I have a piece of paper in my hand right now. I’m holding it as I record this. You can’t see it. I’m going to describe it to you. It’s a photocopy. The original is in a small museum in Fosan in Guangdong Province in southern China. Fosan is the city where Yip Man was born. The museum is on a side street in a building that used to be a school.
I have not been to the museum. A friend of my father’s went in 2008 and brought back this photocopy and gave it to my father. And my father put it in the same kitchen drawer where he keeps the notebook from Bangkok. The drawer with the rubber bands and the birthday candles. The photocopy has been in that drawer for 16 years.
I asked my father if I could borrow it for this video. He said yes, but brought it back. The paper is letter sized. The original was probably smaller. Chinese stationery in 1965 was usually a smaller format closer to a five. This is a photocopy that was enlarged. The handwriting is in classical Chinese brush and ink. Vertical columns right to left.
There are seven columns. The last column is shorter than the others. Below the last column, there is a small red square, a personal seal. The kind of man stamps on a letter to mark it is truly from him. The seal is faint on the photocopy. On the original, it would be vermilion red.
The letter is dated the 8th month of 1965. It is addressed to Lee Junfan. That was Bruce Lee’s given name. The letter is signed. Yipman. I’m going to read it to you later. Not now. Later in the fourth chapter, when the timing is right. For now, I just want you to know that I’m holding it. that this part is real.
That whatever else I tell you tonight that you can’t verify this, you can verify. The letter exists. It’s in a museum. The photocopy is in my hand. Last time I told you three stories about one night in Bangkok. I couldn’t tell you which one was true. None of them had a document attached. This one is older and smaller and quieter. And I know most of it is true because the letter is in my hand.
But I want to be honest with you again the way I always am at the start. Not all of this story is verifiable. The center of it, the phone call in November of 1972 is told to me by my father who was told by a man in Seattle who was told by a man in Hong Kong who was in the room when one side of the call happened. That’s three removes.
I’ll mark it when we get there. This is an artistic story told through the memory of my father. made with deep respect for Bruce Lee, for Yipman, for the lineage of Wing Chun, and for the men who carry it. Some of it is real. Some of it is the way it was told to me. Take it as a story. I want to take you somewhere before I start.
There is a building on Nathan Road in Koon on the west side of the street between Jordan Road and Austin Road in a stretch of Sim Shasui that has been rebuilt and rebuilt and rebuilt since 1972. The exact address is hard to pin down now because the buildings have been renumbered twice. But somewhere on that stretch of Nathan Road, on the second floor of a building that probably no longer exists in its original form, there was a small apartment in the early 1970s.
The apartment had two rooms. The front room was where students came when they came to learn. The back room was where Yipman lived. The front room had a wooden floor with the finish worn off in the center where students had stood for 30 years. The back room had a single bed, a desk, a window that looked down onto Nathan Road, and a black rotary telephone on a small table next to the bed.
The phone in the back room is the phone I’m going to tell you about. If you go to that stretch of Nathan Road today, and I have not, but I have looked at it on a screen for many hours, you will not find the building. Or you might find a building that’s in roughly the right place, but is now seven stories instead of three and has a 7-Eleven on the ground floor and a clothing store above it and offices above that.
The school is gone. The apartment is gone. The phone is gone. Yep. Man has been gone for 52 years. But I want you to picture the backroom, the single bed, the desk, the window with the wooden shutters half closed against the neon of Nathan Road, the phone on the table, a man of 79 sitting on the edge of the bed in a gray cotton jacket with frog button closures with a cigarette burning in a small ceramic ashtray holding the receiver of the phone loosely against his right ear. The line is open.
Long distance Hong Kong to Hong Kong. Actually, Bruce was on Cumberland Road in Kunong, 4 miles north. But in 1972, even a 4-mile call inside Hong Kong went through an operator and crackled like it was coming from another country. That’s where we’re going. Not yet. In about 35 minutes.
First, I have to tell you who these two men were to each other. Because if you don’t understand that, the call doesn’t mean anything. It’s just two voices on a bad line. Bruce Lee climbed the stairs to Yipman’s school for the first time in the spring of 1956. He was 15 years old. He had been in three street fights that his mother knew about and probably six that she didn’t.
He had been beaten badly in one of them by an older boy from a rival school in Cowoon and had come home with his lips split and a tooth loose. His mother had said enough. His father had said, “Find him a teacher.” The teacher his father found through a chain of family friends was Yipman.
Yipman at that point was 63 years old. He had been in Hong Kong for 7 years. He had come from Fosan in 1949 in the wave of refugees that left Guangdong when the communists took the south. He had left behind a wife. He had left behind two sons. He would not see them again for a long time and his wife he would not see again at all.
She died in Fosan in 1960. And he received the news by letter. And according to the people who were with him that day, he did not weep. He just sat in his chair and smoked one cigarette and then another and then a third. And at the end of the third cigarette, he stood up and went to teach his afternoon class. In 1956, when Bruce came up the stairs, Yipman was teaching out of a small room above a restaurant on Lee Tat Street.
