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Tribune News Service

The first step was easy.
A book editor, impressed by Jeff Chang’s acclaimed 2005 cultural history of hip-hop, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, asked if he would consider writing a book on Bruce Lee, the martial arts icon and movie star.
The next 99 steps? Well, that was something altogether different.
The editor who had pitched the biography left the publishing industry. Chang had two books already under contract to finish. More editors came and went. Another book cut to the front of the line. A fourth editor dropped the book.

In 2021, nearly 15 years after Chang originally agreed to do the Lee project, the book went out to bid again – and quickly sold again – but Chang no longer knew what he wanted to do with it.
“You know, when you do a celebrity bio, there’s a certain kind of format,” he says in a downtown Los Angeles bookstore. “The mission is to dig up all the dirt you can. The essential narrative is, ‘This person wasn’t an angel.’
“That wasn’t what I was interested in.”
By then, it was the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and Chang, who lives in Oakland in the US state of California, was working long days at a racial justice institute as violence targeting Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders skyrocketed in the San Francisco Bay Area and around the world.
“At the same time, the image of Bruce started appearing on the walls in Oakland Chinatown, San Francisco Chinatown, here in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York City,” says Chang, whose heritage is Chinese and native Hawaiian.
“I already had been pondering the question of why it is that Bruce Lee is a hero to people all around the world who feel like they’ve been stepped on,” he says. “So when he starts appearing on walls, I was like, ‘Oh, there’s a bigger story here, and he’s representing something new now to a new generation of Asian-Americans.’”
Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America has just arrived in bookstores, and while it contains the story of Lee’s life from his birth in San Francisco in 1940 to his death at 32 in 1973, it is a biography wrapped inside a cultural history, the story of both Lee and the multitudes who in him saw pieces of their own stories.

Lee remains the epitome of cool, and Chang says the martial arts star’s door-opening cachet made it easier for young Asian-Americans to enter the world of hip-hop. “The image we made of Bruce was Bruce with dark glasses getting ready to rock two turntables,” he says.
“For this generation, it was Bruce as an image of strength, of pride or unity,” Chang continues. “And also this desire for solidarity. Like, we need to stick together, but also we need folks to be able to see us.”
Bruce Lee was not just a two-dimensional mural on a brick wall or a poster in a bedroom, Chang realised. In many ways, he lived on.
“The rise of Bruce and the rise of Asian America, they almost mirror each other,” he says. “While Bruce is not an activist, he reflects a lot of the ambitions and desires of that particular generation that names themselves ‘Asian-Americans’ for the first time.
“I thought, ‘Ah, that’s the story.’ The whole book changed to that particular point.”
Research for Water Mirror Echo began even before Chang had mapped out the book’s narrative.
From Lee’s return to the United States in 1959 until he died in Hong Kong in 1973, his life and career were well documented in journals and letters: from him developing his own fighting style, jeet kune do, to starring in some of the biggest martial arts movies in cinema history.
Interviews with old friends and family members, including Lee’s widow Linda Lee Cadwell and daughter Shannon Lee, also revealed lesser-known truths about the man behind the image.
“You come in from the outside and you’re like, ‘Bruce is invulnerable, like, he must have always had this thing in him,’” Chang says. “But it was, for me, really moving, poignant and something I wanted to lean into to find out about all his foibles and vulnerabilities.
“To talk to people who knew him, say in Seattle, and ask them what he was like when he got excited. They’d be like, ‘Sometimes, he had so much he wanted to say and he couldn’t express it, so he would just shake.’”
A key early interview arrived with Amy Sanbo, a fellow student at the University of Washington, and Lee’s first big love in the United States.
“Bruce is just completely head over heels for her, but she didn’t really think that he was all that,” Chang says of Sanbo’s first impression. “She thought he was kind of immature.
“Bruce is a kid, not six months off the boat,” he says. “To talk to his University of Washington fellow students, who are like, ‘This guy was annoying.’ He came on the one hand with all this confidence, and on the other hand with all this awkwardness.
“To hear people say, ‘You’re strange’, it’s pretty funny, and it’s also not a picture of Bruce that I had read in other biographies.”

Fifty years after the death of the first Asian superstar, how have things changed for Asian-American figures in pop culture? Chang, who concludes the book with a chapter on just this, has thought about it a lot.
Lee fought, and won, the right to make Enter the Dragon his way, Chang says, but he died before that film was released.
“Then it takes another generation to get to Dragon [a Bruce Lee biopic], to get to Brandon Lee, to get to All-American Girl [Margaret Cho’s sitcom], to get to The Joy Luck Club,” Chang says. “It takes another generation almost for us to get to Crazy Rich Asians, Fresh Off the Boat.
“The crowning thing of this is Everything Everywhere All at Once,” Chang says of the 2022 film, which won seven Academy Awards, including best picture, best actress and best supporting actor and actress.
“It’s natural to say that you have this multiracial [entertainment] like we see all day, every day right now,” Chang says. “It’s a big deal to see that on the screen.
“What history tells us is that we have to go back into hibernation and wait another generation for something to happen before we can do that,” he says. “I hope not, but that’s sort of the long shadow of Bruce.
“There’s a lot of movement forward in the last five years, and then the tide may be going out now,” Chang says. “I don’t want to think that. We’re all still here, and we’re all making work.
“But who knows? It’s part of a larger story of America right now that’s still being written.”


