3.

THE RISE OF KUNG FU, FROM WONG

FEI-HUNG TO BRUCE LEE

Just as the shenguai wuxia genre took root in Hong Kong’s Cantonese cinema
after the war, it was rather quickly displaced by a local tradition of martial arts
action which came to be called ‘Kung Fu’. The new genre was kicked off by a
series of films based on the adventures of the real-life Cantonese martial arts hero
Wong Fei-hung (Huang Feihong, in Pinyin). The essential marker of difference
distinguishing the kung fu film from the shenguai wuxia film was its emphasis on
‘real fighting’.
Director Wu Pang (Hu Peng in Pinyin) (1909–2000), who created the Wong
Fei-hung series, explained that the reason why he forged a new direction in the
Chinese martial arts cinema hitherto dominated by shenguai wuxia was because
audiences were getting tired of the fantasy routines often shoddily staged and
executed. In order to maintain interest, the producers of shenguai wuxia pictures
attempted to spruce up their productions with directly animated cartoon images
in colour, hand-drawn onto black-and-white prints. Wu writes:

the fight sequences were composed of flying swords clashing with flying
knives, whiskers versus gourds, magical ropes catching flying snakes, metal
circles colliding with each other and giving off electric sparks. Shenguai and
wuxia were mixed together in a pot, and in this way, producers hoped that
the genre would survive.1

Moreover, the martial arts action was based on stage-influenced northern school
fighting techniques.2 Wu proposed that a film about a local hero using southern

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styles of martial arts would be his generation’s contribution to the ‘rescue of the
wuxia movie from its crisis’.3 The rescue involved prising the genre away from the
grip of shenguai fantasy. In stressing wuxia without the shenguai, Wu indicated that
the new signifying system of martial arts action, namely kung fu, was drawn from
the same historical topos of xia on which the shenguai pictures were also based.
The real-life hero Wong Fei-hung shares the same trait of knight-errant chiv-
alry, using his martial prowess to help the needy and the oppressed, thus he has
the same concern for the underdog as the traditional wuxia hero drawn from
fiction. In fact, the heroic acts of Wong Fei-hung were first documented in the
‘Guangdong school of wuxia fiction’ that came into prominence in the 1930s.
The Guangdong school is so named because, according to Ye Hongsheng, its
authors use the Cantonese language as their prose style and their stories feature
the heroes of the Southern Shaolin.4 John Christopher Hamm notes that the
Guangdong school is ‘an example of direct textual continuity between the late
Qing and Old School periods’ , and its production and circulation ‘bridges the
Old School/New School chronological divide as well’.5
Wong Fei-hung was therefore the model of an early twentieth-century xia
warrior inheriting and passing on historicist topoi of patriarchy, celibacy, nation-
alism, and a Confucian ethos mixed with Buddhist principles of tolerance, virtue
and patience, but within the body of a Cantonese language and identity. These
character traits will be examined more closely below as they become embodied
by the Cantonese actor Kwan Tak-hing who played Wong Fei-hung in a long
running film series from 1949 to 1970, and re-examined as the character under-
goes another reincarnation in the form of the non-Cantonese actor Jet Li who
played Wong Fei-hung in a new film cycle in the 1990s. I will also examine the
distinctions between northern and southern schools of martial arts, and how the
concept of ‘real fighting’ came about and underwent a transition from its roots
in formal theatrical tradition into becoming a style of innovative kung fu (or the
claim of ‘real kung fu’) created solely for the cinema in the hands of Bruce Lee
and such directors as Lau Kar-leong and John Woo in the 1970s.

The Beginnings of Hong Kong’s Kung Fu Cinema

The first kung fu movie produced before the war was Fang Shiyu da leitai (The
Adventures of Fong Sai-yuk, 1938), which presented a real-life kung fu hero, Fong
Sai-yuk (in Pinyin: Fang Shiyu), whose legendary status is of nearly the same
proportions as Wong Fei-hung (both figures were popularised through the serial-
ised novels of the Guangdong school of wuxia fiction circulating in this period).
Judged purely on documentary and circumstantial evidence since the film is no
longer extant,6 we may note a few precedents set by The Adventures of Fong Sai-yuk.
First, it featured a local Cantonese martial arts hero stemming from the Southern
Shaolin tradition and thus highlights a fighting style that was highly distinctive

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and distinguishable from the northern tradition of wuxia based on Wudang and
the Northern Shaolin. Second, a Cantonese opera star Sun Ma Si-tsang, played the
hero, underscoring the southern cultural features of the genre. Third, the Fong
Sai-yuk legend unfolded through the format of the serial adventure, released in
several instalments. Although only one sequel to The Adventures of Fong Sai-yuk
was produced in the prewar period, the Fong legend was revived after the war.
Four Fong Sai-yuk films were released from 1948–1949 before the first Wong Fei-
hung film was produced.
The Wong Fei-hung films developed on all these precedents. First, Wong
Fei-hung was a local Cantonese legend; second, a Cantonese opera star, Kwan
Tak-hing, would play Wong; and third, it would develop as a long-running series.
Kwan’s Cantonese identity and his training in Cantonese cultural forms such as
opera was an important factor in the series, as I will show below. The Wong Fei-
hung legend soon proved to be more potent than the Fong Sai-yuk legend, which
was also revived in the 1990s with Jet Li playing the role of Fong Sai-yuk (in the
1970s, Fong Sai-yuk was the featured hero in a series of films directed by Zhang
Che, who chose Alexander Fu Sheng to play Fong). Jet Li, as I have noted before,
also played Wong Fei-hung, in Tsui Hark’s Once Upon a Time in China series. Li
of course is non-Cantonese, and he invests the character with a different dimen-
sion of identity politics conditioned by Hong Kong’s anxiety over its impending
reunification with China in 1997, well discussed by Tony Williams,7 so that the
Cantonese identity of the character was less of a cultural factor or denominator
of the success of the series.
The Wong Fei-hung series began with two instalments in 1949 under
the collective title of Huang Feihong zhengzhuan (The True Story of Wong
Fei-hung),8 featuring Kwan Tak-hing as the eponymous hero. Its director
Wu Pang had first learned of Wong Fei-hung when he was prodded by a
friend, the Cantonese opera librettist and scenarist Ng Yat-siu, into reading a
newspaper-serialised story about the historical Wong, while crossing Victoria
Harbour on the Star Ferry. Wu became convinced that the subject was good mate-
rial for a film. He sought out the writer of the article, Zhu Yuzhai, one of the key
figures of the Guangdong school of wuxia fiction, who agreed to write a full-scale
biography of Wong Fei-hung for the director with the intent of turning it into
a screenplay.9 Zhu’s purported biography is essentially fiction built upon a slim
framework of fact.
The Wong Fei-hung films constituted a virtual industry in itself, sustaining a
corps of supporting players, martial arts stuntmen and directors who could spe-
cialise in kung fu as a genre. Simultaneously, its popularity sustained the whole
Cantonese film industry: a distinctive feature of the industry at the time was that
producers bid for the rights with director Wu Pang to make the films rather than
having one production company owning the franchise to the series. Financiers
and producers in the Singapore-Malaysia market clamoured to invest in the

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series, thus embedding the practice of pre-selling rights in the Hong Kong film
industry. Rights were pre-sold on the very image of Wong Fei-hung as a local cul-
tural legend. Director Wu Pang explained that the prevalence of scenes showing
Wong Fei-hung dancing the lion (or in some variations, dancing the unicorn) in
the series was because such scenes were pre-shot before any script was written in
order to sell the film to overseas investors.10
The identification of Wong as a local legend or regional hero also meant that
the character belonged entirely in the realm of Cantonese cinema. The real Wong
Fei-hung was a descendant of the southern martial arts school derived from the
northern Shaolin Temple, adherents of whom included such legendary names as
Fong Sai-yuk, Hung Hei-kwun, Wu Wai-kin, the monk Sande, and Lu Acai. They
disseminated their own distinctive styles of martial arts into Guangdong and
established new schools. ‘The Adventures of Fong Sai-yuk’ was the beginning of a
trend by Hong Kong’s filmmakers to depict these authentic local heroes and their
idiosyncratic practice of martial arts. The intent of such films was to ‘preserve and
disseminate a range of putatively authentic martial arts postures and movements’ ,
as Hector Rodriguez reports.11 An important contribution of the Wong Fei-hung
films was ‘the assistance of skilled martial artists trained in both Southern and
Northern fighting styles’ ,12 which would imply to me that an implicit awareness
of northern styles was written into the textual sign system of southern kung fu.
According to Zhu’s biography, Wong Fei-hung (whose year of birth is variously
given as either 1847 or 1855 by different scholars) was taught the martial arts
from the age of six by his father Wong Kei-ying. Fei-hung learned the art of the
Eight Trigram (bagua) long-staff fighting method that was invented by the fifth
son of the fabled Yang family known in legend as Wulang: the hero of Lau Kar-
leong’s magnificent 1984 film Wulang bagua gun (The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter).
Wulang became a monk and transmitted the technique to Lu Acai, one of the
original Shaolin Temple disciples.13 Lu taught the technique to his own disciple,
Wong Kei-ying, who then passed the techniques to his son14 (in Lau Kar-leong’s
1976 film Lu Acai yu Huang Feihong/Challenge of the Masters, the legend is that Fei-
hung learned the techniques from Lu Acai himself).
Wong Kei-ying’s own formidable skills in the martial arts allowed him to
become a coach to government troops stationed in Guangdong but since he
was poorly paid for his services, he supplemented his income by becoming a
roving herbalist. As a boy, Fei-hung accompanied his father on his trips around
the province to sell medicines and performed martial arts to pull in the crowds.
His mastery of the Eight-Trigram method of staff-fighting, among many other
techniques, so amazed the public that he was immediately dubbed a wonder
kid (Fei-hung was then only twelve years old) and gave rise to a challenge from
a member of a rival school. Taking up the challenge, Fei-hung defeated the rival,
and this marked the beginning of his fame and legend.15 The childhood adven-
tures of Wong Fei-hung when travelling with his father Wong Kei-ying were the

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basis of Yuen Wo-ping’s marvellous 1993 movie Shaonian Huang Feihong zhi tie
houzi (Iron Monkey), which shows Fei-hung in his childhood years performing
the pole-fighting technique, and the imitation of his father’s own invention, the
‘shadowless kick’ (wuxing jiao).
Zhu’s biography goes on to detail episode after episode of Wong’s adventures
in the province of Guangdong and in Hong Kong from his teenage years to
adulthood. The biography makes clear that Wong Fei-hung’s fame was entirely
founded on his prowess in the martial arts and that since his teenage years,
Fei-hung was primarily responsible for the upkeep of the family reputation and
its livelihood. Wong Fei-hung died in the 1920s (either 1920 or 1924) leaving
behind a legend that celebrated his life as martial artist, kung fu coach and
medical practitioner.

