50 years after Bruce’s death, torchbearers reflect on legacy
This is an article “50 years after Bruce Lee’s death, torchbearers reflect on his legacy — and their own” written by Richard Seven, July 20, 2023 By Crystal Paul for The Seattle Times. You can read it on their site here.
The gravestones of Bruce and Brandon Lee are gleaming.
Constantly adorned with flowers and coins, occasionally a handwritten note or a handful of mandarin oranges from the thousands of visitors who come to pay respects every year, the grave sites of the famous martial artist and his son at Lake View Cemetery on Capitol Hill are never lonely.
But more than that, they are clearly cared for.
Every year for 48 years, Taky Kimura — a one-time student and collaborator of the legendary Bruce Lee — visited the grave site on July 20, the anniversary of Lee’s death, and cleaned the gravestones. He’d place flowers, burn incense, say a few words and linger to talk with visitors as a way to honor not just the actor who captivated the world with his films and martial arts philosophy, but his best friend — the man who changed his life.
Until his death in 2021 at 96 years old, Kimura had dedicated his life to paying forward not just the lessons and training but also the care he’d received from the friend who left a lifelong impression on him. Since then, Kimura’s son Andy has continued his father’s work.
This year marks 50 years since Lee’s untimely death by cerebral edema, or brain swelling, at age 32, leaving behind his wife Linda Lee Cadwell and children, and a legacy more powerful than his famous one-inch punch. In the decades since his death, the public remains enthralled by Lee’s mastery of several martial arts forms and by the ways that he revolutionized martial arts film, especially for Asian American actors.
Amid the awe surrounding his story, Lee’s friends and family have worked tirelessly to sort the truths from the myths and lies and lift up the man over the legend.
As some of Lee’s oldest students and friends age and pass away, his legacy lies squarely in the hands of the next generation — like Lee’s daughter Shannon and Kimura’s son Andy. As the current keepers of Lee’s legacy, they face new challenges as they keep Lee’s teachings from being over-commercialized, misinterpreted or lost altogether.
After her mother’s tenure, Shannon Lee took over running the Bruce Lee Foundation for about 23 years, launching several projects to honor her father and promote his philosophical side.
Shannon and Andy grew up swathed in Lee’s teachings and, now in their 50s, have taken up the charge of keeping them relevant — all while contemplating legacies of their own.
Growing up Kimura
After Lee’s death, Taky Kimura would sometimes meet Lee’s grave site visitors and ask them what brought them there. Some came just to pay respects, but others had been moved by Lee’s philosophies. He would sit and talk with them, sharing more of Lee’s ideas and life, and, once, invited someone to join the once-secret martial arts club where he taught Jeet Kune Do, Lee’s martial arts form.
After emerging from Japanese incarceration camps in the 1940s cowed and disillusioned by racism, Kimura was reinvigorated by his friendship with the brazen and confident, yet philosophical, Lee. Together, they shared with the world Lee’s pioneering martial arts philosophy and style, which held as its core tenet that a martial artist should adapt and personalize the different fighting styles to suit their needs.
Just as Lee’s philosophies infused both his life and his martial arts practice, Kimura’s training with Lee helped revive his spirit and body.
“Empty your mind,” Lee famously wrote in one of his journals. “Be formless, shapeless, like water. You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”
Lee was always careful about whom he trained, looking for those who sought martial arts as a way to improve themselves rather than to hurt others. He never wanted to risk losing the tenets at the core of Jeet Kune Do.
That’s why it was so important to Taky Kimura to keep Lee’s legacy alive, and why Andy feels he has a compounded duty to honor Lee’s legacy, as well as the quieter, yet remarkable, legacy of his father.
“I feel like I’ve got a double responsibility because I have to continue to sing my father’s song,” Andy said. “[And], making sure that … the idea of [Bruce Lee] and what he offered is still available to young people and to people throughout time going forward.”
When Andy was a kid, his father sometimes forgot to pick him up from school, because he’d gotten caught up talking to a stranger about their interest in Lee.
“Not even somebody he knew. Someone who hit him up randomly, and my dad took a day off work to take this guy around and show him all the stuff,” he said.
Andy and his father Taky in the basement of the Chinatown-International District grocery store where Taky taught Jeet Kune Do, Bruce Lee’s martial arts form, to a select group of... (Courtesy of Andy Kimura)More
Both martial artists, Taky Kimura and Lee met once stories of Lee’s fighting prowess gained attention in Seattle. Kimura was still suffering after his release from the Minidoka, Idaho, and Tule Lake, Calif., incarceration camps that imprisoned Japanese Americans during World War II. Lee had begun training his first students in his new martial art. Eventually, that included Taky Kimura.
A young Taky Kimura had refused to believe Japanese Americans were second-class citizens in the U.S., but after incarceration, he felt the marginalization. In public, he kept his head down, moved off the sidewalk when white people walked by.
Lee, on the other hand, was bold. He had spent much of his youth in Hong Kong, as yet unscathed by the anti-Asian racism in the U.S. When he met Taky Kimura in 1959, 19-year-old Lee was confident, unafraid and full of brave new ideas. His ideas about self-expression and self-improvement were exactly what Taky Kimura needed.