Not the Nathan Road apartment yet. That came later. Lee Tat Street, a narrow street in Yamati. The school was one room, maybe 400 square feet, with a wooden floor and a row of windows along one wall that looked out onto an alley. There were no mirrors. There were no certificates on the walls.
There was a small altar in the corner with three sticks of incense burning in a brass holder. There was a wooden dummy in the back, a Mukian Jang, the training dummy that Wing Chun students work against. And the dummy had been worn smooth in the places where hands and elbows hit it 10,000 times a year. Yep. Man wore that day what he wore most days, a long gray cotton gown, traditional Chinese cut, plain.
He was small, 5’2, maybe 53, slender. He had a face that one of his students later described as the face of a man who was decided not to be surprised by anything anymore. He was at 63 already thinning. He smoked. He had smoked for 50 years. He would smoke for another 15. And the throat cancer that killed him in 72 was already in 1956 a small dark patch on the inside of his throat that no one had seen yet.
Bruce, at 15, was 4 in shorter than he would be at his full adult height. He was thin. He weighed maybe 110 lb. He had the same face, you know, from photographs, but it wasn’t fixed yet. It was still the face of a boy. He came up the stairs in a school uniform. He was a student at Lassal College, a Catholic boy school in Koon, with his hair short and his shirt half-tucked.
He was, by every account anyone gave later, a difficult kid, restless, quick to argue, quick to fight. His father, Lihoy Chen, was a Cantonese opera star and a working actor. Bruce had been on screen since he was an infant, had appeared in his first film at 3 months old. had a kind of casual fame in Hong Kong by the time he was a teenager that did not make him calmer.
It made him worse. He came up the stairs in any case and he stood in the doorway of the school and Yip Man looked at him from across the room and did not get up. There’s a thing that happened in that first meeting that I want to tell you. I have it from two sources. One is a book of recollections published in Hong Kong in 1998 by some of Yipman’s senior students.
The other is my father’s notes from a conversation with Teik Kimura, who was Bruce’s senior student in Seattle and who heard the story directly from Bruce in 1963. Both sources agree on the bones. Bruce stood in the doorway. Yipman from across the room said, “Come in or don’t come in.” Bruce came in. Yipman asked him why he was there.
Bruce said, “I want to learn how to fight.” Yep. Man said, “That’s not what I teach.” Bruce said, “Then what do you teach?” Yipman said, “I teach you how to stand.” Bruce, by his own account, later almost left. He was 15. He had come up the stairs to learn how to break a man’s nose. He was being told by a small old man in a gray gown that the curriculum was standing.
He looked at the door behind him. He looked at the wooden dummy in the back. He looked at the old man. He stayed. The first two years of Bruce’s training under Yipman, 56 and 57, were not what Bruce later said they were. I want to be careful with this part because what Bruce later said in interviews in America in the late60s is the version most people know.
In those interviews, Bruce described his training under Yipman as the foundation that he then surpassed. He described Wing Chun as a starting point that he had outgrown. He used a phrase more than once. The finger pointing at the moon. Don’t look at the finger. Look at the moon. The finger was Wing Chun.
The moon was the truth Bruce had found beyond it. That’s a beautiful phrase. It’s a true phrase in its way, but it’s not the whole story of those first two years. The first two years, according to the people who were in the room, and I’m drawing here from the same 1998 Hong Kong book, plus a long interview Yip Chun, Yip Man’s eldest son, gave to a Hong Kong magazine in 2004, Bruce did not spar.
He did not learn to break noses. He stood. He held a posture called Yi Ji Kimyong Ma, the basic Wing Chun stance with his knees slightly bent and his feet turned in for 40 minutes at a time. While Yipman walked around him and corrected his weight distribution with a small bamboo stick, he learned the first form of Wing Chun Shun Tao.
The little idea, he learned to do it slowly. The form performed correctly takes about 30 minutes. Bruce in his first year did it three times a session, three sessions a week for 50 weeks. That’s 450 repetitions of a 30inut form in his first year. That’s 225 hours of standing in one place doing slow movements while a small old man corrected the angle of his wrist.
Bruce in interviews later did not talk about this. Bruce in interviews later talked about what came after the second form, the third form, the wooden dummy, the cheese saw sticky hands drills, the application of the principles to combat. He talked about how he had taken Wing Chun and then adapted it, opened it, liberated it. All of that is true. He did do that.
He did that brilliantly. But he can only do it because he had stood in one place for 225 hours in the first year. The finger pointing at the moon, Yipman would have agreed with that phrase. But Yipman would have said, “You can only point at the moon if your hand is steady. And the way you make your hand steady is you stand in one place with your knees bent for 40 minutes at a time while someone corrects you with a bamboo stick.
That’s what those first two years were. By 1958, Bruce was 17 and he had moved past the standing. He was working on the wooden dummy. He was doing cheese saw with senior students. He was for the first time sparring, but only against other students of the school. Only with Yipman watching, only with Yipman’s verbal corrections coming in real time across the room.
