Oakland | August 1964
Barney Scollan couldn’t sign up fast enough for Bruce Lee’s school in Oakland. Not long after witnessing Bruce’s demonstrations at Long Beach, Scollan relocated from Sacramento to Berkeley, where he began his freshman year at the University of California in the fall of 1964. He was thrilled to learn that Bruce’s new school was practically down the block.
Through vivid retellings of what he had witnessed down in Long Beach, Scollan convinced two of his college roommates, Dick Miller and Bob Saunders, to attend the school with him, and together they made the short drive over to Broadway Avenue to enroll. The three young college students arrived at the Oakland branch of the Jun Fan Institute and waited patiently for Bruce to finish an earlier class before speaking with him.
“So, Bruce,” Saunders asked, after introductions, “why is your approach to martial arts so special?”
Bruce raised an eyebrow, and then in a flash Saunders’s eyeglasses were on the other side of the room. Without ever touching him, Bruce had kicked the glasses off of his face.
“That is why,” he replied, with a smirk.
Like Bruce’s peers up in Seattle, Scollan and his Berkeley roommates were part of a generation that existed in an ever-present American street-fighting culture. “I would get into fights all the time,” explains Scollan, “which was just really stupid, but that’s how it was. If you went out to a dance or a movie, the odds were pretty good that you might tangle with some other guys by the end of the night.”
In this sense the growing national interest in the Asian martial arts was likely due in some part to their appeal as a means for young men to better navigate street fights. Yet a large portion of that appeal appears to have been predicated on the romantic allure of the Eastern world and the notion that the skills were in fact esoteric fighting arts that contained exotic methods and secret techniques.
“There will always be the macho thing of needing a better way of beating up the guy down the street and proving yourself,” says historian Thomas A. Green, “but in this case you’re proving yourself with secrets. And it’s not doing push-ups or working the bag, it’s a secret technique that you have.”
By 1964 Bruce was attempting to tackle the mythology of the martial arts head on, much like the Chinese historian Tang Hao had done decades earlier, by “emphasizing practicality and renouncing embellishment.” Paradoxically, Bruce was pushing for realism even as he was also constantly stoking the imaginations of observers toward the unrealistic. In this sense—of kicking the eyeglasses cleanly off someone’s face—his feats of speed and agility were not only drawing students to his business but were also weaving their own mythology in the process. Bruce’s students would increasingly attest to how he had become virtually “untouchable” in sparring sessions. George Lee remembers how Bruce could snatch a quarter out of someone’s palm and leave a dime in exchange before the person could even close his hand. Bob Cook, a well-traveled martial artist like Fong and Inosanto, allowed Bruce to perform the one-inch punch on him and said it felt like “a hand-grenade” going off in his chest. Like his demonstrations in Long Beach, Bruce’s seemingly uncanny abilities would resonate heavily with young men compelled toward the martial arts, particularly when presented with Bruce’s emphasis on practicality. Even still, it made for a curious mismatch of perceptions.
More notably perhaps, was that Bruce tied his approach together by interweaving his own sense of philosophy, a blend of classic wisdom he had learned during his studies at the University of Washington and insights he gleaned from the wide range of books he was always consuming, including many self-help books of the era. Bruce thought that the martial arts, when combined with these influences, became a means of personal cultivation, a way for the individual to reach his or her best potential. It is a perspective that has long been debated in martial arts circles: are the fighting arts just that—specifically for fighting? Or are they a gateway to an individual’s improvement and evolution, or—as it is commonly termed in the debate—self-actualization. In this regard Bruce differed from Tang Hao in that he genuinely embraced the philosophical (and almost spiritual) side of the field. And it was with this very point of philosophical emphasis on the potential of the individual that Bruce would inspire many of those around him (and later, many others). Leo Fong, for instance, is just one of many students who attest to Bruce having a profound impact on his life.
By the summer of 1964, Fong’s Friday-night practice session had consistently turned into one of those long discussions of all things martial arts that had become so popular with the Oakland camp since Bruce’s arrival. What had once been quiet sessions between James and Fong now took on new dimensions as Bruce contributed his high energy 24/7 approach to those evenings.
