How kung fu shows cultural merging of East and West

Bruce Lee has single-handedly changed world cinema, and the way the West looks at its own body.

Picture this memory: I am 9 and being driven to school in an army jeep in Saigon, Vietnam. The street is filled with weeping young men donning white headbands. On their shoulders sits an altar strewn with garlands. My jeep draws near. Bruce Lee's handsome face stares out from the altar with determination and seriousness. Asia's most famous son had died a few days earlier while making a film in Hong Kong. I, too, begin to cry.

Every schoolboy I know loves Bruce Lee, and I am no exception. At school, the older boys often say, "Little Dragon Lee shows the Americans and the French how to fight and what honor really is."

Through Little Dragon Lee, we could imagine our own faces on the silver screen. Lee transcended race and national boundaries. In the schoolyard many of us, after having seen a Bruce Lee movie, would pretend to practice martial arts. We would fight each other under the shade of the tamarind trees and repeat certain lines learned from the film, and echo that famous Bruce Lee high-pitched growl to unnerve our opponents.

Lee single-handedly brought the heroic Asian male image, long suffering from invisibility, onto the world stage, restoring Asian pride. How could I not weep at his passing?

It's been over four decades since then. I am an American now and so much has changed since Bruce Lee first flew like an avenging god across the silver screen with his awe-inspiring kicks. For one thing he has single-handedly changed world cinema, and the way the West looks at its own body.