Instructions posted.

CHAPTER 13 Stellar Transit Bruce Lee's Body or Chinese Masculinity in a Transnational Frame CHRIS BERRY BRUCE LEE's STELLAR transit across the world's screens was all the more spectacular for its shocking brevity. His untimely death at the age of thirty-one, at the height of his success and after only four martial arts fea­ tures, transformed him from new star to shooting star. Born in the United States, appearing suddenly out of Hong Kong, and flashing across the world's screens, he no sooner became the first global Chinese film star than he disap­ peared. In the years to follow, numerous Bruce Lee look-alikes tried and failed to fill the gap. They only succeeded in confirming his unique charisma, cen­ tral to which is the body he delights in displaying in his films. Stripped to the waist, lean muscles taught with fury, and poised to pounce (Fig. 13.1), iconic images of Bruce Lee continue to appear on book covers, DVD covers, and fan web pages. Everybody loves Bruce Lee's body, or so it seems. But they may not all love it for the same reasons. Bruce Lee's body is a transnational frame, shaped by his own experiences in the United States and Hong Kong and by perceptions of the various transnational markets his films were aimed at. If all mass cultural products are open to interpretation in the quest for maximum sales, this poly­ semic potential must be even truer for transnational cultural products. 1 Lee's deployment of his body as a weapon to win international and interracial com­ petitions has been variously celebrated as the triumph of the Chinese, Asian, or third-world underdog. It has also been understood within different models of masculinity and different body ideals, each with its own history. Finally, STELLAR TRANSIT 219 FIGURE 13.1. Bruce poised to pounce in Fist of Fury ( 1972). Lee's display of his body has elicited queer readings. These queer readings have intersected with the other ways of understanding Lee's body, sometimes provoking anger, sometimes being appropriated for pro-feminist or queer­ friendly purposes.

The different interpretations of Bruce Lee have developed in different times in different places according to local circumstances; they are situated. Some commentators are clearly aware of other discussions that have preceded them. However, overall, each discourse has proceeded relatively autono­ mously. The underdog interpretations rarely incorporate issues of masculinity, and although the discussions of masculinity may acknowledge Lee's underdog triumphs, they rarely relate this to the type of masculinity he developed. This essay aims to understand not only Bruce Lee's body as a transnational frame, but also the interpretations of it as such. In a transnational framework, it be­ comes significant that the vehicle for the "triumph of the underdog" narrative is also a Chinese man and that the particular masculinity he embodies fore­ grounds the eroticized male body.

Focusing on this framework enables me to make a further leap. In the past, I have noticed in passing that, while everybody else loves Bruce Lee's body, I feel more ambivalent. After focusing on the transit of Lee's star body more carefully, another altogether less spectacular asteroid comes in to view. Trail­ ing Lee, it haunts his reworking of Chinese masculinity, revealing the price of success for his model of Chinese masculinity. I therefore argue that Lee's body is an agonized one- caught in the double-bind of a compulsion to respond to the challenge of modern American masculinity on one hand, and a homo­ phobic and racially marked self-hatred that is a precondition for that ability to respond on the other. 220 CHRIS BERRY Triumph of the Underdog Bruce Lee's breakthrough as the first Chinese global star was based on only four features he made as an adult before his death. In the Lee legend, this achieve­ ment is a triumph of the underdog and a struggle against racism.' Born in the United States in 1940, Lee grew up in Hong Kong, where he was as a 1950s child star. Returning to the United States and graduating from the University of Washington in Seattle with a BA in Philosophy, he had some success on American television before losing the role of Caine in the Kung Fu series to Caucasian actor David Carradine. 3 American martial arts star Chuck Norris is reported as commenting, "Carradine's as good at martial arts as I am at acting."' Returning to Hong Kong, Lee debuted as an adult in 1971 with The Big Boss.' It broke box office records in Hong Kong. He followed this in 1972 with Fist of Fury. It also set new box office records and enabled Lee to estab­ lish his own production company, for which he wrote and directed The Way of the Dragon. In 1973 he made the James Bond-style film Enter the Dragon for Warner Brothers. At this high point, he died of a mysterious brain seizure. A fifth fihn, The Game of Death, was completed later by splicing scenes he had completed with new footage using stand-ins. Each film is a variation on the triumph of the underdog theme. In The Big Boss, Lee is a migrant working at a factory run by a Chinese boss in Thai­ land. His mother has warned him not to get into fights, but he gets drawn into protests after two workers die. Impressed by his martial arts skills, the boss promotes him to foreman. But when Lee discovers he is being used and the company is in fact a front for drug smuggling and prostitution, he goes on a furious rampage. The film ends with him being taken away by police after kill­ ing the boss. The Big Boss takes place almost entirely in the Chinese community in Thai­ land, and so it seems more about class than nationality or ethnicity. Fist of Fury is his most evidently nationalistic work. Set in semi-colonized Shanghai in 1908, it is based on a true event-the death of the founderof the Jingwu mar­ tial arts school. Lee plays a student. Discovering that a rival Japanese karate school killed his master, he breal,s his school's ban on deploying its fighting skills with a series of retaliatory killings. The Japanese taunt him with a sign bearing the "sick man of Asia'' slogan used to denigrate China. Lee destroys it and also the notorious "No Dogs or Chinese" sign at a park gate. The fihn culminates in a contest with a Russian champion brought in by the Japanese school. When the police come to arrest Lee, he runs at them and the camera.