Fong was still trying to figure out where to land with his martial arts focus. He had a remarkable background in boxing, but in the face of the elaborate stories he heard about various Eastern styles and methods, Fong was questioning the worth of his pugilism. During a Friday-night workout session, Fong related to Bruce his own experiences sparring with other kung fu practitioners, and how he figured his success resulted from them going easy on him.
Bruce laughed it off. “Leo, are you serious, man? They just don’t know how to handle your boxing skills.” Finally adding up Fong’s habits, Bruce asked, “Is that why you have been practicing so many different styles?”
“Yeah, Bruce, I’m looking for the ultimate,” Fong replied.
“No, Leo,” Bruce said, putting his hand on Fong’s chest over his heart, “the ultimate is in here. Stick with your boxing Leo, your boxing is real.”
A lot had happened in Bruce Lee’s life after the Long Beach Tournament.
Bruce had been apart from Linda Emery since he cut short his enrollment at the University of Washington at the conclusion of the spring semester. Anxious to make something of himself and expand his business into a new region, Bruce had moved south to Oakland to open his second school. By August he had returned to Seattle with a wedding ring lent to him by James Lee’s wife, Katherine.
Linda’s family caught wind that that she and Bruce were poised to elope and pulled them in for a tense family meeting to register their protests. Their mixed ethnicities were brought up as a major point of contention, in addition to the normal family concerns about a young couple set on marrying. Bruce’s family, with their long history of interracial marriage, seemed to mildly prefer that he marry a Chinese woman but otherwise expressed little opposition. On the seventeenth of August, the two married in Seattle and quickly relocated to live with James and his family at his Monticello Street home in Oakland, where they were soon expecting their first child. In the coming weeks James’s wife, Katherine, tragically passed from cancer. Now, living together and supporting each other through their personal battles, Bruce and James became closer than ever.
In the wake of his Long Beach performance, Bruce returned home in Oakland one day to find a message waiting for him. “This guy,” Linda said, “this producer from Hollywood, called you and wants to talk with you.” Bruce got on the phone and spoke with William Dozier, who explained to him that he was producing a new Charlie Chan show and that he wanted Bruce to audition for one of the key roles. (“We were both very excited,” Linda recalls.)
In the meantime, Bruce went back out on the road for a different bit of show business, hired to take the stage with the leading lady of Hong Kong, Diana Chang Chung-Wen, as she toured Chinese communities along the American West Coast. These engagements would bring them to the Sun Sing Theater in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the very same stage where Bruce’s father had performed two decades earlier.
Originally known as the Mandarin Theater (before being renamed in 1949), the Sun Sing had long been one of the premiere venues in Chinatown. Situated on one of the busiest stretches of Grant Street, the theater was a key location in Chinatown’s opera (and then cinema) culture for many decades throughout the twentieth century.
Built in 1924, the Mandarin quickly eclipsed the aging Liberty Theater on Broadway to become the epicenter of Chinatown’s well-established opera culture. Residents of Chinatown weren’t welcomed in venues anywhere else around town, and most couldn’t understand the language being used on stage anyhow. As a result business within Chinatown’s opera houses thrived. In the same period the newly constructed Great China Theater opened just one block east, down Jackson Street, to become the Mandarin’s prime competition for many years to come. The two venues were constantly trying to out-bill each other with top-notch opera talent imported from China. In 1931 the Mandarin even brought over Ma Sze-tsang—likely the most famous actress in southern China at the time—for an eighteen-month run.
It was within this context, that the Mandarin Theater booked Bruce’s father, Hoi Cheun, with other members of the Cantonese Opera in late 1939. The theater had deep enough pockets to post bonds with the Immigration Department for each individual it imported and paid the talent handsomely during their stay. However, by the time of Hoi Chuen’s arrival to San Francisco, opera’s heyday in Chinatown was on the descent. In the week before Bruce’s birth at the Chinese Hospital in November 1940, the Grandview Theater opened just a block down the hill on Jackson Street as a state-of-the-art modern movie theater. It also served as the American headquarters of the Grandview production company, which produced films (of respectable quality considering the low budgets) for export back to Hong Kong. It was under Grandview that Esther Heng made Golden Gate Girl and bestowed a young Bruce with his first role. In time the Mandarin Theater would shift its own format to host opera performances during the day and then screen films in the evening. Later Orson Welles shot scenes in and around the theater for the film The Lady from Shanghai—with his estranged wife at the time, Rita Hayworth—in 1946, shortly before it was rechristened as the Sun Sing.
