bruce passed. Bruce stood 4 feet from the body for hours in a dark gray suit with polished shoes with his hands at his sides and his face quiet. And then Bruce died and the occasion was created again. And Tiki practiced the lesson and Dan Inosanto practiced the lesson and the students practiced the lesson.
And the lesson traveled. The lesson is still traveling. The lesson arrived in my father’s kitchen on a Wednesday afternoon. My father told me the story and my father said, “I wonder who stood at Bruce’s funeral.” And my father walked out of the kitchen and I stood there. I stood in the kitchen alone with the hum of the refrigerator and the afternoon sunlight in the cup in the sink.
And I stood there. I stood not for hours for a few minutes, but I stood. I stood in my father’s kitchen and I felt the weight of the standing and I felt the lesson moving through me the way force moves through a pillar downward into the floor into the earth. The body holds things. The body can hold things differently.
The body can hold things with an open hand instead of a fist. I stood in the kitchen and held the story with open hands. I need to tell you the thing I cannot prove. I’ve been careful in this story. I’ve been careful to separate the chain from the speculation, the event from the imagination, the sharp parts from the blurred parts.
I’ve been careful to tell you when I’m inside the chain, and when I’m outside it. I’ve been careful because carefulness is the debt I owe the chain, the debt I owe Jesse and David and my father. They carried this story with precision. The least I can do is carry it with honesty. But there is something I need to say that I cannot prove.
Something that lives in me is conviction without evidence. Something that I believe the way I believe the floor will hold me when I step on it. Not because I’ve tested the floor, but because my body has decided to trust it. I believe that what Bruce Lee did with his hands at that funeral, the open hands, the raised palms, the holding of nothing and everything, I believe that was Fuky Young<unk>s teaching made visible.
I believe that in the moment of confrontation, in the seconds between the man’s failed push and the man’s retreat, Bruce Lee embodied the thing that Fukyou Young had taught him. Not deliberately, not as a strategy, not as a martial arts technique selected from a catalog of available techniques. Bruce embodied the teaching, the way water embodies fluidity, not by choice, but by nature.
By the nature that Fuk Young had helped Bruce discover. I believe that the open hands were not Bruce’s invention. I believe the open hands were Fukyou Young’s gift. I believe that somewhere in a back room or an apartment or an office in Seattle’s International District, an old man, a small man, thin with hands that had touched a thousand bodies, placed his palms on Bruce Lee’s chest and said, “Feel this.
Feel what you’re holding. Feel where you’re holding it. And now open. Not your hands. Your chest. Open your chest. Let the thing you’re holding have room. Let the thing you’re holding breathe. And Bruce opened. And the opening changed something in Bruce’s body. Something structural. Something that went deeper than muscle and deeper than bone and reached the place where the body stores its oldest instructions.
The instructions that say fight or flee, tighten or release, clench or open. And Fukyou Young changed the instruction. Fukyou Young changed the default from clench to open, from fist to palm, from fight to presence. Not in every situation, Bruce Lee was still a fighter, still a man who could close his fists faster than any man alive, still a man whose strike could drop a man twice his size.
But in the default state, in the resting state, in the state that the body returns to when the crisis is over and the adrenaline recedes and the body asks itself, “What am I?” And the body answered, “I am open.” And at the funeral when the man pushed and the push failed and the man spoke and the words failed and the moment arrived.
The moment when every other martial artist in history would have closed his fists and raised his guard and prepared to strike. Bruce did the opposite. Bruce opened. Bruce raised his open hands. Bruce showed the man the openness. Bruce said with his body, with his palms, with the space between his fingers, I am open.
I am not closed. I am not a fist. I am an open hand. And the man saw the openness. And the openness terrified him because openness in the face of threat is impossible. Openness in the face of a push is wrong. Openness when someone has their hand on your chest is a violation of every survival instinct the human body carries.
The body says clench. The body says fight. The body says close your hands and raise your guard and protect yourself. And Bruce Bruce overrode every one of those instructions. Bruce stood in the face of threat with open hands. And the openness was so complete and so total and so wrong that the man’s brain could not process it.
The man’s brain saw the open hands and the man’s brain said, “This does not compute. This is not a man who was about to fight me. This is not a man who is afraid of me. This is not a man who is angry at me. This is what is this? What am I looking at? What is this person showing me?” The man’s brain could not answer the question.
The man’s brain could not categorize the open hands. The man’s brain had categories for fists and categories for flight and categories for anger and categories for fear. The man’s brain did not have a category for openness in the face of threat. The brain tried to file the image and there was no folder and the brain panicked.
The blood left the man’s face. The man stepped back. The man left. This is what I believe. This is the thing I cannot prove. I cannot prove it because the thing I’m describing, the quality of openness, the embodiment of a teaching, the visible manifestation of an internal state, that thing does not photograph.
That thing does not record. That thing does not translate into language cleanly. That thing lives in the space between two bodies standing in a room. And the only people who can testify to it are the people who were there. Jesse was there. Jesse saw it. Jesse didn’t know what he saw, but Jesse knew it was something.
And Jesse carried it. One telling, one chain, four hands, 20 years. And the something arrived, diminished by the carrying, enriched by the carrying, changed by the carrying, preserved by the carrying. And the something is here now in this room between us. I can’t prove it, but I believe it. And I think Jesse believed it, too.
I think that’s why Jesse told the story once and only once, not because the story was a secret, because the story was sacred. And sacred things are told carefully, told sparingly, told with the understanding that every telling costs something, and every telling pays something, and the balance between the cost and the payment must be respected.