Lower your elbow. Don’t lean. Don’t reach. Come back to the center. I want to tell you what Wing Chun actually was in Yipman’s school in 1958. Because most people who know Bruce Lee know what Bruce did with Wing Chun, and very few people know what Wing Chun was before Bruce did things with it.
Wing Chan is a southern Chinese martial art. It comes from GuangDong province. It is in lineage perhaps 250 years old. Though the legends about its origin go back further and are like most martial arts origin stories, partly invention. It was designed, this is the key thing, for a small person to fight a larger person at close range.
It does not rely on strength. It does not rely on athleticism. It does not rely on length of limb. It relies on three things. Structure, sensitivity, and economy of motion. Structure means the body is organized so that force comes from the ground, through the legs, up through the spine, out through the hands in a single connected line.
If your structure is right, a much larger man cannot push you backwards even if he leans his whole weight into you. If your structure is wrong, a child can move you. Sensitivity. This is what the chessaw drills teach. Means that when your forearm is in contact with your opponent’s forearm, you can feel through that contact what your opponent is about to do.
You feel his intention before you see it. The drill is two people standing close, forearms touching, eyes closed, moving and countering by feel alone. Yep. Man could do chessaw with a senior student blindfolded and could redirect every attack the student threw by touch only for 20 minutes without being hit once. I have watched a video of his son.
Yepching doing this in the 1990s at the age of 70. It looks like nothing. It looks like two men gently touching forearms. It is, when you understand what’s happening, one of the strangest things you will ever see. Economy of motion means the shortest distance between your hand and your opponent’s center is a straight line.
You do not wind up. You do not chamber. You do not pull your hand back to throw it. The hand goes from where it is to where the target is with no preparation, with no telegraph. A Wing Chun punch travels 6 in and arrives without warning. It is not a powerful punch by the standards of boxing.
It is a punch that lands when the other man did not know it was coming. That is what Yipman taught. Structure, sensitivity, economy. Three things. 250 years of refinement compressed into three principles. It was not flashy. It was not entertaining to watch. It was when done correctly, almost invisible. Bruce, by 1958, was very good at it.
Not the best in the school. There were senior students, men in their 20s, who had been training for a decade, and Bruce was not at their level yet. But he was the most talented of his generation. Yip Man knew it. The senior students knew it. Bruce knew it. And here is where the trouble started. There is a thing Yipman taught that Bruce later rejected.
I want to be careful about this part. Wing Chun in its traditional form is closed. That means it is a complete system. You do not borrow from other systems. You do not add boxing to it. You do not add kicks beyond the few low kicks that are already in the curriculum. You do not bring in grappling. You do not bring in weapons beyond the two that are part of the system, the long pole and the butterfly knives. You learn what is in the system.
You spend 20 years learning what is in the system. And then at the end of 20 years, you may understand a fraction of what is in the system. Bruce, by the time he was 17, was already looking outside. He had a friend at Lassel College who boxed, a western boxer, English trained with a coach at a club in Koon.
Bruce went with him to the club. Bruce watched. Bruce sparred. Bruce, in the first sparring session, got hit in the face four times by a boxer who weighed 20 lbs more than him and had a 6-in reach advantage. Bruce came back to Yipman school the next week with a bruise on his cheekbone and a question. The question was, “Why don’t we move our heads? In Wing Chun, the head does not move much.
The structure holds the head in place over the spine, over the hips, over the feet. You do not slip punches. You do not bob and weave. You intercept the punch with your hands using sensitivity and economy before it reaches your head. That’s the theory. Bruce had just spent 40 minutes in a boxing ring, discovering that the theory has limits.
A boxer with a 6-in reach advantage can land a jab on you before your hand reaches his arm. Sensitivity does not help you if there is no contact yet. You need to move your head. Bruce asked Yip Man, “Why don’t we move our heads?” Yep. Man, according to a senior student named Wong Shan Leang, who was in the room, Wong Shan Leang went on to become one of the most respected Wing Chun teachers of the next generation, and he wrote about this exchange in a Hong Kong martial arts journal in the 1980s. Yep.
man said because if you move your head you have already lost your structure and if you have lost your structure you have already lost the fight the boxer hits you because you are letting him hit you fix your structure then he won’t reach Bruce said but he did reach Yipman said then your structure was wrongly wrote was quiet for a long moment then Bruce said I think the structure has limits Yep.
Man said, “The structure has no limits. Your understanding of the structure has limits. That’s a different problem.” That was the conversation. Wong Shan Leong wrote that he remembered the exact words because of what came after. Because that conversation, in his view, was the beginning of the long slow drift between Bruce and Yipman that ended with 12 years of silence and one phone call in November of 1972.
Bruce did not stop training. Bruce kept training under Yipman for two more years until he left for America in 1959. But after that conversation, something had changed. Bruce was looking outside the system. He was reading boxing manuals. He was watching films of western fencers. He was already interested in fencing because his older brother Peter was a champion fencer in Hong Kong.