‘Printing the Legend’ of Wong Fei-hung

Prior to its appearance in the cinema, the Wong Fei-hung legend was perpet-
uated in print by Zhu Yuzhai’s ‘biography’ through serialisation in the news-
papers in the late 1940s, but the legend was already popular at least a decade
earlier through the works of the ‘Guangdong school’ novelists Deng Yugong
and Gao Xiaofeng.16 To his legions of fans, the name of Wong Fei-hung was
circulated among devotees of the martial arts, some of whom had trained under
Wong’s disciples, such as Lam Sai-wing, who ran their own martial arts schools
(as far as I know, Lam Sai-wing was the only one of Wong’s disciples who had
a film devoted to his adventures outside of the Wong Fei-hung series: Yuen
Wo-ping’s Lin Shirong/The Magnificent Butcher, released in 1979). It was the cinema
that disseminated the legend to a wider public and this cinematic legend has
proven to be particularly durable and agile. Despite his real-life antecedence, new
generations of movie fans would know Wong Fei-hung purely as a screen person-
ality rather than a genuine historic figure.
The character of Wong Fei-hung is a case of the cinema ‘printing the legend’ , to
borrow the immortal phrase from John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
(1962), indicating that the character is largely a fabrication but one which has
endured and ingrained itself deeply in the consciousness of cinematic culture
and in popular folklore. From 1949 to 1998, more than a hundred feature films
featuring the Wong Fei-hung character were produced. Those starring Kwan Tak-
hing alone number up to seventy-seven from the end of the 1940s to the 1970s;17
and Kwan also played the role in a TV series in the late 1970s, demonstrating that
the precedent of the long running series in the cinema would now be appropri-
ated by television. The year 1956 was the record year in Wong Fei-hung releases: a
total of twenty-five films, averaging two a month. Kwan played the character as a
mature hero and he continued to play the character up to his old age.
As Kwan Tak-hing grew older, the image of Wong Fei-hung as a stern,

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Confucianist patriarch became more ingrained. The Confucian prototype of

the ‘superior gentleman’ (junzi) is embodied by Kwan’s personification, and
proceeding from his portrayal are qualities of fairness, moderation, social
conservatism – all qualities he exuded forever after. The Confucian tenets of
respect for elders and a hierarchal order of human relationships are underscored
by Wong Fei-hung’s status as a master and his relationships with his disciples.
Because he played the character in seventy-seven films in the old series from
1949 to 1970, and was directed most of the time by Wu Pang, Kwan’s Wong
Fei-hung is a consistent cinematic personality who stood his ground on
Confucianist principles of yi (righteousness), stressing the value of a man doing
what a man ought to do, in the Chinese way. Kung fu was the means to achieve a
just result, but the right use of kung fu was dependent on one’s character, based
on ideals of yi and ren (human-heartedness).
In the late 1970s, Jackie Chan played Wong Fei-hung as a precocious kung fu
brat in Zui quan (Drunken Master, 1979), one of a number of films dealing with
Wong’s early life from childhood to young adulthood (fifteen years later, a much
older Chan played the same juvenile character in the sequel Zui quan II/Drunken
Master II released in 1994). The way that Chan played the role, Wong was hardly
the staunch disciplinarian that he was made out to be in adult life. In the nine-
ties, Wong Fei-hung was played by Jet Li in a completely revamped series that
appeared from 1991 to 1994 under the English title Once Upon a Time in China,
produced by Tsui Hark, who directed the first three and the best episodes of the
series (Li was replaced by Vincent Zhao after the third episode).
Li’s persona was quite different from that of Kwan Tak-hing’s. He played Wong
Fei-hung as a youngish Chinese gentleman apparently open to Western ideas and
concepts though remaining a staunch patriot and nationalist (as Tony Williams
puts it very well, he is ‘ultimately at home with both his national identity and the
idea that he needs to accommodate himself to a wider world beyond his original
homeland’18). Since the legend is moulded to suit different epochs and the
personalities of different actors, we should consider what the legend perpetuates,
assuming that the ‘printed legend’ is the one constant factor in all the Wong
Fei-hung films.
Though the format of an ongoing series depicting Wong Fei-hung having
adventures in various townships throughout Guangdong province makes him an
itinerant character in the tradition of youxia (roving knight-errant), the image of
Wong is that of a master with an established niche and a core following of disci-
ples. He is the patriarchal figure within his immediate niche centred in the apoth-
ecary named Po Chi Lam, where he keeps and trains his disciples and dispenses
medicine to his patients and clients. The patriarchal focus is a distinctive trait of
the series and it highlights two or three things: first, the master–disciple relation-
ship as another historicist element of wuxia developed strongly in the cinema,
and second, the hard-school techniques of kung fu fighting which appear to

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dictate an almost exclusive male dominance in the ranks of Wong’s disciples

– and very rarely does a male master take on a female disciple. Third, perhaps,
the patriarchal theme informs another aspect to the Wong legend which is the
incessant rivalry between the different schools (another stalwart of the series was
the actor Sek Kin who embodied the perennial villain and rival to Wong Fei-
hung; and like Kwan Tak-hing, Sek Kin also had personal training in the martial
arts), and the constant indiscipline of the disciples which entails the necessary
presence of a authoritarian master and patriarch to impose order on the ‘family’
(as Jeff Takacs has shown, members of a martial arts tradition are very much like
Chinese families and are organised according to their generations19).
Wong’s Po Chi Lam is recurrently beset with challenges from rival schools
and masters, northern and southern – and this kind of internecine rivalry and
conflict was invariably resolved by Wong’s superiority in the martial arts, but
more importantly by his integrity of character. In The Magnificent Butcher, there
is a marvellous scene in which Kwan Tak-hing’s Wong Fei-hung subdues Master
Ko from a rival school through a duel of writing brushes. Wong fends off Ko
who tries to blot Wong’s calligraphy as he writes the phrase, renzhe wudi (‘The
Benevolent is Invincible’). Here, the master-figure is defined by his Confucianism
(the operating principle of which is ren, benevolence) but also by his love of
nation. Wong is identified as a supporter of the Nationalist revolution seeking to
overthrow the Qing dynasty – and the incessant rivalry between schools essen-
tially denotes the fractious atmosphere of Chinese society marking the end of the
Qing dynasty and the transition to the Republic.
The master persona of Wong Fei-hung is as much a political image as a kung
fu one; thus next to his image as a kung fu fighter, Wong is a nationalist, of
Republican vintage. This is evident in the Kwan Tak-hing persona but is especially
prominent in the Jet Li persona of Wong Fei-hung, as portrayed in Tsui Hark’s
Huang Feihong zhi er: nan’er dang ziqiang (Once Upon a Time in China, Part Two,
1992) where Wong Fei-hung prevents the Manchus from arresting Sun Yat-sen,
the father of the Republican revolution. Wong Fei-hung is an atypical national-
istic figure in the kung fu cinema set in the transition period from the late Qing
to the Republic.
The quality of nationalism is inherent in the practice of martial arts, as des-
ignated by the Mandarin term guoshu to signify martial arts, which as John
Christopher Hamm observes, is a term employed in the Republican era to
enshrine ‘a project of reinventing martial traditions in the service of nationalistic
self-strengthening’.20 Guoshu bounds all practitioners to make one’s body strong
in order to make the country strong through upholding the values in martial
arts that would protect the social fabric and ensure the security of the nation.
Such nationalism in the Wong Fei-hung persona echoes the debate in the 1920s
of ‘New Heroism’ as a concept that could revivify the nation through a renewed
emphasis on militarism, discussed in Chapter 1.

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This same echo reverberates throughout the first three editions of Tsui
Hark’s Once Upon a Time in China series.21 But it is particularly resonant
in the pre-credits prologue to the first edition where Jet Li’s Wong Fei-hung sees
off the general Liu Yongfu on board a ship carrying Liu to Vietnam to do battle
with the French (like Wong Fei-hung, Liu is a real historical figure, famed for his
role in the Sino–French War of 1884–1885). Wong witnesses a lion dance per-
formed as part of the send-off ceremony. When firecrackers are ignited, French
marines in an adjoining ship mistake the noise for gunfire and they return fire,
wounding the man who dances the lion head. As the man falls, Wong catches
the head of the lion and resumes the dance, which symbolically ends with the
lion consuming a hung offering known as the qing (literally, the green), usually
concealing a red packet of money, but here the red packet, a parting gift for Liu,
contains a written couplet: ‘Great ideals soar to the clouds, The essence (qi) of xia
fills the sky’. In return, Liu presents Wong with a fan on which the words ‘unequal
treaties’ are printed over a map of China.22
The legacy of the Wong Fei-hung cinematic persona is a prerequisite nation-
alism which is associated with the concept of xiaqi (essence of xia). All kung fu
heroes are nationalistic in some degree or other but Wong Fei-hung is the pro-
totypical personification of nationalistic xia in the cinema, setting the standard
for the latter portrayals of nationalistic kung fu heroes such as Huo Yuanjia (as
played by Jet Li in Ronny Yu’s 2006 film, Fearless) and Chen Zhen (played by
Bruce Lee in Fist of Fury). I have argued elsewhere that the nationalism of kung
fu heroes and martial arts cinema in general engenders a sense of ‘abstract nation-
alism’ in Chinese audiences who do not live in China itself.23 It gives to these
diasporic audiences the possibility for identification with a China that exists only
in the imagination and is effectively an imagined nationalism, following Benedict
Anderson’s contention that a nation is ‘an imagined political community . . .
because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their
fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives
the image of their communion’.24
This imagined nationalism has a transnational reach since it binds together
ethnic Chinese who do not live in China and are nationals of other countries but
who nevertheless imagines a certain vision of China as a ‘mother country’.25 Hong
Kong’s kung fu cinema has played a role in the construction of this imagined
nationalism or what I have called abstract nationalism, inasmuch as it is a kind of
nationalism that is not tied either to Mainland China or Taiwan, from the vantage
point of Hong Kong. Other critics have used more conceptual, psychoanalytical
terms to refer to the correlation between nationalism and kung fu. In the words
of Siu Leung Li, kung fu is a ‘cultural imaginary’ evoked by Hong Kong filmmak-
ers as a symbolic expression to ‘reassert a Chinese subject in modern times’.26 The
emphases are mine, and the words point out the link between the ‘imaginary’ and
the ‘Chinese subject’.