Just as the theater had done three decades earlier in securing one of China’s premiere actresses with Ma Sze-tsang, it was now hosting the leading starlet of Hong Kong cinema—“The Most Beautiful Creature of Free China”—Diana Chang Chung-Wen. As Paul Fonoroff, longtime Hong Kong Cinema critic for the South China Morning Daily, explains it, “Diana Chang’s voluptuous figure and sexy demeanor helped make her a Mandarin Marilyn Monroe of the late 1950s and early 1960s.”
Born in Hebei Province in northern China, Diana eloped at the age of fifteen during the height of the war in 1941 and fled to Taiwan. Divorced two years later, she entered the film industry in her late teens under Taiwan’s fledgling Central Motion Picture Corporation (where she had another short-lived marriage, to a studio executive).
As Fonoroff describes it, her rise to cinematic fame was a colorful one:
Diana made her Hong Kong debut in Three Sisters (1957), notable for Chang’s rendition of “Chop Suey Roll,” sung to the tune of “Mambo Italiano” but with Chinese lyrics in which the amply endowed starlet invited listeners to partake of her cha shao bao (“roast pork buns”). Her passionate kiss in the Hong Kong–Thai co-production Flame in Ash (1958) caused a sensation, and she proved even more photogenic when filmed in Eastmancolor for Calendar Girl (1959).
Diana was one of the busiest actresses in Mandarin pictures in the late 1950s, her credits including such escapist fare as Wild Fantasies (1958), Loves of a Model (1959), and Fire-Breathing Lass (1959) (which was also one of her nicknames).
In the fall of 1964 Diana embarked on a tour of the U.S. West Coast to promote her new film, The Amorous Lotus Pan. She was scheduled to appear at Chinatown theaters from Seattle to Los Angeles. Through his father’s connections back home, Bruce was hired to accompany her along the tour, as well as dance the Hong Kong cha-cha on stage with her each night (and by some accounts, serve as a low-key bodyguard in the process).
During the final days of August, the tour was scheduled for a stop at the Sun Sing Theater, where Bruce and Diana were told to expect a packed house. As he had done to great effect for many years, Bruce was intent on seizing a down moment in the official program to take center stage for a martial arts performance. It would be, after all, a great opportunity to advertise his new Oakland school before all Chinatown. With Taky Kimura and James Lee unavailable, Bruce recruited his new friend Dan Inosanto to serve as a stage partner. The demonstration that ensued would become forever notorious among the Chinatown martial arts community.
Although Bruce carried a small degree of fame—derived from his Hong Kong films—his reputation within San Francisco’s Chinatown by August 1964 was highly mixed. While neighborhood students of his dance instruction were very fond of him, members of the local martial arts scene considered him a troublemaker with little respect for his elders. To them he truly was the negative stereotype of a belligerent and egotistical Hong Kong Wing Chun practitioner, and his 1959 run-in with Lau Bun had only reinforced this type of impudent persona. So while his cha-cha performance that day may have been welcomed by some segments of the audience, his martial arts demonstration certainly was not by others.
Furthermore, in a wider context there is evidence of lingering tensions between James Lee and T. Y. Wong after their split, which pointed to antagonistic camps developing between Chinatown and Oakland. In this sense Bruce was regarded not as a lone practitioner but as a representative of a rival faction. Indeed, it was T.Y. who had labeled Bruce “a dissident with bad manners.”
Not long after James left Kin Mon, T.Y. had published his own new book on his Sil Lum system of Kung Fu. Toward the end of the book he included a section titled “Soft Hand Stunts,” in which T.Y. dismisses James Lee’s type of Iron Hand techniques as mere gimmickry, concluding “Do not waste your time practicing this art.” To drive the point home, in a not-so-subtle insult, the final page ran with an image of T.Y.’s small eight-year-old son mimicking the exact manner in which James had been portrayed breaking bricks in the previous book, under the headline: “See, I Can Break ’Em Too!”
