Our latest WCS podcast guest explained to me and my cohost Lev Anderson that Bruce Lee’s most famous line in this precise moment of human history is, “Be water.”
“It's driven lots of athletes, a lot of corporate leaders. It’s driven social movements,” said Jeff Chang, author of the brand new Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America. “It was part of a passage that Bruce had read from a Daoist tract. And the full thing is moving: “Be like water, still be like a mirror, respond like an echo.” And the first time that I read that in The Tao of Jeet Kune Do, I kind of fell out of my chair and I had to take a long walk because I was like, Wow, there's so much more going on here. What does it even really mean?”
The entirety of the martial artist and actor’s extraordinary life has a koan-esque quality to it. As revealed in Chang’s deeply-researched 560-page book, Bruce Lee is an enigmatic ocean of power, contradiction, and beauty. The San Francisco anchor baby makes major moves in Hong Kong and culminates in 1973 as a spiritual giant—a ground-breaking artist who single-fistedly alters the perception of his people.
Immortal.
“Bruce has this kind of aura of him. He's sort of this scrim that we project all kinds of things onto. And it has to do in part because the actual picture of Asians in America is so underdeveloped.”—Jeff Chang
Water Mirror Echo’s most exceptional quality is its way of weaving Bruce’s fascinating narrative in with the relentlessly melancholy of Asian America’s experience before Hollywood cameras. Drawing from the heinous Asian Exclusion Act in the run up to Pearl Harbor, American cinema hit mid-20th-century audiences up with the kind of fear-based screen representation that was invented in our White supremacist society.
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The kind of fear-based screen representation that’s abetted in taking the American journey to a breathtakingly terrible place.
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Chang never leaves an opportunity for contextual elaboration get past him. My favorite Water Mirror Echo tributaries concern the dashed Hollywood dreams of figures like Anna Mae Wong, a riveting actress. Her tale and dozens of others augment the meaning of Chang’s Lee. This California storyteller’s broader cultural placement is always so apt.
In listening to the podcast, note how Chang situates his subject in company of writer and philosopher Alan Watts.
For our 2025, “Be like water, still be like a mirror, respond like an echo” might mean that we fight back with a power that can make guns weak. It may mean that we’ll fight with style, strength, and imagination and they’ll hate us for it, when we win. The meaning is not fixed.