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Li tells us that the Wong Fei-hung series was one of the ‘major constitutive
elements of Hong Kong popular culture’.27 As a product of Hong Kong cinematic
imagination, Wong Fei-hung’s nationalism is informed and complicated by Hong
Kong’s special status as a territory located within and without China. Abstract or
imaginary, the nationalism of the Wong Fei-hung films is not a simple, one-dimen-
sional proposition. They transmit a sense of Chinese nationalism together with
perceptions of autochthonism and xenophobia. They may in fact have more to
do with localism and regionalism, or even a wider Cantonese chauvinism – but to
call the films provincial may be to denigrate them. Nationalism, as Prasenjit Duara
tells us, ‘is rarely the nationalism of the nation, but rather marks the site where
different representations of the nation contest and negotiate with each other’.28
The Wong Fei-hung films present as much a vantage view of Cantonese national-
ism as they also offer a general approval of Chinese nationalism. Both nationalisms
revolve around ‘China’ and are far less contradictory than one may think because
of the central role played by Guangdong in the forming of the Republic: Sun
Yat-sen was himself a Cantonese and he later formed a militarist government in
Guangzhou with the aim of reunifying the whole of China through a military
campaign which came to be known as the Northern Expedition.29
Hector Rodriguez reiterates the claim often made about the Wong Fei-hung
films, that they had a ‘self-imposed mission . . . to protect the traditional sources
of Cantonese cultural identity from the ravages of time and circumstance’: the
films would function as archival records of ‘precious folk traditions that might
not survive China’s rapid transition to modernity’.30 This suggests to me that the
nation itself, China, poses a threat to Cantonese culture, and of course, it should
be recalled that the GMD government had banned Cantonese films in 1937.
Whether or not the Wong Fei-hung films functioned as ethnography and actually
served the purpose of protecting and preserving Cantonese cultural identity is
open to further investigation – and many of the films in the series appear not
to have been preserved themselves, perhaps due to the perception of bad quality
(most of the films were shoddily made in quick time).
If the Wong Fei-hung films are ‘Chinese’ in the broad sense, they are reflective
of a Chinese-ness still in its formative stage. The historical background of the
Wong Fei-hung films reveals a Chinese nation still under construction in that it
had to be put together again after the overthrow of the Qing. The shaky founda-
tions of the Republic, the era of warlordism, the fractiousness of the GMD regime
(and the separatism of the Guangdong GMD in 1931), the invasion of Manchuria
by Japan, war with Japan, the civil war with the CCP, have all contributed to the
tenuousness of the modern nation-state, and the concept of nationalism itself is
therefore still tentative. The invocation of a Chinese nationalism in the Wong
Fei-hung films suggests something still evolving. It is in this sense that it may not
be amiss to speak of an essentialism or transcendent cultural identity – wuxia
being a signifier of such.

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Wong Fei-hung as a wuxia hero designates an essentialist identity composed

of multiple traits, which is somehow fixed but transhistorical. Here, it might be
more useful to regard Wong Fei-hung’s Confucianism as a sign of transcendent
cultural identity, or to put it another way, a sign of Chinese cosmopolitanism
rather than nationalism.31 The Confucianism of the character certainly suggests
values in the genre less political if not less contentious, and it moves the series
more towards the characteristic didacticism and paternalism of Cantonese
cinema in this period. Thus, Wong Fei-hung seemed primarily occupied with
ethical behaviour and he always tried to be the perfect model of a Confucian
gentleman even when under attack (I will refer to an example of this later below).
As a sign of the Confucian morality that binds him, Kwan’s Wong Fei-hung
persona adds a further level of celibacy to the character which has become a
stock concept in the portrayal of kung fu characters in general. The principle
of celibacy is associated with the Shaolin Temple and the view that martial arts
emanating from this tradition necessitate a thorough concentration of mind and
body. Buddhism itself emphasises abstinence inherent in the virtues of tolerance
and forbearance, and it forbids carnal knowledge as one of its commandments.
The image of Wong Fei-hung as a celibate knight-errant is in keeping with such
virtues. As such, Wong Fei-hung is an archetypal knight-errant, bearing out
Y. W. Ma’s comment that the ‘observance of sexual Puritanism is an obligatory
code which a Chinese knight-errant should hesitate to violate’.32
Any martial hero who violates the code does so at his own peril, as demon-
strated in Lau Kar-leong’s Wuguan (Martial Club, 1981) about the young Wong
Fei-hung and his mate Wang Yinlin, who gets into deep trouble because he goes
to the brothel and brags about his kung fu prowess to the girls. A girl asks him
to perform kung fu and he replies, ‘kung fu is to be performed in bed’ , and he
proceeds to grab two bowls with his bare hands, as if grabbing the breasts of a
woman, and breaks them, startling the girl, whom he consoles by saying ‘I am
not grabbing you’. The whole implication is that sex harms the body: the scene
ends in Yinlin falling into a trap laid by rival members of another school who
breaks one of his legs, which is symbolic inasmuch as kung fu involves both
the arms and the legs in fighting. Wong Fei-hung might have learned his lesson
there. In him, we see the prototype of a celibate knight-errant, the standard of
later cinematic knights-errant, whether of the kung fu variety or that of the
swordsman in wuxia films (cf. Bruce Lee, Jimmy Wang Yu, Di Long, David
Chiang, Jackie Chan, and Chow Yun-fat in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon).
I would argue that perhaps even more than the nationalism, the characteristic
of Wong as a celibate hero is an important indicator of the shared heritage of
wuxia and kung fu. It provides the continuity of Wong Fei-hung’s character from
Kwan Tak-hing to Jet Li. Li’s characterisation may differ from Kwan Tak-hing’s
in substantial ways but in at least the aspect of Wong as a celibate hero, there is
ultimately no difference because of the ingrained tradition of celibacy that we

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associate with the kung fu heroes hailing from the Shaolin school. Wong Fei-
hung as portrayed by Kwan and Li is a no-nonsense ascetic self-disciplinarian, a
stoic master surrounded mostly by males, demanding strictness and discipline
of himself and his followers. Apart from his disciples, Wong Fei-hung does not
appear to have his own family although in real life he was a married man (a fact
mentioned in Zhu Yuzhai’s biography), and, according to Kwan Tak-hing, had
five wives.33
The first film in the series The True Story of Wong Fei-hung: Whiplash Snuffs the
Candle Flame (1949) contains a romantic episode in which Wong forms an attach-
ment to a lady who nurses him back to health after he receives a wound from
an assailant (the wounded Wong having run away, comes into a cul-de-sac and
is offered shelter in the lady’s house). This sequence shows Wong in a vulnerable
state both physically and emotionally, quite untypical of the series that later
developed. In the Once Upon a Time in China series, Wong is seen carrying on a
modish infatuation with the Aunt Yee character, played by Rosamund Kwan, but
like Kwan Tak-hing’s Wong Fei-hung, Li’s characterisation is basically into sexual
self-denial.34
The Aunt Yee character is an interesting anomaly since she too can be linked
to the tradition of the female knight-errant: her Chinese name is ‘Shisan yi’ ,
meaning Thirteenth Aunt, recalling none other than Thirteenth Sister (‘Shisan
mei’) of the novel A Tale of Heroic Lovers. Her name demonstrates that female
characters in the martial arts cinema are never far from the wuxia model of the
female knight-errant. However, if we see Aunt Yee as a successor of Thirteenth
Sister, it is through that side of her character which shows her femininity, as in
the second half of the novel where Thirteenth Sister reaffirms her respect for the
patriarchy and demonstrates loyalty and fidelity to her husband (see Chapter 5
for a more detailed discussion of the character and the novel).
Although she is not portrayed as a knight-errant figure, Aunt Yee’s character
increasingly assumes that role – as Tony Williams points out, she ‘develops added
resilience in each part of the series’: a ‘Western-educated damsel in distress in the
first film, she uses one of Huang’s techniques to throw an assailant off the boat
at the end of the second’; in Part Six, ‘she rides on horseback and uses Huang’s
triple shadow-kick technique against hostile Indians’; and so on and so forth.35 In
assessing this relationship, film scholar Kwai-Cheung Lo asserts that Aunt Yee is
an ‘“intruder” who perturbs the order of the fraternal bond’ on which Wong Fei-
hung has had a strong hold.36
To a male knight-errant figure, the female sex is not allowed to intrude into the
‘order of the fraternal bond’ unless they do so as near-equals, meaning that they
are also adept in martial arts. In Yuen Wo-ping’s Iron Monkey, the eponymous
character who is a Robin Hood figure by night and medical doctor by day, has
a female companion who appears every bit as proficient in the martial arts as he
is. In one scene, they do a martial arts equivalent of a pas de deux, leaping and