Soon afterward, while compiling Bruce’s book, James donned his old Kin Mon uniform for a section of photographs that was meant to illustrate “examples of a slower system against the more effective Gung Fu techniques.” In those pages James is dismantled by Bruce in a photo-by-photo dismissal of specific techniques featured in T.Y.’s previous book. Both titles were readily for sale in Chinatown, and the slights could hardly have gone unnoticed among local martial artists.
(In fact, years later, in the introduction of James Lee’s 1972 book Wing Chun Kung-Fu, his language became far more blunt: “Wing Chun has made a big difference in my life. Before taking it up, I studied the sil lum style, which featured such forms as ‘A Dragon and Tiger in Conference’ and ‘Nine Dragons at Sea.’ Not once during those years did I see students spar. We were told that this type of training would eventually lead to deadly ‘internal strength.’ I realized later that the whole repertoire was just a time-killing tactic to collect a monthly fee. In disgust, I quit practicing this particular sil lum style.”)
James and Al Novak had also developed poor reputations among certain quarters in Chinatown. They had made a habit of hitting all the neighborhood bars and nightclubs after class at Kin Mon, which likely did not sit well with T. Y. Wong’s “sturdy citizen” mentality. When one of these outings devolved into a vicious bar fight, James opened up a local resident’s jaw with a powerful left cross before coming back with a savage backhand that only further dismantled his opponent’s face (according to Al Tracy, this incident was so bad that the Hop Sing Tong demanded James pay for the victim’s facial surgery). In this context the recent collaborations and business ventures of James, Bruce, and Novak were seen by some as a collusion of troublemakers.
Yet however much these issues and incidents may have added to the tensions between the Chinatown and Oakland martial arts camps, none were as incendiary as Bruce’s contentious demonstrations throughout 1964, from Wally Jay’s luau to his more recent showing in Long Beach. Stories of what had been said began to trickle around the neighborhood: of Bruce dismissing other styles, criticizing what the masters were teaching as impractical, and asserting the superiority of his own system. Now, in late August 1964, the question was whether Bruce would have the nerve to say those same things from the stage of the Sun Sing Theater in the heart of Chinatown?
Mentioning that his new book would be for sale in the lobby afterward, he conveyed a coy observation. “Unlike the Chinese,” he said, “I’ve noticed that Westerners don’t appreciate what they read.” Referencing the vertical nature of Chinese text, versus the horizontal rendering of English sentences, he said, “When they read in the East, you can see that they like it,” he explained, moving his head up and down as if saying yes, “but when a Westerner reads, they go like this,” now turning his head side to side, as if disagreeing, “because they don’t really enjoy it.”
Getting a brief laugh from the crowd, Bruce motioned for Inosanto and prepared to begin. Diana Chang had sung a few of the better-known numbers from her films and then, as planned, danced the cha-cha with Bruce. Now, in between performances, Bruce announced that he wanted to demonstrate the type of kung fu that he would be teaching at his new school over in Oakland.
Bruce worked through some basic Wing Chun concepts with Inosanto as his target, emphasizing the practicality and efficiency of the system. He made a point of saying that it was free of so many of the unnecessary wasted motions found in the Chinese martial arts today. Whereas in Long Beach Bruce had spanned cultures and styles, here he was talking solely about kung fu, and if he had started nice with some humor, it wasn’t long before he was already using the term “classical mess” to disparage other styles. As he had done at the luau, he dipped into a bit of Northern Shaolin, before quickly dismissing the wide kicks as impractical. “Why would you kick high and leave yourself open,” he said, pausing to allow Inosanto to counter. “Instead you can kick low and punch high,” he explained while demonstrating each blow.
Letting forth a blast of chain punches, Bruce remarked how he had brought his skills from Hong Kong, and even there in China “80 percent of what they are teaching is nonsense. Here, in America, it is 90 percent.” This comment drew an uneasy murmur from sections of the crowd. And then Bruce really drove it home. “These old tigers,” he said, presumably referring to Chinatown’s old masters, “they have no teeth.”
A cigarette butt was tossed toward the stage in disgust. More followed. Savvy to the etiquette of stage culture, Bruce knew this to be no small insult.
