Fifty years ago, legendary martial artist and actor Bruce Lee passed away unexpectedly. To commemorate the anniversary of his death, Cold Tea Collective’s Natasha Jung sat down with Shannon Lee, his daughter, to talk about the legacy that the Asian American icon left behind.
Her reflections on her father’s work and how his image continues to inspire touches upon themes of what it means to be a steward to someone else’s legacy while also trying to create your own impact. Lee embodies what it means to be a graceful steward, on one’s own terms.
Watch the full interview above.
Enter the Shannon: A Legacy of Her Own
From a very early age, Shannon Lee understood that she could not fight the public image of Bruce Lee. She saw it to be nearly impossible to undo the impact and impression that he’s made.
Instead, she used her own image of him to define the work that she did around his legacy.
“Excitement and enthusiasm is probably the best word for what you could just feel from him,” Lee recalls. “He loved what he was doing, and he was joyful in what he was doing. And that is the memory that I have of him and hold on to.”
Her memory of her father’s joyfulness helps her find pride and satisfaction in the impact she creates for herself, not just as Bruce Lee’s daughter. Stepping out of her father’s shadow, Lee has gone on to write her own book and create a non-profit foundation.
In fact, Lee was recognized as one of the first-ever recipients of the Global Connector Award by the inaugural EXNW Summit, promoting storytelling by creators of racial minority backgrounds. Her acceptance speech began with recounting that over the years she received many honors on her father’s behalf, but the Global Connector Award represents the first recognition for her own work in the nonprofit, television, and community-services space.
Lee notes that her work feeds her soul in a personal way, even though it is surrounded by her father’s legacy.
She says, “I am my father’s legacy, and it is part of who I am.”
The Future of the Bruce Lee Foundation
Lee co-founded the Bruce Lee Foundation in 2002 to promote her father’s art and philosophy in the present day. Bruce Lee’s larger-than-life legacy informs the direction of the Foundation.
Lee notes her pride in Foundation initiatives like Camp Bruce Lee, which seeks to promote early self-confidence in children, along with various exhibitions at museums such as the Hong Kong Heritage Museum and the Academy Museum. The Foundation has a historical focus on empowering young people with its college scholarships or the Little Dragons Program, a martial arts training regimen for underprivileged groups.
“Now, we’re working on workshop initiatives for older kids,” Lee tells Cold Tea Collective. “All of this is about putting tools in people’s hands to navigate challenges, and my father had such amazing teachings and practices around helping people to use their mind rather than get used by their mind.”
In the Foundation’s next chapter, Lee will spearhead their focus on mental health and mentorship.
“The Foundation is focused on youth mental health, in particular for communities of color, where there’s a lot of stigma, a lot of silence, and not a lot of access for mental wellness,” she says.
Her goal is to create “Bruce Lee-sized impact” in the arena by bringing together regional organizations with mental health directives while supporting them with the resources of the Foundation. Lee acknowledges that Bruce Lee and mental health may seem an odd pairing at first glance.
“The impact he was able to create is all because he had such a diligent practice of mind, body, spirit, wellness, and that he trained his mind just as diligently as he trained his body,” she explains. “Because he’s Bruce Lee—he’s awesome, cool, and kick ass—he can help destigmatize this.”
Warrior to Writer
Warrior, the crime drama based on Bruce Lee’s writings, now is on its third season. The show centers on the gang wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown during the late 1800s and an immigrant prodigy who upends them.
The show has expanded Bruce Lee’s multi hyphenate status to include writer and helped cement him as a top Asian American creative. Lee herself was instrumental in pushing the show’s success.
“We got to make this show in a way he probably could have never imagined it would be made,” Lee says. “If [Warrior] had been made in the sixties or the early seventies, he would have been the main star, but there would only be a lot of ancillary extra Asian roles.”
The show stars a range of Asian characters with far more depth than what could’ve been depicted had the show been produced even just a decade earlier.
Read more: Olivia Cheng talks breaking new ground in Warrior and real life
With the strides that Asian Americans have made in Hollywood in the fifty years since Bruce Lee’s passing, casting an all Asian ensemble cast for Warrior seems a no-brainer. But Bruce Lee’s contemporaries would have been unlikely to green-light such casting decisions.
In a way, Warrior is only a show that could be executed properly today. Shannon believes though that her father’s philosophies are inherent in the production.
“It goes to the heart of what my father used to talk about in authentic self-expression,” she says. “My father had a real knack for finding stories that talked about, in his case, the Chinese American experience.”
See also: Bringing the immigrant experience to screen with Warrior’s Chen Tang
What’s Next
Bruce Lee fans can look forward to the upcoming House of Lee animated series set for release in 2024. The show follows Bruce Lee’s quest to assemble the “Dragon Warriors” to fight off a menacing dark force. Shannon Lee, a principal creator of the story, drew inspiration from her own experiences along with the Bruce Lee canon.
For Lee herself, she hopes to work on more projects for herself in addition to her work with her father’s legacy, including the launch of the DRGN streetwear line and the Foundation’s new chapter in youth mental health.
The path she blazes for herself is distinctively hers—it’s not a balancing act between two separate parts of herself, but rather a natural progression of one into the other.
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