Taky Kimura, then 36 and much more low-key, was a needed dose of practicality for the sometimes impulsive Lee. He helped him with the practical aspects of running his martial arts clubs, cooled his temper and sometimes served as the dummy in Lee’s martial arts demonstrations.
Fifty years later after Lee’s death, Andy still feels the reverberations of his father’s trauma from incarceration, but also the healing salve his father found in his friendship with Lee.
“I feel like I carried all of his anger for being incarcerated,” Andy said. “I always admired people that had the confidence to walk into a room and just for whatever reason, just perform in a way that I wasn’t able to, because I was always thinking, ‘How is this gonna make me look? How is this gonna make my people look?’ That’s how I was raised.”
Andy Kimura now runs the Jun Fan Gung Fu Institute which grew out of the humble private club in the basement of his father’s grocery store in Seattle’s Chinatown International District where Lee started his first martial arts school. There, Taky Kimura — one of only a handful of people certified by Lee to teach Jeet Kune Do — continued teaching carefully selected students for decades.
Every year on the anniversary of Lee’s death, Andy cleans Bruce and Brandon’s gravestones. He places flowers, burns incense, says a few words and lingers to talk with visitors.
Andy’s dedication to telling the story of his father and Lee’s unique friendship has helped him find a sense of peace and purpose.
“Everything [my dad] went through is, in many ways, to me much more incredible than Bruce’s life because he really suffered a lot of tremendous loss and came back from it,” he said. “Bruce’s philosophy and friendship was an integral part of him coming back. So I really see them as sort of yin and yang. I don’t really think Bruce could have become who he was without my father, and certainly, my father would have never been who he was without Bruce.”
Today, at Lee’s namesake, the Jun Fan Gung Fu Institute, which temporarily relocated to Kirkland after its original building burned down during COVID, Andy teaches students who may be the ones to keep Lee’s legacy alive. But he also keeps his father’s memory alive by walking his father’s path as someone who simply cared deeply about others.
“He was really able to just block everything out and focus on the person in front of him,” Andy said. “It can be a chore to deal with people and take time and really see every individual, not just to perform. Well, my dad really saw each person, took the time.”
“His philosophies are the really timeless part”
The kind of dedication that Kimura gave to sharing Lee’s art and philosophy takes a lot of time. Shannon Lee can attest to that.
When her mother asked her 23 years ago if she’d like to take over as the primary keeper of her father’s legacy, Shannon gave a resounding “yes.” She felt a deep personal connection to her father, of course, but she also felt she could help bring out a part of her father’s life that few knew about.
Shannon has dedicated the last two decades of her life to not just preserving her father’s legacy but transmitting it more widely. In her hands, her father’s legacy has transcended public nostalgia for a martial arts legend and grown to center his timeless ideas of a man who thought deeply about life.
Through film and TV, exhibits featuring his personal effects and writings like the now-permanent installation at the Wing Luke Museum, and recently her book “Be Water, My Friend,” Shannon has shared the philosophical side of her father, a side that few outside of his direct friends and family knew well.
Although she plans to do this work for “a lot longer,” Shannon has begun to ask herself about the legacy she hopes to leave behind as well.
“It can be really hard in a lot of ways to be attached to someone who has such a huge legacy, is so beloved and so well known, and wonder whether you’re attaching your own value to that or not,” she said.
“One of the things that’s so beautiful about what my father achieved was that he constantly beat the drum [that] the only person you really need to make sure is OK in this process is yourself.”
Over the years, she has begun to delegate to others at the Bruce Lee Family Companies some of the more mundane parts of her role as legacy keeper in order to spend more time on the Bruce Lee Foundation she and her mother founded in 2002, as well as her own projects.
She isn’t ready to start thinking about who will take over after her just yet, but when the time comes, she said, she will ask her daughter Wren, now 20, the same question her own mother did 23 years ago, but she has no expectations for her daughter to take over if it’s not what she wants.
Shannon hopes her work to elevate her father as a thinker as well as a fighter will steel his legacy against the ever-shifting winds of pop culture and a future in which the only legacy keepers will have never known the man himself.
“His philosophies are really the timeless part,” she said. “The beauty of it is that because he was such a highly practiced individual, his expression of those philosophies, what he left behind in terms of the way he moved, the things he taught, the way he culled them, cultivated himself and moved through space, are very unique, and therefore timeless because of it.”
Though his ideas and martial arts mastery have captured the global imagination for more than 50 years, he is also a man who more directly impacted the lives of those he knew and loved. And on the 50th anniversary of Bruce Lee’s death, his widow Linda and Andy gathered at his grave on Capitol Hill and cleaned the tombstone, placed flowers, burned incense, said a few words and honored the man whose life changed all of theirs.
Crystal Paul: crystal.l.paul@gmail.com; on Twitter: @cplhouse. Crystal L. Paul is a freelance reporter who writes about communities and the arts.