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whirling in mid-air to retrieve paper blown up by the wind, a scene that is as

near to a lovemaking scene as kung fu cinema can get. In the Once Upon a Time in
China series, Aunt Yee may be fairly unorthodox in her relationship with Wong
Fei-hung because of her Western education, but Wong is always careful to observe
decorum, and he is never seen making love to her (the only way that Wong could
‘legitimately have an affair’ with a woman, as Kwai-Cheung Lo points out, is for
Wong to lose his memory and forget that he is a Chinese hero, as he does in Part
6 of the series, Huang Feihong zhi xiyu xiongshi/Once Upon a Time in China and
America, released in 199737).
By tradition therefore, the kung fu hero is usually a celibate hero, a fundamen-
tal principle that is largely adhered to by latter stars from Bruce Lee to Jet Li. Even
though these latter-day actors are sometimes depicted having relations with the
opposite sex as a result of adapting traditional Chinese martial arts to modern
times (for instance, Jimmy Wang Yu making love to Western women in The Man
from Hong Kong, released in 1975, as a reworking of the Chinese kung fu hero into
an Oriental version of James Bond), I would still maintain that it is quite rare to
see scenes of kung fu heroes actually making love. Celibacy as a characteristic of
the martial arts genre stems from the Buddhist practice of abstinence being one
of the pillars reinforcing the moral foundation of the martial artist hero (sexual
abstinence ‘was probably at first regarded as a health measure’ , as C. T. Hsia sug-
gests38), but since the world of the martial arts is traditionally dominated by men,
celibacy, ironically, tends to reaffirm the traditional norms of the patriarchy and
its normative standards of polygamy and having as many children as possible,
preferably sons. Hence we might see celibacy as one of the more striking anoma-
lies of the cinematic xia personality.
The Wong Fei-hung films were the earliest manifestations of the martial arts
genre’s focus on the male although in some instances, the series featured female
fighters as protagonists. Writing about Once Upon a Time in China, Kwai-Cheung
Lo notes that women could not have had any impact on the ‘solidity of the patri-
archal system and the brotherly bondage that constitutes it’.39 This lack of the
female impact is as much a concept perpetrated by the cinematic legend of Wong
Fei-hung as it is a reference to the social system of the patriarchy in traditional
China. The longevity of the Wong Fei-hung series ensured a male dominance in
the martial arts. In the 1960s, Zhang Che refashioned the ideal of male dominance
and brotherly bondage to deal more with ideas of individual heroism than the
collective spirit embodied in Wong Fei-hung’s Confucian-nationalist ethos.

Real Kung Fu
The central feature of the Wong Fei-hung films would turn on ‘real fighting’ or
‘real kung fu’ (zhen gongfu), raising an epistemological question about the nature
of the genre. I should point out that such terms were employed by the filmmakers

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and performers themselves to describe what they had constructed on the screen,
and in turn, fans of the genre are complicit in their expectations that what they
are seeing is real. Western theorists of film might find these terms troubling, since
‘real fighting’ and ‘real kung fu’ in the cinema are patently not real. More accu-
rately, they are representations of the real, involving different forms of resemblance
and performance and a high degree of choreography (at most, one might speak
of edited fragments of real-time kung fu performances).
Aaron Anderson’s thesis of kinaesthetic understanding of martial arts violence
rests on an ‘intellectual understanding that the violence itself is entirely rep-
resentational’.40 On the other hand, Leon Hunt has given an account of various
kinds of ‘authenticity’ in the kung fu film (he offers three types: ‘archival, cinematic
and corporeal’ – emphases his),41 supporting in his own way the assertion of ‘real
kung fu’. Hunt refers to the customary use of long takes in the fight sequences and
the ‘corporeal authenticity’ of the actors’ bodies (‘measured by stuntwork and
physical risk as much as fighting ability’42) which we might take to be some of the
conditions ensuring real kung fu on the screen.
The idea of real kung fu may really be a matter of ‘projective illusion’ to use
Richard Allen’s term, whereby ‘the fiction appears to unfold before our eyes as we
watch, as if it were live, as if it were created in the moment of projection’43 (a qual-
ification may be made, which is that the kung fu technique is not supposed to
be fiction). Allen adds, ‘what affords a projective illusion of the projected moving
image is that our awareness of the photographic basis of the image is overridden
by the combination of movement, sound, and projection’.44 On these conditions,
kung fu films are kinetic, they are noisy, and they certainly project if we take
projection as a metaphor of action (and we might even refer to the projection of
the body), all of which combine to create our expectations of ‘real kung fu’.
The claim of authenticity or that of ‘real kung fu’ , it must be said, mirrors the
claims of writers in the Guangdong school of wuxia fiction that they were writing
‘real’ , ‘true’ and ‘authentic’ biographies of Wong Fei-hung, and it also mirrors the
historicist practice in which writer-historians were writing factual history even
when they were writing fiction. In the Chinese conception of history, fact and
fiction, history and myth, are interwoven in such a way that the reader cannot
tell them apart. The history of wuxia literature, from the period of the Tang tales
onwards, is that both author and reader are somehow complicit in the weaving of
historical events, real figures, fiction and fact, into a narrative so compelling that
historicity is sacrificed and what ensues is a historicism of truth and authenticity.
This conceit of wuxia is now grafted onto the kung fu cinema in terms of an
opposition between reality and make-believe (and, it must be recalled, advocates
of kung fu assert that it stresses reality over the fantasy of wuxia45).
In general, critics have referred to the Wong Fei-hung films as representative of
the ‘realist’ strand of martial arts in comparison with the ‘fantastic’ strand of the
shenguai wuxia adventure serials.46 Special effects were utilised in the fantasy

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strand that employed the craft of direct animation, giving the films an aesthetic
look that is quite different from the austere realism of the Wong Fei-hung kung fu
movies. Denoted as the realist school, the Wong Fei-hung films represented kung
fu as a technology that stood in strong contrast to the visual effects of the shen-
guai mode. Kwai-Cheung Lo provides an erudite view of kung fu as technology:
‘It is the human body that has been turned into a fighting machine – probably
the only technology that is invented, developed and manipulated by Chinese in
modern times’.47 ‘Starting from the seventies’ , Lo claims, ‘the portrayal of kung
fu in Hong Kong cinema has sprung forth to a very “present technology” of the
time.’48
Lo suggests that kung fu had ‘come to presence’ as a technology in Hong Kong
cinema, and the defining moment is the presence of Bruce Lee, ‘who turns himself
into a total weapon to vanquish his foreign contenders on screen’.49 However, it
was the Wong Fei-hung films which first brought details of real fist-fighting and
authentic unarmed combat techniques, such as the traditional ‘Hong Fist’ (hong
quan) and the ‘shadowless kick’ (both trademarks of the real Wong Fei-hung),
into presence. The first two films in the series introduced martial arts unique to
the south, such as the Tiger-Crane technique of fist-fighting and the pole-fighting
method of Wulang, which required specialists to perform.50 There is often a
reminder or demonstration of the hard training required to gain mastery of such
techniques, though the films usually ended up as moral object lessons going
beyond just mere displays of kung fu.
By stressing kung fu as technology, the Wong Fei-hung films appeared to reject
the film technology of visual effects that branded the shenguai wuxia movies. As
fantasy adventure serials, the latter featured swordplay with a focus on the manip-
ulation of various types of hand weapons as well as newfangled flying parapher-
nalia such as flying darts, missiles and arrows. In addition, the heroes and heroines
possessed powers of flight and levitation: they could appear and disappear by
means of weightless leaps and could also fly through mountains and woods, feats
achieved by crude wires that were used to haul actors up hundreds of feet into the
air. The makers of the Wong Fei-hung series had sought to distinguish themselves
from precisely such fake-technological feats by emphasising the exquisite martial
arts of the various schools and their realistic or pragmatic styles that could be
adopted for self-defence and healthy exercise.
Seen today, the choreography of the action sequences in both the realist
and fantastic strands during this period appears largely stage bound. ‘As far as
representation goes’ , writes critic Liu Damu, ‘there is a preference for single,
extended takes to show the duels; the effect is not unlike a martial arts documen-
tary.’51 The staginess was a result of the practice of employing opera actors and
acrobats, known as longhu wushi (literally, Dragon-Tiger Martial Masters) to stage
the action. In Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s, both the opera and film worlds
invoked the name of the Dragon-Tiger Martial Masters whenever bits of action

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were needed and performers were required to rebound on stage, do somersaults

and leaps, simulate fights or stand in for the main actors. Lau Kar-leong (himself
a second-generation Dragon-Tiger master) told me that the name was adopted by
a group of Cantonese opera performers originally known as ‘Five Army Tigers’
(wu junhu). They performed special acrobatics and martial arts on stage but when
it came to billing themselves on marquees and playbills, the original name didn’t
sound right (at least in Cantonese) and so it was changed to ‘The Dragon-Tiger
Martial Masters’ (longhu wushi).52
Some of the original members of the Dragon-Tiger Martial Masters came from
the north and for this reason, the name longhu wushi is sometimes associated with
northern martial arts and the northern regional operas though, as Lau Kar-leong
has maintained, the name is generically applied to the martial artist-acrobats in
Cantonese opera. In time, the Dragon-Tiger Martial Masters came to be used
for all northerners and southerners in the trade. The Wong Fei-hung films, in
particular, employed Dragon-Tiger Martial Masters such as the northerner Yuan
Xiaotian, and southerner Lau Tsam, Lau Kar-leong’s father, to stage and choreo-
graph kung fu bits of business. As a second-generation ‘dragon-tiger master’ , Lau
Kar-leong also appeared with his father in many Wong Fei-hung movies and he
later became known as a martial arts director in the 1960s, and a director in his
own right from 1975 onwards.
The dragon-tiger masters mixed opera techniques from the northern school
(bei pai) with kung fu techniques of the southern school (nan pai), a sign of the
hybridity of the martial arts that increasingly marked the genre’s development.
Lau Kar-leong recalled that the speciality of the northern school was to stage ‘false
kung fu’ , meaning that the prevailing wisdom at the time was to avoid using real
kung fu for reasons of safety and to stage fight scenes in such a stylised manner
that antagonists would fall down even before they were hit.53
Such stage-bound effects were supposed to simulate the sensation of real fight-
ing. The staginess would be familiar to many in the audience at the time. Many
would be avid patrons of live opera where performances of ‘operabatics’ staged by
the Dragon-Tiger Masters customarily unfolded in long sequences without breaks,
in real displays of skill, strength and dexterity. However, in the shenguai wuxia
films, such displays merely appeared stagy because of their focus on supernatural
prowess and imaginative fantasy. Artificiality was compounded by the operatic
techniques of the northern school (bei pai), stage techniques that were mechani-
cally copied on the screen so that the term bei pai almost became a synonym for
artifice or staginess, as Lau Kar-leong has pointed out.
The kung fu techniques employed in the Wong Fei-hung series were ostensi-
bly nan pai (southern school). However, the films also featured northern school
techniques because of the hybrid nature of the Dragon-Tiger Masters. So what
made them particularly regional and parochial? The answer is their evocations
of Cantonese folk culture: depictions of religious practices, festivals, traditional