He was thinking about footwork that was not Wing Chun footwork. And Yip Man knew it. Yep. Man, by every account did not stop teaching Bruce, did not punish him, did not lecture him. Yip Man was not that kind of teacher. He continued to correct Bruce’s structure. He continued to walk around him with the bamboo stick. But there was, the senior student said later, a small new distance in Yipman’s eyes when he looked at Bruce.
not anger, something closer to recognition. Recognition that this student was going to leave him eventually and that there was nothing to be done about it and that the only honest response was to keep teaching him as well as possible until the day he left. In 1959, Bruce did leave. Not because of Yip Man, because of his mother.
He had been in another street fight, a serious one. This time with the son of a triadconnected family, and his mother decided that Hong Kong was no longer safe for him. Bruce had American citizenship. By birth, he had been born in San Francisco in 1940 when his father was on a Cantonese opera tour and his mother put him on a steamship in April of 59 and sent him to live with family friends in Seattle.
He was 18 years old. The day before he left, Bruce went to Yipman’s school for the last time as a resident student. He stood at the door. Yipman was at the back of the room sitting on a wooden chair smoking. Bruce came in. They did not speak for a minute. Then Yipman said in Cantonese, “Go well.” Bruce said, “I will come back.
” Yipman said, “If you come back, come back better.” Bruce bowed. He left. He went down the stairs. He did not come back. He did technically come back to Hong Kong many times. He came back in ‘ 63 to visit family. He came back in 70 and 71 and 72 for filming. He lived in Hong Kong full-time from 1971 onwards in the house on Cumberland Road.
But he did not after that day in April 1959. Ever again come up the stairs of Yipman’s school as a student. He saw Yipman twice in person between 59 and 72. Once in 63 briefly at a public event. Once in 70 at a wedding. Both meetings were polite. Both meetings were short. Neither meeting the people present said later contained a real conversation.
12 years. Two brief public meetings. No real conversations. And one letter in 1965 which I’m holding right now and which I’m going to read to you in the next chapter. Bruce landed in Seattle in May of 1959. He was 18. He had $40 in his pocket, an address for a family friend in the Chinatown International District, and a return ticket to Hong Kong he would never use.
I’m not going to tell you the whole Seattle story tonight. I’ve told parts of it before in the first video about the note from 65 and in the third about the letter in the hard coverver book. The Seattle years 60 to 64 are the years when Bruce went from being Yipman’s student to being a teacher in his own right. He lived above Ruby Chow’s restaurant on Broadway in Jefferson, washing dishes for room and board.
He enrolled at Edison Technical School, then at the University of Washington. He started teaching in the parking lot behind Ruby Chows, then in the basement of a Chinese church, then in a small rented space on University Way. Tikki Kimura became his first senior student in ‘ 61. The school was called the Lie Junfang Gung Fu Institute.
It was not called a Wing Chun School. It was named after Bruce. That naming matters. It’s the first public signal that Bruce was no longer teaching Yipman’s system. He was teaching Bruce’s system. He was still using most of what Jipman had given him. The structure, the economy of motion, the chain punches, the chessaw drills, but he was adding things.
Boxing footwork, fencing footwork, long range kicks from northern Chinese styles, a philosophy of adaptation that came partly from his philosophy classes at UW and partly from his own restlessness. By 64, when he did the demonstration at the Long Beach International Karate Championships, the demonstration that put him in front of Hollywood for the first time, what he showed on that stage was not Wing Chun.
It was close to Wing Chun in places. The chain punches were Wing Chun. The 1-in punch was Wing Chun, but the footwork was not. The kicks were not. The framing was not. Bruce was 23 years old and he was standing on a stage in Long Beach showing 500 American martial artists a system that did not yet have a name that he would later call Jeet Kim Du and that was by any honest measurement no longer the art Yipman had taught him.
Word traveled back to Hong Kong. Hong Kong in 1964 was a city of 800,000 practicing martial artists and every school knew every other school and every senior teacher read the same small circle of martial arts magazines. And news from America came through family letters and through the Cantonese opera network that Bruce’s father was part of.
It took maybe six months for the full story of what Bruce was doing in Seattle and Oakland to reach Yipman on Nathan Road. Yip Man, according to Yipchun’s 2004 interview, did not say much about it. He read the letters. He looked at the photographs people sent him from the Long Beach demonstration. He put them down. He smoked.
He went back to teaching his afternoon class. He said once to a senior student who asked him directly what he thought of Bruce’s new art. He has taken what I gave him and he has made it something else. That is his choice. It is not mine to judge. That is on the surface a generous response.
Yepchun in the interview says his father meant it generously. But Yipchun also says, and I want to give you this carefully, that his father’s face when he said it was the face of a man who had lost something and had decided not to speak about the loss. There was one event in late 1964 that changed the temperature between them. Bruce came back to Hong Kong in the fall of 64.
Short visit, maybe 3 weeks. He was 24. He had just gotten engaged to Linda Emory. He came to Hong Kong to introduce her to his family. During that visit, a group of senior Wingchun practitioners, former classmates of Bruce from the Yipman school, men who were now teachers themselves, organized a small gathering, a dinner, and after the dinner, an informal demonstration.