Jesse told the story once. I’m telling it now. After this, I don’t know who tells it. Maybe you. I want to go back to my father’s kitchen one more time. My father said, “I wonder who stood at Bruce’s funeral.” And my father walked out of the kitchen and I stood there. I told you that I stood in the kitchen with the hum of the refrigerator and the light through the window and the cup in the sink.
I want to talk about the cup and the sink. The cup was white ceramic with a thin blue line around the rim. The cup was upside down on the dish towel next to the sink. My father had rinsed it and placed it there upside down, draining the last drops of water sliding down the ceramic and into the towel. The cup was empty.
The cup had held coffee and now the cup held nothing. The cup was open. I’m looking at the cup now in memory and I’m seeing the cup the way I see Bruce’s hands open, empty, containing nothing, containing everything. The cup had held coffee. The cup had been part of the story. My father held the cup while he told me about the funeral.
My father put the cup down when he got to the part about the hands. My father picked the cup up again when he talked about Bruce arriving at the funeral. My father drank from the cup when he talked about what gets him about the story. My father rinsed the cup and placed it upside down on the towel and said, “I wonder who stood at Bruce’s funeral and walked out.
” The cup was a prop. The cup was a handhold. The cup was the thing my father’s hands did while my father’s mouth told the story. The same way Bruce’s hands were open at the funeral, not doing anything, not performing a technique, just being held, my father’s hands held the cup. The cup was my father’s open hand.
The cup was the thing my father held while the story moved through him. And when the story was done, my father put the cup down. empty, open, upside down, draining. I think about that cup more than I should. I think about it because the cup is a perfect image for what I’ve been trying to describe. The body holds things. The cup holds things.
And when the hauling is done, when the coffee is drunk, when the story is told, when the lesson is delivered, the cup is rinsed and placed upside down on the towel and the cup is empty. But the cup is not nothing. An empty cup is not nothing. An empty cup is a cup. An empty cup has shape. An empty cup has capacity.
An empty cup has the history of everything it has ever held. the coffee, the tea, the water, the milk, the whatever. The history is in the ceramic. The history is in the faint stain on the inside of the rim that no amount of rinsing removes. The history is in the chip on the handle where the cup was set down too hard one morning, years ago, by someone who was distracted or tired or thinking about something else.
The empty cup is full of history. The open hand is full of history. Bruce’s open hands at the funeral were full of history, full of Fuk Young’s teaching, full of IP man’s training, full of Hong Kong and the ocean crossing and the $100 and the dishwashing and the park and the rain and Jesse Glover and Linda Emory and every punch thrown and every kick landed in every moment of every day of Bruce Lee’s 32 years on earth.
The hands were open and the hands were empty and the hands were full. The cup in the sink. The hand at the funeral. The body holds things even when it’s open. Especially when it’s open. You are the last link. For now, you are the last link for now until you tell someone. until you sit in a kitchen or stand in a gym or lie in a bed in the dark next to someone you love and say, “Let me tell you a story about Bruce Lee at a funeral.
” And then you become my father and the person you tell becomes me and the chain extends or you don’t tell anyone and the chain stops here and the story lives in you the way the story lived in Jesse for years before Jesse told David is silently privately in the body in the muscles in the place where the body holds things.
Both options are correct. Telling is correct. Not telling is correct. Jesse told once and that was correct. Jesse refused to tell again and that was correct. The story doesn’t need more links. The story has enough links. But the story doesn’t resist more links either. The story is open. The story is a cup. The story has capacity.
Here’s what I want you to carry if you carry anything. Not the confrontation, not the push, not the open hands, not the blood leaving the man’s face, not the word don’t, not the fluorescent light or the chrysanthemums or the folding chairs or the lenolium or the polished shoes. Carry this. Bruce Lee stood at a funeral.
That’s it. That’s the core. That’s the thing that survived every link in the chain without losing a single atom. Bruce Lee stood at a funeral. Bruce Lee stopped building. Bruce Lee stopped training. Bruce Lee stopped chasing the dream. Bruce Lee put on a suit. Bruce Lee polished his shoes. Bruce Lee walked into a room with a dead man and flowers and folding chairs.
And Bruce Lee stood there for hours because someone mattered because Fukyong mattered because the teaching mattered. Because the body holds things and the body had held Fukyouong<unk>s teaching and the teaching deserved the standing. The teaching deserved the hours. The teaching deserved the suit and the shoes and the drive and the room and the presence.
Carry that. Carry the idea that standing is an act. That presence is a practice. That showing up physically, bodily with your shoes on the floor and your hands at your sides and your face quiet. That showing up is the most basic and the most profound form of respect. Carry the idea that the open hand holds more than the fist.
Carry the idea that the body holds things, that the body holds grief and anger and fear and love and respect and loss, that the holding is work, that the holding costs something, that the holding is worth the cost. Carry the idea that a chain of human mouths can carry a story across decades and deliver it intact.
Not perfectly, not without cost, not without the tax of texture and the enrichment of interpretation, but intact. Meaning intact, heart intact. Carry the idea that one telling is enough. Jesse told the story once. I’ve told it now. If you tell it, tell it once. Tell it in a kitchen. Tell it over coffee. Tell it to someone who will stand still long enough to hear it.
Tell it to someone who knows what it means to hold something in the body, in the hands, in the open palms. Tell it once, the chain will do the rest. Bruce Lee stood at a funeral. His hands were at his sides. His shoes were polished. His face was quiet. 4 ft from the body. 4 hours. That’s the story.