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arts of healing and medicine, the performances of lion and unicorn dances that
symbolise unity, prosperity and happiness for the community.
The lion dances were usually performed by Kwan Tak-hing himself: one more
sign of the actor’s uncanny incarnation of Wong Fei-hung, who was known as
an expert lion dancer. Aside from these local features, the use of plots revolved
around questions of moral duty and ethics in the martial arts (the lion dance
as a constituent part of the martial arts, involves its own code of ethics, as Lau
Kar-leong personally explains in the prologue of Martial Club), which I would
argue, bolsters the concept of realism. In the final analysis, realism in the kung
fu cinema indicates that kung fu is a way of life. Wong Fei-hung was always por-
trayed as a man of Confucian substance and strong principles, showing that the
real essence of kung fu is to live a life of moral duty.
As a man of principle, Wong does not resort to kung fu for the sake of it. He
wards off enemies as much by his moral character as by force of arms (and then,
only as a last resort). Thus, in the 1968 entry, Huang Feihong weizhen wu Yangcheng
(Wong Fei-hung: The Incredible Success in Canton), actor Sek Kin, the perennial
heavy of the series, pours hot tea on Master Wong’s head to provoke him, but the
Master abides by the principle of Confucian tolerance and is not provoked, sitting
calmly as the tea is poured over his head.54 At the end of Huang Feihong Tianhou
miao jin xiang (Wong Fei-hung Attends the Joss Stick Festival at the Heavenly Goddess
Temple, 1956), after defeating his opponent, Master Fu (Sek Kin) in the climactic
fight, Wong Fei-hung humbly apologises to him and proceeds to tend to his
wounded arm. Unimpressed and unrepentant, Master Fu seizes the opportunity
for revenge: he picks up a shard from a broken cup and cuts Wong Fei-hung’s
face. Startled and hurt, Wong quickly settles into his usual poise of tolerance and
smiles at his assailant, asserting his humility and asking to be forgiven before
he can depart with peace of mind. Master Fu, disarmed by Wong’s benevolence,
finally breaks down and asks for Wong’s forgiveness.
Finally, the Confucian essence of Wong Fei-hung’s character makes him a univer-
sal Chinese character, one who is able to cross over from being a Cantonese local
hero to being a Mandarin personage, as I would call the Jet Li characterisation of
Wong Fei-hung in the Once Upon a Time in China series, as well as characterisations
by other non-Cantonese actors. The Wong Fei-hung films continued to be produced
up until the decline of the Cantonese cinema in the late 1960s.
As Mandarin cinema became predominant, Wong Fei-hung was reconstructed
as a Mandarin-speaking character, first, in Shaw Brothers’ Huang Feihong (The
Master of Kung Fu), released in 1973, where he was played by character actor
Gu Feng, a northerner. Shaws’ rival, Golden Harvest, was compelled to put out
its own Mandarin version of a Wong Fei-hung picture, Huang Feihong Shaolin
quan (The Skyhawk), released in 1974, featuring none other than Kwan Tak-hing
himself, who was reported to be affronted when Shaw Brothers considered him
too old to play the part in The Master of Kung Fu,55 which, as it turned out, proved

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to be inferior and therefore failed to launch another cycle of Wong Fei-hung

movies in Mandarin, clearly the intent of Shaw Brothers, although at least one
other movie was made by the studio, Huang Feihong yiqu ding cai pao (The Rivals
of Kung Fu), released in 1974.
The Mandarinisation of Wong Fei-hung came about because, ironically, the old
series featuring Wong Fei-hung were now considered, in the era of ‘new school’
wuxia, antiquated and stagy. Shaw Brothers sought to renew the series by staging
more ‘realistic’ fights and more ‘authentic’ detail of early Republican society in
Guangdong.56 The updating of Wong Fei-hung was also an evident feature of
Jet Li’s portrayal of the character in the ‘Once Upon a Time in China’ series: Li’s
persona being that of a Mandarin-speaking actor and martial artist (though in his
Hong Kong films, he is usually dubbed into Cantonese). From Wong Fei-hung
to Huang Feihong (the Mandarin tones of Wong’s name by which he would be
known to Chinese audiences outside of Hong Kong through Jet Li’s portrayal),
the character has proven to be the most resilient reference point of the kung fu
genre in the Hong Kong cinema.

Bruce Lee and the 1970s Kung Fu Craze

Bey Logan, author of Hong Kong Action Cinema, notes that as each new genera-
tion re-examines the Wong Fei-hung phenomenon through new films featuring
the same character, ‘these new films reflect the changes that have taken place
in southern Chinese society’.57 Logan might rather have said that they reflect
the changes that have taken place within the Hong Kong cinema. For over two
decades, the Kwan Tak-hing-Wong Fei-hung films entertained the audience with
‘real kung fu’ as derived from the traditions passed on by true disciples of past
masters. Then, there were the traditions derived from opera stagecraft, as practised
by the Dragon-Tiger Masters.
Second-generation Dragon-Tiger masters developed into professional second
units (the martial arts action second unit or action-choreography unit headed by
a director) that are now incorporated into the whole filmmaking business. The
actors, stunt players and directors of contemporary martial arts cinema are now
drawn from a film tradition of martial arts and no longer from the stage. Thus,
the Wong Fei-hung films, which I have earlier described as stemming from the
stage and opera tradition where the fighting was choreographed in a stylised
manner to simulate ‘real kung fu’ must be seen as the precursors of the even more
realistic and brutal kung fu fighting style of Bruce Lee.
Bruce Lee, in his own fashion, kept up the spirit of the Cantonese revival,
though his pictures were spoken in Mandarin (with Lee’s dialogue dubbed),
because he was himself Cantonese and had been trained in Wing Chun, as the
director Zhang Che notes in his memoirs.58 Lee was born in San Francisco in
1940, and was taken to Hong Kong where he began a career as a child actor. He

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returned to the United States in 1959, momentarily ending his acting career in
Hong Kong cinema to concentrate on his studies.
In the United States, Lee had taught himself the martial arts. He was an innova-
tor who invented his own technique of Jeet Kune Do (the art of the Intercepting
Fist) which he modified from the Wing Chun tradition. Though he ruffled a
few orthodox feathers, Lee secured a reputation as a champion in a martial arts
competition, following which he expressed a desire to make it in the movies.
He tried his luck in Hollywood, and landed minor roles in movies and televi-
sion. Disillusioned, he returned to Hong Kong where he would show the world
his mettle. His fame is essentially based on four films he made in Hong Kong:
Tangshan daxiong (The Big Boss, 1971), Jingwu men (Fist of Fury, 1972), Menglong
guojiang (The Way of the Dragon, 1972), and Longzheng hudou (Enter the Dragon,
1973).
Yet in Hong Kong, Lee was an outsider. Siu Leung Li points out that Lee’s
Chinese national identity was ‘undercut and exposed by his own already mul-
ti-hyphenated and slippery identity’ as an American citizen and Hong Kong-
Chinese background.59 Though his Cantonese roots meant that his martial arts
stemmed from the southern tradition, he was essentially an autodidact who did
not come out of the stage or the tradition of the Dragon-Tiger Masters. Li also
asserts that Lee’s Jeet Kune Do was a highly syncretic form of martial arts which
‘synthesizes any skill functional and effective, regardless of cultural, national,
sectarian boundaries’. As such, Lee’s own school of martial arts is ‘apparently not
authentically “Chinese”’.60 Based on such assertions, it may be said therefore that
Lee broke the mould of the kung fu cinema shaped and fashioned by the Wong
Fei-hung films.
The appeal of the Wong Fei-hung films was based on regionalism and local
flavour. Lee’s significance as a martial arts icon has relied on his charismatic
ability to cross over from East to West. However, mutual understanding of Lee
remains elusive, symbolised by the apparent division in how Western and Eastern
critics regard Lee in terms of the concepts of narcissism and nationalism. These
two concepts were raised by Tony Rayns in a short but often-quoted essay on
Bruce Lee published in 1980.61 By raising the psychoanalytical trope of narcis-
sism, Rayns attributes the star’s interest and training in the martial arts to his
sense of inferiority. Rayns probably meant to pose narcissism as a counterintuitive
response to nationalism, which to most critics implies racialism and ethnicity, or
the kind of ‘ghetto myth’ politics representing the essentialism of the genre that,
one assumes, Western critics find most objectionable.62 Peggy Chiao explains that
Lee’s films are ‘overtly political’ but because the politics are presented in ‘black
and white’ , they are ‘devoid of persuasive power’ and ‘Lee’s blatant racism and
nationalism thus spell one of the major weaknesses of his films’.63
However, far from attenuating Lee’s nationalism, its matching with narcissism
raises intriguing suggestions that they are two sides of the same coin. Lee is like a