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Books and literature

How Bruce Lee went from a martial arts star to an enduring Asian-American icon

A woman looks at a Bruce Lee poster in Hong Kong in 2024. Half a century after his death, Lee is still an icon from Asia to the United States. Jeff Chang considers why in his biography of the kung fu movie star. Photo: Zuma Press/TNS

Jeff Chang, author of Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America (2025). Photo: Instagram/zentronix

The cover of Chang’s book. Photo: Mariner Books/TNS

Chang says Bruce Lee has served as “an image of strength, of pride or unity” for Asian Americans. Photo: Instagram/zentronix

The chaotic life of Anthony Wong, the 3-time Hong Kong best actor ‘shut out’ by China

Actor Anthony Wong stays active in local theatre and collaborates with filmmakers. Photo: Felix Wong

Hong Kong actor Anthony Wong at an interview with the Post in 2019. Photo: Jonathan Wong

Anthony Wong at an interview with the Post in 2001. Photo: Martin Chan

Anthony Wong, pictured alongside Anita Yuen Wing-yee, won his first best actor prize at the Hong Kong Film Awards in 1994. Photo: Martin Chan

Anthony Wong in a still from The Untold Story (1993).

Anthony Wong performs to cheer up hundreds of youths taking part in a 30-hour fast at the Hong Kong Stadium in 1996. Photo: SCMP

(From left) Sam Lee, Anthony Wong and Michael Wong in a still from Beast Cops (1998). 

Anthony Wong (left) in a still from Infernal Affairs (2002). Photo: Media Asia

Anthony Wong in a still from Still Human (2018). Photo: Golden Scene

Anthony Wong at an interview with the Post in October 2025. Photo: Edmond So

For Black Eyed Peas’ Apl.de.ap, helping farmers in the Philippines returns him to his roots

Black Eyed Peas member Apl.de.ap at his family farm in the Philippines’ Pampanga province. The Grammy-winning musician shows us some of the work he’s doing to support coconut farmers in his homeland, and shares his story. Photo: Kylie Knott 

Apl with his mother, Cristina Pineda, on their family farm in the Philippines. Photo: Kylie Knott 

Apl recently teamed up with the Philippine Coconut Authority and climate venture studio Omtse Ventures for an initiative that aims to support Filipino farmers. Photo: Instagram/apledeap

Apl at Esmeris Farm. Photo: Kylie Knott

Esmeris Farm owner Victor Esmeris (right) with Uynghiem Ngo, creator of Earth Sama, Earth Sama, the technology that the food forest project uses to count and track the trees. Photo: Kylie Knott

Timothee Chalamet lookalike contest births stars in the making and a community of brothers

Timothee Chalamet lookalike contest winner Miles Mitchell at the 82nd Golden Globes in Los Angeles in January 2025. The competition, held in New York in 2024, has led to “crazy” opportunities for some of its high-placing participants. Photo: Invision/AP

Timothee Chalamet lookalike contest winner Miles Mitchell (left), runner-up Zander Dueve (centre) and organiser Anthony Po (right) in Washington Square Park, New York, in October 2024. Photo: AP

Since winning the lookalike contest, Mitchell has appeared in advertisements for Impossible Foods and more. Photo: AP

Mitchell wants to leverage his new-found fame to become a successful actor. Photo: AP

Cecilia Cheung: Hong Kong actress, sex scandal victim and Chinese social media star

Cecilia Cheung at the 23rd Hong Kong Film Awards in 2004. The actress’ personal life garnered a lot of attention in the 2000s, with tabloids covering scandals and her high-profile romantic life. Photo: SCMP

Cheung in 1999. Photo: Oliver Tsang

Cheung speaks after receiving the award for best new performer, as veteran actors Liza Wang and Danny Lee look on, at the 19th Hong Kong Film Awards in 2000. Photo: Martin Chan

Cheung and Nicholas Tse in 2001. Photo: Reuters

Cheung in a still from Lost in Time (2003), for which she won best actress at the 23rd Hong Kong Film Awards. Photo: China Star Entertainment Group

Cheung and Tse at the 30th Hong Kong Film Awards in 2011, the year they filed for divorce. Photo: K. Y. Cheng

Cheung and Stephen Chow in a still from King of Comedy (1999). Her feature-film debut remains one of her most memorable roles. Photo: The Star Overseas

Cheung and her three sons. Photo: Weibo

Cheung in a photo she posted on her Weibo account in 2023. Photo: Weibo

Lifestyle

Entertainment

Culture

Books

Jeff Chang explores why, 50 years after his death, Bruce Lee remains ‘a hero to people all around the world’ in Water Mirror Echo


Jeff Chang explores why, 50 years after his death, Bruce Lee remains ‘a hero to people all around the world’ in Water Mirror Echo.


Bruce Lee

Hong Kong cinema

Asian diaspora

How Bruce Lee went from a martial arts star to an enduring Asian-American icon

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Jeff Chang explores why, 50 years after his death, Bruce Lee remains ‘a hero to people all around the world’ in Water Mirror Echo

Jeff Chang explores why, 50 years after his death, Bruce Lee remains ‘a hero to people all around the world’ in Water Mirror Echo