“Bruce was saying these things that were offensive to the Chinese martial arts,” explains Inosanto, “and they didn’t like that sort of attitude coming from a young sifu.”
Toward the far back of theater, a male audience member, seemingly making his way to the exit, turned to shout, “That’s not kung fu!”
Bruce smiled, “Sir, would you care to come up on stage so I can demonstrate?”
The departing spectator shot back as he continued toward the exit. “You don’t know kung fu!”
Bruce tried now to salvage his demonstration, asking, “Would anyone else care to volunteer?”
In the lower-left seats facing the stage, a hand shot up. Bruce, anxious to gain control over the situation, quickly called the volunteer up.
Sixteen-year old Adeline Fong sat with some of her friends, close to the stage. Born and raised in Chinatown, Fong came from a family that was deeply involved in the neighborhood’s opera culture (in fact, her “great uncle” operated the Great China Theater on Jackson Street). At the age of eight, a good friend of her older sister—“Auntie” Gwynn—caught her jaywalking and pulled her into Chan Heung’s Hung Gar school on Ross Alley to keep her out of trouble. Gwynn was a very early and enthusiastic fixture of the neighborhood martial arts scene who in her efforts to keep Fong safe inadvertently started her kung fu training at a young age. Later Fong would enroll with Bing Chan and become one of the first females in Chinatown to perform with a Lion Dance team. When her stepfather heard how serious she was about her studies, he arranged for her to also train with Lau Bun, essentially exposing her to a uniquely wide cross section of what the neighborhood martial arts culture had to offer.
Fong attended the Sun Sing that night with a sizable group of students from Bing Chan’s school. When Bruce asked for a volunteer, her classmate Kenneth Wong didn’t hesitate to raise his hand, much to the mischievous delight of his peers.
“When Bruce called Kenneth up, we began cheering and hollering,” she explains, “egging him on.”
Like Bruce, Kenneth was known as a bit of a hotshot.
Kenneth Wong ignored the stairs and just leapt onto center stage. This elicited some howls from his friends in the nearby row, and laughter from other sections of audience.
Bruce thanked him for volunteering and explained the demonstration he wanted to conduct. Instead of the one-inch punch, Bruce set the stage for his typical routine of closing the gap and tagging his opponent on the forehead, emphasizing speed and streamlined footwork. It was the same bit that he had already performed numerous times, including at Wally Jay’s luau and the impromptu gathering the night before the Long Beach tournament. As always he explained that he would close from a wide distance of a few feet to deliver a light blow to the volunteer’s forehead. He asked Kenneth to attempt to block him.
The two practitioners were ready, even as the crowd remained noisy. Bruce moved in fast. Kenneth blocked the blow clean. The crowd now roared. Bruce stepped back and motioned to go again. The volume in the theater stayed high. Bruce bolted in and delivered his blow. Blocked. And again. Blocked.
And as the crowd was near frenzy now with cheers and heckles, Kenneth stepped back and shifted to an offensive pose: fists up and outward toward the opponent. And for a brief moment, an explosive tension held heavy over the theater, as if right there on stage Chinatown’s martial arts culture was finally going to square off against its detractor.
Realizing that the entire demonstration was completely off the rails and that the crowd was quickly going from surly to riotous, Bruce stepped back and smiled. He then offered an obligatory word, “Thank you for participating.” The crowd erupted, reveling in his loss. A fresh round of cigarettes rained forth.
And then, stepping to the edge of center stage, Bruce signed off with a comment that is still hotly debated to this day in Chinatown martial arts circles: “I would like to let everybody know that any time my Chinatown brothers want to try out my Wing Chun, they are welcomed to come find me at my school in Oakland.”
And with that Bruce left the stage, leaving many in the crowd to wonder—did he just put out an open challenge to all of Chinatown?
The neighborhood was abuzz.
“Bruce talked about how there were no good martial artists in America,” explained James Wing Woo, a longtime local kung fu practitioner, “and word of that went quickly around Chinatown.”
Descriptions of the errant demonstration were enthusiastically retold down in Hung Sing. At the Jackson Street Café, word reached Wong Jack Man that Bruce had performed and dismissed Northern Shaolin on stage. Word trickled into Kin Mon during the evening’s class. Bing Chan heard about the incident and scolded Kenneth Wong for not retaliating against Bruce. Down Old Chinatown Lane members of the Gee Yau Seah discussed what had occurred.