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male version of Thirteenth Sister who represents the two sides of the knight-errant
(a traditionalist conservative side and a revolutionary activist side). His mastery
of kung fu is that side that links him with nationalism (kung fu and nationalism
are inextricably linked, as the name guoshu reminds us), but his narcissistic side
indicates a more problematic personality, pointing to a clash between traditional
norms of knight-errant behaviour (albeit manifested through a bumpkin persona
as seen in The Big Boss and The Way of the Dragon) and the standards of postmod-
ernism (Lee heralding kung fu as a postmodern martial art).64 Rayns throws no
light at all on the subject and has nothing to say about how Lee might be seen as
a contemporary version of a traditional knight-errant. He does throw some light
on Lee’s body by associating it with narcissism, but makes no connection between
the body and nationalism: Yvonne Tasker has proven more erudite on this matter
when she says that the ‘assertion of nationalism is very clearly inscribed through
the revelation of Lee’s body’.65
As for narcissism and Lee’s body, Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar have pointed
out that Rayns’s article offers a ‘queer appreciation of Lee’ ,66 but in the same way
that the article is unable to offer an objective and perceptive analysis of Lee’s
nationalism, it is also inadequate in assessing Lee’s narcissism as queer viewing
pleasure. Berry and Farquhar are of course more perceptive on this subject.
Defining Lee as a paragon of ‘neo-wu masculinity’ , the authors emphasise that
his brand of masculinity ‘is hybridized with and positioned within globalized
American (codes of) masculinity’.67 Berry and Farquhar are troubled by the
narcissistic eroticisation of Lee under the ‘queer gaze’ of one of the characters in
Lee’s films (the actor Wei Ping’ao who appears as a gay villain in Fist of Fury and
The Way of the Dragon) which reveals homophobia and attendant anxieties as ‘an
integral component of the globalized American masculinity that features display
of the eroticized as well as martial male body’.68 ‘The ultimate goal of this model
of masculinity,’ they continue, ‘is to win the approving acknowledgement of other
men. This homosocial aim can also tip all too easily into homosexuality if respect
and admiration become the foundation for desire, and therefore the boundary
line between the two must be rigorously policed’.69
Here the question to consider is who or what does the policing? Berry and
Farquhar suggest that the tensions are worked out in martial arts action, but
just what exactly is the driving force of martial arts action? Neo-wu masculinity?
Could not the constituent of Chinese nationalism in Lee’s masculinity act as the
policing factor that stops masculinity from tipping over into homosexuality?
There is some irony here because it is through kung fu that Lee respects and
admires the transnational Other in homosocial fashion, as shown in his duel
with Chuck Norris in the Coliseum scene in The Way of the Dragon. This scene
demonstrates that nationalism and narcissism appear to complement each other
or perhaps to contain each other (in any case, each throws some light on the
other), but thus far, what really is the nature of Lee’s nationalism? Here I might

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just bring up the question that Yuan Shu asks, ‘What kind of nationalism could
Lee’s films offer to the inhabitants of Hong Kong?’ His reply echoes my point
about abstract nationalism:

Lee’s rendition of China highlights the problem of cultural dislocation

among the inhabitants of Hong Kong, who do not identify themselves with
either mainland China or the British empire, but who live in a space of
anxiety, ambiguity, and contradiction in between.

He goes on to say that such a sense of uncertainty can easily be turned ‘into
anticolonial sentiments’ and that this representation of China ‘is exactly how
nationalism works in Lee’s films’.70 My own essays had attempted to demonstrate
this but may instead have overemphasised the Chineseness factor in Lee’s nation-
alism, not giving due concern to his transnational appeal.71
Lee’s ‘nationalism’ is multi-faceted and revolves around issues of decolonisation
struggles,72 postcolonial or subaltern identity, ethnic pride, civil rights activism,
appealing not only to Chinese communities, as his primary audience, but also
other minority communities in the West, as Vijay Prashad has demonstrated
in his book, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting.73 Whether or not the politics are
persuasive is immaterial, it seems to me, and Prashad has shown that the star’s
philosophy of fighting with one’s bare hands inspired a generation of African-
Americans and Asian-Americans to take up the martial arts in order to bolster
the anti-racist movement in the United States.74 This is the kind of progressive
nationalism, iconically represented by Bruce Lee, which now seems forgotten in
the age of globalisation,75 perhaps in the interest of the contemporary neoliberal
orthodoxy which serves to remind us that nationalism was never progressive at
all.
Lee’s nationalism however would amount to nothing if not for the fact that
he was responsible for revivifying kung fu as a genre in the Hong Kong cinema.
This is of course significant; if Lee had made his first kung fu movie in the United
States, we might not now be talking of nationalism but transnationalism, to
begin with. Though it is critically fashionable to attribute the rise of the kung
fu cinema to Bruce Lee, the reason for the rise was not due solely to Lee. Shaw
Brothers had rush-produced the first kung fu pictures well before Lee arrived on
the Hong Kong scene: Zhang Che’s Baochou (Vengeance) and Jimmy Wang Yu’s
Longhu dou (The Chinese Boxer), both released in 1970 posted first claims on the
genre before rival Golden Harvest could do so with the first Bruce Lee picture.
Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest were engaged in a fierce rivalry, and they
manufactured a push into the European and US markets with a spate of kung fu
movies, dubbed into English and given new titles from their Hong Kong versions,
among them Shaws’ Tianxia diyi quan (Five Fingers of Death, originally King Boxer),
and Golden Harvest’s The Big Boss (renamed Fists of Fury in the US).76 They were

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sensational box-office hits, the first time that Hong Kong movies had scored in a
big way in the Western market. The Big Boss was Bruce Lee’s first kung fu movie
upon his return to Hong Kong and he became an instant phenomenon. The
film played in sixteen theatres located all over Hong Kong, seven performances
each day, finally grossing over HK$4 million, a record-breaking achievement for
a Hong Kong star.77
Smarting on its failure to secure Lee’s services when he first approached them,
it was now Shaw Brothers who approached the star, in 1973. Lee demanded
HK$2.5 million (about half a million US dollars at the then rate of exchange),
and Run Run Shaw was hard put to turn him down.78 Lee, however, was toying
with the idea of becoming a truly independent movie star, working with both
major studios and with other independents. He was half-way succeeding with
this game plan when he died prematurely. He had established his own company,
Concord, and went on to direct and star in The Way of the Dragon. That success
then led Lee to re-stake his claim on Hollywood, by appearing in Enter the Dragon,
a co-production with Warner Brothers. This was an important film in laying the
groundwork of East–West appreciation of the genre, signalling the kind of dena-
tionalised, if not completely deracinated, kung fu project that Hollywood would
aim to produce in the years ahead.79
While Hong Kong’s studios had economic reasons to manufacture the kung fu
craze, it must be said that the genre’s appeal would not have had as great an impact
without Bruce Lee. Lee’s appeal was founded on his charisma and innovative style
in the martial arts, and it is here that we might consider his kung fu a postmodern
syncretisation of tradition and personal idiosyncrasy. It is worthwhile to look at
this style in some detail. I will focus on the last climactic sequence of The Big Boss.
The film’s Bangkok setting immediately breaks the precedents of the Wong Fei-
hung films. Lee plays a Chinese migrant who finds work in an ice factory. When
his buddies go missing, Lee investigates but is instead made the foreman of the
factory so as to forestall any discoveries of foul play. Eventually, Lee discovers that
the ice factory is used as a front for drug trafficking by the boss, played by Han
Yingjie. In the final confrontation scene, the two men fight each other, with Han
employing his skills as a northern master of martial arts, and Lee his own innova-
tive style of kung fu modified from Wing Chun techniques. Unlike the operatic
style of the Wong Fei-hung films, Lee’s style was more akin to something that one
could see in a tournament with two people competing and exchanging blows.80
The action is more brutal and much quicker, more like a real street fight and less
like an opera.
Lee was primarily responsible for his own choreography of the martial arts
scenes, working on these with the credited martial arts director Han Yingjie. He
incorporated the expansive, exaggerated style of choreography in the new school
wuxia cycle preceding the rise of the kung fu movie, realising that audiences
would be used to watching this form of choreographic violence. Lee employed

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his famous leaps-into-the-air stunts, achieved by the trampoline. His strategy was
to heighten the reality of the kung fu techniques in an offsetting effect combining
the convention of wuxia pictures. Thus, he maintained some of what the audience
expected to see from wuxia pictures (the flying, leaping and jumping) but pre-
sented something else they had never seen before – an intense, animalistic fight
sequence of two men using real kicks and real punches. In other words, the ‘real
fighting’ of kung fu had to undergo a cinematic change.
Real kung fu fighting lasts only a brief few seconds, as martial arts coaches will
testify, and although Lee was a Wing Chun practitioner of very high standard, he
understood that realistic Wing Chun methods were not compatible with cinema.
The technique is too short and too abrupt. It is said that Wing Chun was created
to take advantage of the tight, narrow streets and alleyways of Guangzhou where
the martial art originated (the last set-piece scene in Lau Kar-leong’s Martial Club
demonstrates this kind of fighting within narrow confines splendidly, though in
Lau’s film, the style on display is the more muscular ‘Hong fist’81). On film, the
technique would look too fast and too quick but in order to make it look con-
vincing, Lee exaggerated all his motions. In The Big Boss, all the action happens in
short sequences emphasising one type of kung fu technique or another.
The interplay with real technique and cinematic effect would characterise all
kung fu pictures after Bruce Lee, who essentially pioneered the concept (thus, the
idea of ‘real kung fu’ is a matter of combining body and cinematic techniques).
The climactic fight sequence between Lee and Han Yingjie in The Big Boss was
a very influential setpiece that obviously prompted young director John Woo to
come up with his own variation of the one-on-one combat sequence. When Woo
was given a chance to direct his very first picture in 1972, he chose to make a kung
fu movie, which was eventually released as Tiehan rouqing (The Young Dragons) in
1975 by the Golden Harvest Studio. Woo staged a protracted climactic duel in
which hero and villain fight it out to the death employing lots of kicks and fist
work in the same manner as Bruce Lee and Han Yingjie.
What prevented Woo’s sequence from being a complete reprise of the climax
in The Big Boss was his camera eye. Woo engendered cinematic style with a
minimum of special effects. The camera changes positions constantly. The com-
batants engage each other in a series of cuts (a grab, a throw, a fall) all working
from different angles but seen as a whole sequence almost unbroken.82 Woo’s
brilliance with the camera and his skills in editing challenges the notion of ‘real
kung fu’. Woo’s work constitutes an evolutionary shift in the development of the
martial arts genre in the Hong Kong cinema. From the Wong Fei-hung films
onwards, stars and performers were key to the concept of real fighting, but in
Woo’s case, the director has gained more control of the process.
By virtue of his style in the action choreography achieved mainly through
editing, Woo debunks the idea of ‘real kung fu’. King Hu, famous for his new
school wuxia pictures, always took delight in saying that there was no such thing