They asked Bruce if he would show what he had been developing in America. They framed it respectfully. They framed it as we want to see what our brother has been doing. Bruce said no. He said no politely. He gave a reason. He was traveling. He had not been training at full intensity. He did not want to embarrass himself.
The reason was thin. The men at the dinner knew it was thin. What Bruce was actually saying was, “I don’t want to show you because what I’ll show you is no longer the thing, you know, and I don’t want to have the conversation that follows.” One of the men at that dinner was Wong Shan Leang. the same Wong Shanlong who had written about Bruce’s first doubts in the school in 58.
Wong Shanlong wrote about this dinner too in a later article. He wrote that Bruce’s refusal was understood by the men present and that they did not press him and that the dinner continued politely. But he also wrote that the next morning one of the men went to Yipman’s school on Nathan Road and told Yipman what had happened.
Told him Bruce had refused to show. Yip Man listened. Yep man smoked. Yip man said in Cantonese and Wong Shan Leong quotes this exactly. He is protecting something either his work or us. Either way it is his to decide. And then Yipman two months later sat down at the desk in the back room of his apartment on Nathan Road and wrote the letter I’m holding in my hand.
I want to read it to you now. The letter is seven columns. It is not long. Classical Chinese is compressed seven columns in a letter of this period is maybe 120 characters which translates to about 230 English words. What I’m going to read is an English translation that my father commissioned from a translator in Seattle in 1994.
The translator was a woman named Mrs. Leang, no relation to the Leang who will come up in the next chapter, who had taught Chinese at the University of Washington for 20 years. She translated this letter for my father in exchange for him fixing her son’s car. My father still has her translation typed on an actual typewriter on a single sheet of paper paperclip to the photocopy.
I’m going to read her translation. I want to warn you before I read it. It is not a dramatic letter. It is not a letter of accusation or a blessing or a farewell. It is shorter and quieter than any of those. When I first read it at 18, I thought I had missed something. I thought the real letter must be longer and this must be just the opening.
It isn’t. This is the whole thing. Here it is. To Lee Junfan. I have heard from friends that you are teaching in America and that what you teach is no longer what I taught you. This does not surprise me and it does not trouble me. A teacher gives a student the tools. What the student builds is the students to build.
If the house you are building is not the house I would have built, that is still your house. I ask one thing. Remember the foundation. The house can be any shape. The foundation must hold. If the foundation cracks, the house falls. And it does not matter how beautiful the shape was. I am told you are well. I am glad.
Come see me when you come to Hong Kong. Or do not. Both are acceptable. Yep. Man, 8th month, 1965. That’s it. That’s the letter. I have held this photocopy in my hands probably 200 times in my life. I read it for the first time when I was 18 in my father’s kitchen on the afternoon he first let me look at the drawer.
I have read it maybe 50 times since. Every time I read it, I think I understand it a little better. And every time a few weeks later, I realize I understood it wrong and I have to read it again. What I think it says today at 39 is this. Yep. Man is not angry. He is not disappointed. He is not giving Bruce his blessing. Exactly. And he is not withholding it.
He is saying, “I taught you the foundation.” The foundation is Wing Chun. The foundation is structure, sensitivity, economy. The house you’re building on top of that foundation, the thing you’re calling Jeet Kundu is yours. I don’t need to see it. I don’t need to approve of it. I don’t need to judge it.
But I am telling you, manto man, teacher to student, one time only. Do not let the foundation crack. Whatever you build, build it on what I gave you. If you build it on something else and the foundation cracks, everything falls. And then at the end, come see me or don’t. Both are acceptable. That last line is the one that stays with me. Both are acceptable.
It is one of the most generous and one of the most devastating things a teacher can say to a student because what it means underneath is I have released you. You do not owe me a visit. You do not owe me an explanation. I am not going to be the person who holds you to an obligation. Go build your house. I’ll be here.
Bruce received this letter in Oakland in the autumn of 1965. He was living with Linda. She was pregnant with their first child. Brandon would be born in February. Bruce read the letter. We know he read it because Linda mentioned it in one of her own later writings, though she did not reproduce the text and he put it in a drawer. He did not write back.
He did not go see Yipman on his next trip to Hong Kong. He did not go see Yipman on the trip after that. He did not go see Yipman in 1970 when he moved back to Hong Kong partially for filming or in 71 when he moved back full-time or in the first 10 months of 72. For 12 years from 60 to 72, minus the two brief polite public meetings, Bruce and Yipman did not speak.
And then one evening in November of 1972, Yipman picked up the phone. I have to mark the fence line again before I tell you this chapter. What I told you in chapters 2, three, and four is historically supported. You can find most of it in published sources. The letter is real. The meetings are documented. Wong Shan Leong<unk>s articles exist.
Yip Chuns interview exists. Some details of what people said, I can’t verify word for word, but the events are on the record. What I’m about to tell you now is not on the record. What I’m about to tell you was told to my father in Seattle in 1989 by a man named Leon Cowing. Leon Cowing was 61 years old in 1989.