If Bruce’s final statement was being interpreted as a challenge, the question now was if anyone would step forward to meet it.
In the coming weeks a letter was drafted.
Wong Jack Man sat down at the Jackson Street Café after finishing his shift waiting tables, joining David Chin and Bing Chan. Chin was a regular at the Gee Yau Seah, a young practitioner in his midtwenties who studied Fut Gar under Mah Sek, the aging Qi Gong master who was widely known for his fantastical demonstrations.
They were also joined by Ronald “Ya Ya” Wu, a close friend of Chin. Wu had little connection to the Gee Yau Seah or martial arts in Chinatown. His nickname, Ya Ya, was a reference to his constantly yammering mouth. One longtime Chinatown resident remembers Wu as “the sort of guy that always had to insert himself into things.”
The group concerned itself with penning a formal note to Bruce Lee in response to his words at the Sun Sing. Although the contents of the actual letter have likely long been lost to a wastebasket, the general consensus is that it sought to take Bruce up on his offer to “try out” his Wing Chun. By the time the note was drafted and the small meeting at the Jackson Street Café concluded, it was Wong Jack Man who had signed his name to the letter.
Why Wong Jack Man, of all the people in the Chinatown martial arts community, had stepped forward remains a matter of much debate. Chin asserts that Wong had stated right there in the Jackson Café that he was set to open a Northern Shaolin kung fu school in Chinatown, and that beating Bruce Lee would give him immediate prestige. Others saw it as merely a macho gesture, spurred on by so much of the praise that Wong had received after recent demonstrations. Perhaps he was genuinely incensed by Bruce’s insulting dismissal of the Northern Shaolin arts and intended to set the record straight by way of his fists. Among the more prevalent perspectives is the idea that Wong had been manipulated into the entire affair, the new kid in town naively lured into a fight without realizing the stakes.
Whatever the case, Chin soon made the trip across the Bay to hand-deliver the letter in Oakland. “I brought the note to Bruce Lee,” Chin says, “and he looked at it and laughed, and said, ‘Okay, set the date.’”
This started a back-and-forth over San Francisco Bay that went on for weeks. Bruce seemed unwilling to back down from the fight, but neither did he pursue it. He refused to fight in Chinatown and maintained that they would have to come to him instead.
As word of an impending showdown spread, anticipation began to build. Leo Fong heard a story that Wong Jack Man possessed a technique called “the vibrating fist,” in which he could strike an opponent Taser-like, rendering him stunned from the blow. Meanwhile, as Chin traveled between the two potential participants, many began to consider him more an instigator than a messenger.
Regardless of the rumor mill, Bruce held firm to his position: if they wanted a fight, they’d have to come over to Oakland to get it.
The matter was settled on a weekday in November. The weather was sunny and pleasant. A frantic excitement spread around sections of Chinatown.
Bruce’s childhood friend Ben Der, now living again in San Francisco, caught wind of the impending showdown. “The day of the fight,” he explains, “everybody was talking about it. And everybody in the neighborhood seemed to favor Wong Jack Man.”
Now assigned to a parish in Stockton, Leo Fong got a call from James Lee in the late afternoon: “It’s all going down, man. Come on over.” Caught on short notice, Fong couldn’t make the drive in time. He anxiously told Jimmy to call him back right after the fight and let him know what happened.
Sam Louie recalls word coming down into Hung Sing, urging the senior students to go over to Oakland with Wong Jack Man. As disliked as Bruce was within Lau Bun’s school, the affair was beyond the bounds of conduct that their teacher permitted. For years Lau Bun had prevented the local martial arts culture from devolving into a Hong Kong–style challenger culture. “We said, ‘It has nothing to do with Hung Sing,’” Louie recalls. “And we explained to them, ‘You go into someone’s studio . . . it’s no good. Whether you win or lose . . . it’s no good.’”
By then the anticipation and adrenaline were too far along to be curbed. As the sun dipped low to the Pacific, Wong Jack Man got into a car and headed east, toward the city of Oakland.