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as kung fu. ‘Kung fu is like Fu Manchu, it doesn’t exist anywhere except maybe
in San Francisco’s Chinatown’ , he said.83 ‘Kung fu’ was a purely Cantonese
term that imparted no meaning of the martial arts in Mandarin; but Hu might
have explained that there was no such thing as real kung fu fighting in cinema.
However, the claim of real kung fu was like a declaration of truth among stars and
directors working in the genre and even Hu himself seemed to believe it. Hu took
pains to differentiate between his style of cinematic combat with the style of Bruce
Lee, Jackie Chan and others, which he called ‘real fighting.’ ‘What I describe is not
real fighting’ , Hu said.84 Hu called his fighting dance.
From the ‘swordplay and magic’ strand of the shenguai wuxia genre to the ‘real
fighting’ strand of the kung fu genre, we may begin to discern the evolution of a
third cinematic strand of the martial arts genre stressing the plasticity of film and
the exhilaration of montage. I have referred to John Woo’s debut work The Young
Dragons, as a good indication of this third strand. Woo’s work in this period of
the Hong Kong cinema showed influences from King Hu and Zhang Che, just as
he was also influenced by Bruce Lee and Han Yingjie in The Big Boss. In effect, he
was distilling the essence of both wuxia and kung fu, and though he would earn
his fame with contemporary gangster movies such as Yingxiong bense (A Better
Tomorrow, 1986) and Diexie shuangxiong (The Killer, 1989), the source of his cine-
matic style of action can be traced to the martial arts.
When Woo joined the film industry, the kung fu picture was at the height of
its popularity and all the world was into kung fu fighting. By the time The Young
Dragons was actually released in 1975, the kung fu craze had just about faded in
the West. The fad came and went but what remains are the images. In the final
analysis, it is the cinematic brilliance of directors such as Woo, King Hu, Zhang
Che, Lau Kar-leong, and not so much the ‘real kung fu’ itself, that hypostatise the
martial arts.

Conclusion
The kung fu cinema shattered the uniformity of the history of the Chinese
martial arts cinema, as begun through an adherence to wuxia and the traditions
of Wudang. This chapter ends with Bruce Lee as the most famous beneficiary of
the Southern Shaolin kung fu tradition in the Hong Kong cinema instituted by
the character of Wong Fei-hung (Lee of course was also a builder of that tradition).
I have deliberately broken the continuity in the chronology of this history of the
wuxia film in order to suggest a less than smooth development of the martial arts
cinema, since, following the ascent of Bruce Lee, the world would recognise a dif-
ferent kind of martial arts cinema in the form of the kung fu film.
In the next chapter, I will revert back to the 1950s to detail the rise of the new
school wuxia picture. Though both wuxia and kung fu draw on mutual influ-
ences, the evolution and rise of the kung fu cinema in the 1970s, as signalled by

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the incredible drawing power of Bruce Lee, will displace the new school wuxia
genre illustrating further the rupture and discontinuity of its history. The bifur-
cated development of wuxia and kung fu is more an intertextual transposition
from one form to the other, not a historical break from each other. Henceforth
the element of wuxia chivalry is an acknowledged component of kung fu and the
element of ‘real fighting’ techniques in hand and leg combat are an integral part
of wuxia action, embellished by the characteristics of swordfighting and fantasy.

Notes
1. Wu Pang (Hu Peng), Wo yu Huang Feihong (‘Wong Fei-hung and I’) (Hong Kong: Wu
Pang, 1995), p. 5.
2. Ibid., p. 4.
3. Ibid., p. 5.
4. See Ye Hongsheng, Lun jian, p. 47.
5. See John Christopher Hamm, ‘Local Heroes: Guangdong School Wuxia Fiction and
Hong Kong’s Imagining of China’ , Twentieth-Century China, 27:1, November 2001,
71–96, esp. p. 73. Some of the material of this article is incorporated into chapter 2,
about Guangdong school fiction, in Hamm, Paper Swordsmen, pp. 32–48.
6. Readers may refer to entries in Hong Kong Filmography, Volume 1, 1913–1941 (Hong
Kong Film Archive, 1997), pp. 290 and 306.
7. See Tony Williams, ‘Under “Western Eyes”: The Personal Odyssey of Huang Fei-Hong
in Once Upon a Time in China’ , Cinema Journal, 40:1, Fall 2000, 3–24.
8. The titles of the episodes are Wong Fei-hung Snuffs the Candle Flame with Whiplash (Part
One) and Wong Fei-hung Burns the Tyrant’s Lair (Part Two).
9. Wu Pang, Wo yu Huang Feihong, p. 6.
10. Ibid., pp. 166–167.
11. See Hector Rodriguez, ‘Hong Kong Popular Culture as an Interpretive Arena: The
Huang Feihong Film Series’ , Screen, 38:1, Spring 1997, 1–24, esp. p. 9.
12. Ibid., p. 9.
13. On the staff as one of the staple weapons in Shaolin fighting techniques, see Meir
Shahar, ‘Staff Legends’ , in The Shaolin Monastery, pp. 82–109.
14. Zhu Yuzhai, Huang Feihong biezhuan (‘A Supplementary Biography of Wong Fei-
hung’) (Hong Kong: Perlan Book Co., no year specified), p. 1. Zhu’s biography was
published in instalments in Hong Kong’s Commercial Daily News in the 1940s. See also
Bey Logan’s Hong Kong Action Cinema (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1995), p. 10.
15. Zhu Yuzhai, Huang Feihong biezhuan, p. 5.
16. See Ye Hongsheng, Lun jian, p. 48.
17. This data is obtained from a filmography printed in the Hong Kong Film Archive’s
publication Wong Fei-hung, The Invincible Master, a brochure accompanying a Wong
Fei-hung retrospective in 1996. Kwan Tak-hing himself claimed to have made nine-
ty-nine Wong Fei-hung films.
18. Tony Williams, ‘Under “Western Eyes”’ , p. 22.
19. See Jeff Takacs, ‘A Case of Contagious Legitimacy: Kinship, Ritual and Manipulation
in Chinese Martial Arts Societies’ , Modern Asian Studies, 37:4, 2003, 885–917, esp. p.
893.
20. John Christopher Hamm, Paper Swordsmen, p. 8.
21. For an analysis of the nationalist project in Tsui’s Wong Fei-hung films, see chapter
on Tsui Hark in my Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (London: British Film
Institute, 1997), pp. 171–173.

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22. For more on the prologue scene, see Tony Williams, ‘Under “Western Eyes”’ , pp. 9–10.
23. See chapter, ‘Bruce Lee: Narcissus and the Little Dragon’ , in my Hong Kong Cinema,
p. 112.
24. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991, rev.edn), p. 6.
25. Anderson refers to the history of Chinese overseas migration over the period of the
disintegration of the Qing dynasty as the basis of the spread of the ‘imagined commu-
nity’ relating to the Chinese. See Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 190.
26. Siu Leung Li, ‘Kung Fu: Negotiating Nationalism and Modernity’ , p. 516.
27. Ibid., p. 518.
28. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation, p. 8.
29. In the sense that Wong Fei-hung is both a Cantonese nationalist and a Chinese
nationalist, I disagree with Kwai-Cheung Lo’s assertion that the early Wong Fei-hung
films impart the message that ‘the local community under Wong, the father figure par
excellence, will exhaust every means in order to enable the ethnically homogeneous,
the nationally continuous, and the traditionally virtuous to prevail over the heteroge-
neous, the alien, and the newfangled’. This is a misreading of the films’ localism as well
as the concept of nationalism as represented by Kwan’s Wong Fei-hung character. The
Wong Fei-hung persona is that of a Confucian moderate Republican, not a rebellious
outlaw of the marshland. Wong is always seen as a mediator, striving to unite the frac-
tious community into a greater entity. It would be against the grain of his character
to exhort the local community to ‘exhaust every means’ to do what Lo claims in his
statement. See Lo, Chinese Face/Off: The Transnational Popular Culture of Hong Kong
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005), p. 149.
30. Hector Rodriguez, ‘Hong Kong Popular Culture as an Interpretive Arena’ , p. 8.
31. I have borrowed this line from William Holland who asserted that the Confucian
philosophy ‘was cosmopolitan, not nationalistic, in its world outlook’. See Holland,
‘Introduction: New Trends in Asian Nationalism’ , in Holland (ed.), Asian Nationalism
and the West (New York: Octagon, 1973), 3–64, esp. p. 40.
32. See Y. W. Ma, ‘The Knight-Errant in Hua-pen Stories’ , p. 282.
33. Kwan said this in a 1989 talk show programme for HK-TVB.
34. For a discussion of the different screen representations of the Wong Fei-hung character
as portrayed by Kwan Tak-hing and Jet Li, see Stephen Teo, Hong Kong Cinema, p. 170.
See also Ng Ho, ‘The Three Heroic Transformations of Huang Feihong’ , Wong Fei-
hung, The Invincible Master (Hong Kong Film Archive, 1996).
35. See Tony Williams, ‘Under “Western Eyes”’ , p. 16.
36. See Kwai-Cheung Lo, ‘Once Upon a Time: Technology Comes to Presence in China’ ,
Modern Chinese Literature, Vol. 7, 1993, 79–96, esp. p. 81.
37. See Kwai-Cheung Lo, Chinese Face/Off, p. 153.
38. C. T. Hsia, The Classic Chinese Novel, p. 88.
39. Kwai-Cheung Lo, ‘Once Upon a Time’ , p. 82.
40. See Aaron Anderson, ‘Violent Dances in Martial Arts Films’ , Jump Cut, No. 44, Fall
2001.
41. Leon Hunt, Kung Fu Cult Masters, p. 29.
42. Ibid., p. 39.
43. Richard Allen, ‘Representation, Illusion, and the Cinema’ , Cinema Journal, 32:2,
Winter 1993, 21–48, p. 42.
44. Ibid. p. 43.
45. Here one must bear in mind that the claim of ‘reality’ is not unrelated to the general
thrust of the Guangdong school of wuxia fiction, which, as John Christopher Hamm
observes, is a genre ‘rather different from that of “real” wuxia fiction’ as represented by
the new school, in that its protagonists ‘seem to fight with fists more than with swords;