He was a Hong Kong immigrate like Kai from the last video, but a different story. He had left Hong Kong in 1976 and settled in the Chinatown International District in Seattle. My father met him through Teimora. Leang Kawing had studied Wing Chan under Yip Man from 1968 to 1972. He was one of the last wave of direct students.
He was 34 years old when he started training, which is late to start Wing Chun. And he was not a talented student. He said this himself repeatedly. He said, “I was the kind of student the teacher keeps because the student pays and is respectful, not because the student will be good.” He trained for four years and reached the intermediate level and then his teacher died and he stopped.
Leon Cowing was in the apartment on Nathan Road on the evening the phone call happened. He was there because by 1972, Yipman was too frail to teach most evenings, and senior students took turns spending the evenings with him, sitting in the front room, making tea, helping him to the bathroom, being present in case he fell.
Leon Cowing was not senior, but he was loyal, and he had volunteered for evening shifts that the senior students did not want. The evening of the call, Leon Cowing could not give my father a date more precise than the third week of November 1972. Leon Coing was in the front room making tea when the phone in the back room rang. Yip man answered it himself.
He would not let anyone else answer the phone in the back room. Because the back room was his private space, he closed the door. The door was thin. Leon Coing could hear one side of the call. This is the part my father heard from Leong Cowing in 1989. This is what I’m going to tell you. The phone rang. Yep. Man answered it.
Yip Man did not speak for the first 15 or 20 seconds of the call. He listened. Then he said in Cantonese, loud enough for Leang to hear through the door, “Junfan.” That was the first word. Junfan, Bruce’s given name. Leon Cawing said that when he heard that name, he stopped what he was doing. He was standing by the small electric kettle in the front room with a tin of tea leaves in his hand.
He put the tin down on the counter and he stood very still because he understood immediately what was happening. Every senior student knew the name. Every senior student knew that this name had not been spoken by Yip Man to any student in that apartment in more than 10 years. The senior students when they spoke of Bruce among themselves called him the American or the actor.
Yipman did not speak of him at all. And now Yipman had said into the telephone, “Junfan.” Leang Coing did not move from where he was standing for the next 22 minutes. He said when he told my father this that the call lasted 22 minutes because he was looking at the clock on the wall of the front room when it started and he was looking at the clock when it ended.
The clock was a plain electric wall clock with a second hand. Leong Cowing watched the second hand for 22 minutes. I want to tell you what he heard through the door in the order he heard it. He did not hear everything. The door was thin, but Yipman was speaking quietly, and some of what was said Leon could not make out.
What follows is only what Leon Cawing remembered distinctly enough to repeat to my father 17 years later. The first thing Yipman said after the name was, “You do not have to explain.” Long pause. Bruce was speaking on the other end. Leong could hear the faint crackle of the other voice, but not the words. Then Yipman said, “I am not angry.
I was never angry.” Long pause. Then Yip Man said, “No, I read about it in the newspaper. I was glad this Leon Cawing told my father must have been in reference to one of Bruce’s film successes. The Big Boss had come out in October of 71. Fist of Fury had come out in March of 72. Way of the Dragon had come out in Hong Kong just weeks before this call.
Yip Man would have read about all three. Long pause. Then Yip Man said, “Your structure is still good. I can see it in the films. Your elbow is a little high sometimes, but the structure is there. Long pause. Leon Cawing told my father that he laughed out loud when he heard this. Standing in the front room, he laughed silently with his hand over his mouth because it was the most Yip Man sentence he had ever heard.
Yip Man was 79. He was dying. He had not spoken to his most famous student in 12 years. His student was on the phone. His student was at that moment the most famous martial artist in the world. And the first technical note Yipman gave him was, “Your elbow is a little high.” Long pause. Then Yip Man said something that Leon Cawing could not hear clearly.
He thought it was a question. He thought Yipman asked, “Are you well?” Long pause. A longer one this time. Leang Kawwing said this pause was maybe 2 minutes. He watched the second hand. Then Yipman said, “I am not well. The doctors have told me. I have months, maybe less. Long pause.” Then Yipman said, “No, do not come.
I do not want you to see me now. Remember me from the school.” Long pause. Then Yip Man said, “Junfan, listen. I want to tell you something.” And here, Leon Cawing said he pressed his ear to the door. He knew it was disrespectful. He knew he should have walked away. He did not walk away. He pressed his ear to the door.
What he heard Yipman say next was this. I’m going to give it to you exactly as Leon Cawwing gave it to my father and exactly as my father wrote it down in the notebook. the same notebook as Bangkok, different page, dated January 4th, 1989. My father wrote it in Leang Cawing<unk>s Cantonese and then underneath in English. I’m giving you the English.
Yep. Man said, “What you built is good. I have watched the films. I have listened to people talk. What you built is good. I am telling you this because you will not hear it from me again.” The foundation held. I was worried that it would not hold. It held. Build higher. Long pause. Then Yip Man said, “Goodbye, Junfan.” And then he hung up.
