How kung fu shows cultural merging of East and West

Agility versus brawn

Lee, who would have turned 74 had he still lived, not only introduced martial arts to the West but also redefined cinematic action itself. Gone was the old idea that bigger is better. Swiftness and a precise kick can topple mass. Agility proves superior to brawn. The body in martial arts motion is pure art, a kind of acrobatic dance, endowed with a lethal elegance and grace that had not, up until Bruce Lee, been imagined cinematically.

His swift kicks and furious punches and energized grunts made a major dent in the American imagination. Think about it: John Wayne, seen as a typical American brawny male, never lifted his leg for anything but to try to ride a horse. But after Bruce Lee, everybody, to paraphrase Carl Douglas, is kung fu fighting.

Picture this kung fu moment: Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi are dueling it out with mind-boggling martial arts skills from one ancient rooftop to another, a steady drumbeat egging them on. Fists and kicks fly, elbows and knees clash, there are back flips and somersaults, and the excited audience at the Sony Metreon Cineplex murmur their collective approval. When that awesome scene is over, they erupt in clamorous cheers. It's Ang Lee's film "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," an American production, filmed entirely in Mandarin but shown in thousands of major theaters across the United States — a first.

Lee has rendered sophisticated and elegant an old genre, lifting it above its often "chopsocky," low-budget status to the level of poetry. I must confess, watching the audience's enthusiastic reaction I am of two minds. It is like seeing my own childhood fantasies emerge finally from my parents' dusty garage to spill irrevocably onto the public sphere.

I feel immensely proud and excited, but there is also this nagging feeling lurking right underneath, something akin to mourning. In an era when America increasingly relies on the Far East for entertainment and inspiration, my private world, it seems, is private no longer; Asia exudes her mysticism and America is falling slowly under her spell.

Kung fu fighting, once exotic, has become the norm. At the beginning, learning martial arts was the foreground, the underlying plot. Remember David Carradine in the TV series "Kung Fu" in the early 1970s? As Kwai Chang Caine, he learned martial arts in China and then went on to search for his father in America. But these days kung fu fighting is so common that it serves as the background to various movies, television shows, video games, and ads.