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its narrative elements tend towards blood feuds, to the exclusion of such New School
standbys as romance or the quest for occult martial secrets; its general “mimetic level”
seems earthier, a step or two below the New School’s epic vision’. See Hamm, ‘Local
Heroes’ , p. 87.
46. See Liu Damu, ‘Chinese Myth and Martial Arts Films: Some Initial Approaches’ , in Lin
Nien-tung (ed.), Hong Kong Cinema Survey 1946–1968, 40–48, esp. pp. 40–41.
47. Kwai-Cheung Lo, ‘Once Upon a Time’ , p. 93.
48. Ibid., p. 93.
49. Ibid., p. 93.
50. See Wu Pang, Wo yu Huang Feihong, p. 21.
51. Liu Damu, ‘Chinese Myth and Martial Arts Films’ , p. 41.
52. Conversation with Lau Kar-leong, 9 April 2001, Hong Kong. See also The Making of
Martial Arts Films as Told by Filmmakers and Stars (Hong Kong Film Archive, 1999),
p. 71.
53. Author’s conversation with Lau, 9 April 2001.
54. A similar scene occurs in The Skyhawk (1974), Kwan Tak-hing’s return to the series
after an absence of four years, where a bad guy pours boiling water from a kettle over
Wong Fei-hung’s head, and Wong stoically bears the discomfort, refusing to retaliate
with action.
55. See Jin Feng, ‘Huang Feihong yangwei yiyu: Guan Dexing Taiguo paipian’ (‘Wong
Fei-hung Flaunting Strength in Alien Territory: Kwan Tak-hing in Thailand Shoot’) in
Jiahe dianying (‘Golden Movie News’), No. 19, October 1973, p. 43.
56. See A Q, ‘Pai Huang Feihong de dongji: fang daoyan He Menghua’ (‘Interview with
He Menghua: the Motive behind the making of Huang Feihong’), Xianggang yinghua
(‘Hong Kong Movie News’), No. 89, May 1973, p. 38.
57. Bey Logan, Hong Kong Action Cinema, p. 10.
58. Zhang Che, Huigu Xianggang dianying sanshi nian (‘Memoirs: Thirty Years in Hong
Kong Cinema’) (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 1989), p. 6.
59. Siu Leung Li, ‘Kung Fu: Negotiating Nationalism and Modernity’ , pp. 527–528. Li
also quotes Kwai Cheung Lo’s argument that Bruce Lee’s diverse background puts
him outside the category of ‘Chinese hero’ , and that his ‘Chineseness’ invokes ‘a distant
and void China’ (Li, p. 528), which is primarily my point of ‘abstract nationalism’.
Lo’s argument is taken from his essay, ‘Muscles and Subjectivity: A Short History of
the Masculine Body in Hong Kong Popular Culture’ , Camera Obscura, Vol. 7, 1996,
105–125.
60. Li, ‘Kung Fu: Negotiating Nationalism and Modernity’ , p. 527.
61. See Tony Rayns, ‘Bruce Lee: Narcissism and Nationalism’ , in Lau Shing-hon (ed.), A
Study of the Hong Kong Martial Arts Film, pp. 110–112. Rayns later expanded this essay
into another article, ‘Bruce Lee and Other Stories’ , in Li Cheuk-to (ed.), A Study of
Hong Kong Cinema in the Seventies, 8th Hong Kong International Film Festival cata-
logue (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1984), pp. 26–29.
62. The term ‘ghetto myth’ comes from Stuart Kaminsky, ‘Kung Fu Film as Ghetto Myth’ ,
in Michael T. Marsden and John G. Nachbar (eds), Movies as Artifacts: Cultural Critiques
of Popular Film (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1982), pp. 137–145.
63. See Hsiung-ping Chiao, ‘Bruce Lee: His Influence on the Evolution of the Kung Fu
Genre’ , Journal of Popular Film and Television, 9:1, Spring 1981, 30–42, esp. p. 38.
64. The traditional knight-errant behaviour of Lee in The Way of the Dragon is seen in the
scene where he runs away from a naked Italian woman who has picked him up and
taken him back to his apartment, illustrating my point about wuxia celibacy. This
behaviour is contrasted with the ‘narcissistic’ scene prior to the woman’s appearance
where Lee looks at himself in the mirror and practises martial arts moves, suggesting
a connection between narcissism and the persistent need to innovate and practise

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martial arts. For an analysis of this scene, see Gary Needham, ‘Encounters with the
Dragon’ , in Dimitris Eleftheriotis and Needham (eds), Asian Cinemas: A Reader and
Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 409–413, esp. pp. 410–411.
Lee’s behaviour, according to Needham, underlines the contradictions and problems
between the fixed, historicist image of the wuxia-cum-kung fu hero and concurrent
modern/postmodern expectations of liberal society.
65. Yvonne Tasker, ‘Fists of Fury: Discourses of Race and Masculinity in the Martial Arts
Cinema’ , in Eleftheriotis and Needham (eds), Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide,
pp. 437–456, esp. p. 440.
66. See Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, China on Screen: Cinema and Nation (Hong
Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006), fn 19, p. 261. For a more thorough discus-
sion on the queer appropriation of Lee, see Chris Berry, ‘Stellar Transit: Bruce Lee’s
Body or Chinese Masculinity in a Transnational Frame’ , in Fran Martin and Larissa
Heinrich (eds), Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation and Chinese Cultures
(Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006), pp. 218–234.
67. Berry and Farquhar, China on Screen, p. 202.
68. Ibid., p. 202.
69. Ibid., pp. 202–203.
70. See Yuan Shu, ‘From Bruce Lee to Jackie Chan: Reading the Kung Fu Film in an
American Context’ , Journal of Popular Film and Television, 31:2, Summer 2003, 50–59,
esp. pp. 52–53.
71. See my essay ‘True Way of the Dragon: The Films of Bruce Lee’ , in Law Kar (ed.),
Overseas Chinese Figures in Cinema, 16th Hong Kong International Film Festival (Hong
Kong: Urban Council, 1992), pp. 70–80; and my chapter on Lee in Hong Kong Cinema:
The Extra Dimensions, pp. 110–121.
72. See M. T. Kato, ‘Burning Asia: Bruce Lee’s Kinetic Narrative of Decolonization’ ,
Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 17:1, Spring 2005, 62–99, see in particular p. 89.
Kato writes of a ‘kung fu cultural revolution’ which had ‘great potential to relate to
a broader spectrum of decolonization struggles, because it reflected the raw social
sentiment of the Hong Kong masses under multiple layers of colonization’.
73. Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth
of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001). See also Prashad, ‘Bruce Lee and the
Anti-Imperialism of Kung Fu: A Polycultural Adventure’ , positions, 11:1, Spring 2003,
51–90.
74. For an analysis of the connection between kung fu and African-Americans in Jackie
Chan’s films, see Gina Marchetti, ‘Jackie Chan and the Black Connection’ , in Matthew
Tinkcom and Amy Villarejo (eds), Keyframes: Popular Culture and Cultural Studies
(London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 137–158. Meaghan Morris in the
same volume argues that ‘Lee’s modelling of an empowering cultural nationalism
detached from any specific political state is exactly what makes him inspiring for the
comparably abstract and culturalized ethnic “nationalisms” that flourish in the US
and other densely multicultural Western nations.’ See Morris, ‘Learning from Bruce
Lee: Pedagogy and Political Correctness in Martial Arts Cinema’ , Keyframes, 171–186,
esp. p. 183. For a contextualisation of the American political scene at the time of Lee’s
‘nationalist’ impact, see Yuan Shu, ‘From Bruce Lee to Jackie Chan’ , p. 53.
75. See M. T. Kato, ‘Burning Asia’ , for a contextualisation of Asian mass movements and
Lee’s ‘kinetic’ impact as a metaphorical struggle for decolonisation at the ‘nascent
stage of globalization’ (p. 94).
76. See David Desser, ‘The Kung Fu Craze’ , pp. 20–24.
77. See ‘Bruce Lee Takes Hong Kong Boxoffice by Storm’ , Yinhe huabao (‘Milky Way
Pictorial’), No. 164, November 1971, 24–25.
78. See ‘Li Xiaolong zaoshou gongji!’ (‘Bruce Lee under Attack!’), Yinse shijie (‘Cinemart’),

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No. 38, February 1973, p. 2. Director Chu Yuan acted as Shaws’ intermediary in making
the offer to Lee. Chu would have directed Lee in the Shaws production Nian Gengyao,
set in the Qing dynasty (the title referring to the name of the hero to be played by
Lee). The film was never made due to Lee’s death in July that year. See also Liu Yafo,
‘Li Xiaolong wei Shaoshi paixi neimu’ (‘The Inside Story of Bruce Lee’s Picture Deal
with Shaw Brothers’), in Yinse shijie (‘Cinemart’), No. 38, February 1973, 23.
79. For an assessment of the film, see Leon Hunt, ‘Han’s Island Revisited: Enter the
Dragon as Transnational Cult Film’ , reprinted in Eleftheriotis and Needham (eds),
Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide, pp. 426–436.
80. I am indebted to David Petersen, a Wing Chun coach in Melbourne, and freelance
contributor to many martial arts magazines, for pointing this out to me. Conversation
with Petersen, Melbourne, 7 August 1999.
81. For an assessment of this scene, see Leon Hunt, Kung Fu Cult Masters, p. 33.
82. Again, I owe this insight to David Petersen.
83. Mary Blume, ‘Kung Fu Has Come to Paris – but it Doesn’t Mean a Thing’ , Los Angeles
Times, 16 December 1974.
84. See Koichi Yamada and Koyo Udagawa, A Touch of King Hu, translated into Chinese by
Lai Ho and Ma Sung-chi (Hong Kong: Zhengwen she, 1998), p. 68.

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