Leong Cowing stepped back from the door. He went back to the counter. He picked up the tin of tea leaves. He finished making the tea. He poured two cups. He carried one cup into the back room. Yip man was sitting on the edge of the bed. The phone was back on its cradle. He was not crying.
Leon Cowing was specific about this. He told my father that Yip Man was not crying because Leon Kawing knew my father would ask, but he was sitting very still with his hands flat on his knees looking at the wall. The cigarette he had been smoking before the call had burned down to the filter in the ashtray without being touched.
Leong Cowing put the teacup on the desk. Yip Man did not look up. Leong Cowing bowed slightly and left. About 10 days later, Leang Coing was not certain of the exact day Yip Man died. It was December 1st, 1972. He was 79 years old. Throat cancer, as the doctors had said. He died at home in the apartment on Nathan Road in the same back room where the phone call had happened. He was cremated.
His ashes were returned eventually to Foschan. Bruce Lee died 7 months later on July 20th, 1973 in the apartment of the actress Betty Tingpe on Beacon Hill in Hong Kong. Cerebral edema. He was 32 years old. Between the phone call and the two deaths, as far as anyone has been able to document, Bruce and Yipman did not speak again.
That was the last phone call. I drove up to my father’s house last Saturday. It was the first week of October. The weather had turned. It was 54° and raining. This Pacific Pacific Northwest rain that is not heavy but does not stop. The rain that soaks you without you noticing. My father was in the garage when I got there.
He had the door halfway up and the lamp on. He was working on the brake line of an old Toyota pickup that belongs to his neighbor. The neighbor is 81 and can’t get under a truck anymore. My father is 79 and still can. I stood in the doorway of the garage for a minute before he saw me.
He was on his back on the creeper under the truck with his legs sticking out. I could see the bottoms of his boots and a small pool of brake fluid on the concrete next to him. He was humming. I couldn’t tell what the song was. He saw my boots. He rolled out from under the truck. He sat up. He had grease on his forehead. He said, “You’re early.” I said, “I know.
I wanted to talk to you.” He stood up slowly. He has a bad knee now on the left side. And standing from the creeper is the hardest thing he does in a day. He went to the workbench. He picked up a rag. He wiped his hands. He did not look at me. I said, “I want to ask you about Tiki.” He didn’t answer. He kept wiping his hands.
He wiped them for longer than he needed to. Tikki Kimora is 89 years old. He lives in Seattle in the same house he has lived in since 1973. He was Bruce’s senior student. He was the best man at Bruce’s wedding in ‘ 64. He carried Bruce’s casket in 73. He taught Bruce’s system, the Seattle lineage of it, for 51 years.
He retired from teaching in 2021. He does not do interviews anymore. He lives quietly. His number is in a small leather address book on my father’s kitchen counter. The address book has been on the counter in the same spot for probably 15 years. Tiki’s number is on page K. The page is slightly dogeared.
My father has not called that number in three years. I said, “Dad, when’s the last time you called Tiki?” He kept wiping his hands. He said, “I don’t know.” I said, “3 years.” I checked the phone records. “You haven’t called him in 3 years.” He put the rag down. He went to the small refrigerator he keeps in the garage. He opened it.
He took out a can of something. It wasn’t beer. He doesn’t drink anymore. It was some kind of ginger soda. He opened it. He drank from it. He sat down on the wooden stool next to the workbench. He said, “I know.” I said, “Why?” He did not answer for a long time, maybe a full minute. He looked at the floor of the garage. There was a small puddle of rain water near the door where the weather stripping had failed. He looked at the puddle.
He said, “I don’t have a good reason.” I said, “Is he okay? Is he sick?” He said, “I don’t know.” I assume he is. Someone would have called, but I don’t know. I said, “Then call him.” He looked up at me. He looked at me the way he has looked at me maybe three times in my life. The way he looked at me the afternoon he told me about Bangkok.
The way he looked at me the afternoon he first opened the drawer. A look that’s not quite at me. A look that slightly threw me at something behind me that I can’t see. He said, “A man who teaches you when you’re 13, you don’t get to leave him. Even if you stop calling, he’s still there. The teaching is still there. The line is still open.
I know that. Take knows that. That’s why neither of us has to pick up the phone. I said, “But Yipman picked up the phone.” He said, “Yip man was dying.” I said, “Take 89.” He didn’t answer. He drank from the ginger soda. He looked at the puddle by the door. I stayed for another 2 hours. We didn’t talk about Tiki again.
We talked about the break line of the neighbor’s truck. We talked about whether I was eating enough. We talked about a book he was reading, a biography of someone I’d never heard of. The normal things. Around 4:30, the rain got heavier and I said I should head back before the past got bad. He nodded. He walked me out to the car. at the car.
He put his hand on my shoulder briefly the way he does, the way I have described before and he said, “Drive safe.” I got in the car. I started it. I rolled down the window. He was standing in the doorway of the garage with the lamp behind him and his face was in shadow. I said, “Dad, are you going to call him?” He said, “I don’t know.
” Then he said, “Probably not.” I drove home. I have been thinking about that drive home all week. I have been thinking about it because I don’t know what my father meant. I don’t know if he was telling me something true about teachers and students that the relationship is so deep it does not need phone calls or if he was telling me something that sounded wise to cover something sadder which is that he has been meaning to call Tiki for 3 years and he can’t make himself pick up the phone and he doesn’t know why. And by the time he figures out why
it might be too late. I don’t know which one it is. I might never know. My father is not going to tell me. My father is 79. He answers what he answers. The rest he keeps. But I have been thinking about Yipman. Yip Man did pick up the phone. Yip Man at 79 dying with throat cancer with a voice he could barely use with 12 years of silence behind him picked up the phone and called a student who had left him and built something else and become famous in a country Yipman had never been to.
And Yipman said, “The foundation held build higher.” Bruce died seven months later. If Yipman had not made that call, Bruce would have died without hearing his teacher’s voice one last time. Bruce would have died believing probably that Yipman disapproved or that Yip Man had forgotten him or that Yip Man was too proud to reach across the silence.
He would have been wrong about all of it and he would have died wrong. Yep man knew that. Yipman at 79 knew that if he did not make the call, Bruce would carry the wrong thing for the rest of his life. And so Yipman who was the senior who was the teacher who had every right to wait for the student to come to him, Yipman picked up the phone anyway.
That is what a teacher does. I think that is what my father knows. I think that is why when I said take is 89, he did not answer because he knows. He knows that a teacher who is 89 does not have time for a student’s three-year hesitation. He knows that the phone is 10 ft from where he was sitting.
He knows that the address book is on the kitchen counter. He knows that Tiki’s number is on page K. He knows all of it. And still when I asked he said probably not. I don’t understand that. I want to understand it. I am 39 years old and my father is 79 and I am trying to understand the men in my family before they are gone.
And I do not understand this one. I do not understand why a man who loves his teacher does not call his teacher. I do not understand why the silence is easier than the phone. I do not understand why yipman could do it and my father can’t. Maybe there is no understanding it. Maybe the only thing to understand is that it is hard.
Maybe Yipman waited 12 years, too. Maybe Yip Man, in the 10 years between 62 and 72, stood at the phone a 100 times and did not pick it up. Maybe he only picked it up the last time because he knew it was the last time. Maybe that’s what it takes. Maybe my father is waiting for that moment. Maybe he will know when it comes. Maybe he won’t. I don’t know.
underscore unerscore unerscore unerscore unerscore unerscore unerscore unerscore unerscore unerscore unerscore unerscore unerscore unerscore unerscore unerscore unerscore unerscore unerscore unerscore unerscore unerscore unerscore unerscore unerscore unerscore unerscore unerscore unerscore I want to end this video the way yipman ended the call he said, “Goodbye, Junfan.” And he hung up.
That is not a long goodbye. That is not a dramatic goodbye. That is not a goodbye with instructions or with blessings or with a speech. That is a man who knew he was dying, speaking to a student he loved, and saying one word in Cantonese, Joy Jin, which is the ordinary Cantonese word for goodbye, the word you say to a friend you will see next week, and putting the phone down.
Joy Jin literally means see again. It does not mean farewell. It means see again. Yip man who knew he had months, who knew he would not see Bruce again in this life, used the word that means see again. He did not say farewell. He did not say goodbye forever. He said see again and he put the phone down and he sat on the edge of the bed and he looked at the wall and he did not cry.
That is the whole story. The letter is in a museum in Fosan. The photocopy is in a drawer in my father’s kitchen. The phone is gone. The apartment is gone. The building may be gone. Yep. Man has been gone for 52 years. Bruce has been gone for 51. Leon Kawing, who stood at the door and listened, died in Seattle in 2014.
My father went to the funeral and he did not tell me he was going. I found out afterwards. Tiki Kimore is 89 and his number is on page K of the address book on my father’s kitchen counter. My father is 79 and he is under a truck in a garage in the rain and he is not going to call. I don’t know what to do with any of it.
I told you at the beginning that I would tell you the story and that most of it I believe to be true. The letter is true. The silence is true. The phone call I believe it. I believe Liam Cawing. My father believed him. Wong Shanlan<unk>s writings support the shape of it. Yep. Chun<unk>s interview supports the shape of it.
The timing fits. The words sound like Yip Man, but I was not in that room. You were not in that room. Leong Cowing is dead. My father wrote the words down in a notebook in 1989. And the notebook is in the drawer and that is the only record. Take it as a story. The next video I want to make is about a man who sat in Bruce’s school in Seattle three times a week for four years and never once got on the mat. He paid his dues.
He watched. He left. He came back the next week and watched again. His name is Inis Records. My father met him twice. He was not a student and he was not a stranger. I don’t know what he was. I want to find out. That is the next one. Until then, thank you for watching. Thank you for sitting with me for an hour.
If you have a teacher and you have not called your teacher, consider calling your teacher. Consider it as a favor to me. Consider it as a favor to the version of you that will be 79 one day, standing in a garage in the rain, looking at a puddle by the door, trying to answer a question from a son who drove up to ask, “Joy Jyn, see again.