The film ends with a freeze frame of Lee in mid-leap as we hear his character­ istic angry shriek and the hail of police gunfire. STELLAR TRANSIT 221 As Tony Rayns points out, The Way of the Dragon combines the migrant worker theme from The Big Boss with the contest or tournament theme from Fist of Fury. 6 A bumpkin from Hong Kong's New Territories, Lee flies to Rome to help his female cousin, whose restaurant is threatened by local gangsters.

Lee trains the waiters to fight back, against his uncle's advice that they should not fight. The gangsters bring in an American martial artist, played by Chuck Norris. The film culminates in the iconic Coliseum fight scene, followed by a twist when it transpires that his uncle was conspiring with the gangsters.

The box office success of these fihns led to Enter the Dragon, directed by Robert Clouse and guaranteed international distribution by Warner Brothers.

Playing off the popularity of the Bond series, Lee takes on the familiar role of an international police agent combating a wealthy evildoer. He is a highly trained Shaolin martial artist, and his opponent is a Shaolin-disciple-gone­ wrong called Han. He travels to Han's fortress with a Caucasian American and an African American. The latter is killed, but together with his Caucasian col­ league, he destroys the fortress and takes down Han.

The wide range of ethnic and national affiliations in this small body of work hardly constitutes what critics think of as an artist's oeuvre that inscribes a consistent signature. The possible exception is the fight scene choreogra­ phy, which Lee was intensively involved with. Most commentators note his commitment to realistic fighting without the aid of trampolines, wirework, or editing tricks, as well as his development of his own unique )eel Kune Do style.7 But even here, there are significant variations in the direction. Lee was only involved in writing and directing one film, The Way of the Dragon. Cheng Yu notes that director of The Big Boss and Fist of Fury "Luo Wei depended on editing and close-ups to convey the impact of the fight. Luo also often used subjective point-of-view shots such as Lee kicking or punching directly into the camera. In the Coliseum scene, Lee adopts a markedly different ap­ proach, using a medium or long shot to show the fighters on opposite sides of the (wide) screen or in two-shots. As such the style is closer to capturing the fight-performance or representing a reportage of a fight from the ring-side."' As for Enter the Dragon, Tony Rayns is not the only one to disparage Robert Clouse, pointing out that he "fails to comprehend the most basic rule for film­ ing the martial arts-that it is imperative to show protagonists full-length if their movements are to constitute the dynamics of the drama."' This variety extends to the narratives as well as the directing styles, forc­ ing audiences to decode selectively if they want to "make sense" of what Bruce Lee stands for. Four main and often overlapping possibilities for understand­ ing Lee's underdog triumphs circulate; they either represent a triumph for Hong Kong, for diasporic Chinese in general, for the third world, or for Asian 222 CHRIS BERRY Americans. Not all commentators try to assign meaning to Lee's kung fu, and a formalist appreciation of the fighting style is also common. However, noting Lee's Caucasian opponents in Fist of Fury and The Way of the Dragon, Stephen Teo is rightly suspicious of this approach. 10 Most who see Lee as representing Hong Kong base this on his childhood there and his participation in the Hong Kong cinema. However, Kwai-Cheung Lo acknowledges that Lee does not connote a clear Hong Kong identity to most people from Hong Kong. Not only did Lee spend much of his life in the United States and hold a US passport, but he also appeared as generically Chinese rather than specifically from Hong Kong in all his films except The Way of the Dragon. Furthermore, his films were in Mandarin, rather than the local Can­ tonese language of Hong Kong.11 This lack of Hong Kong specificity leads other authors to see Lee's triumph as a metaphor for diasporic Chinese pride. Ying­ chi Chu states, "No other Hong Kong star can more clearly express diasporic consciousness than Bruce Lee. His three best-known films ... present stories of Chinese who live in places dominated and controlled by non-Chinese." 12 Stephen Teo talces a similar view, seeing Lee's "cause" as "cultural nationalism," an ethnically based form implicitly distinct from the state-based nationalism of either the People's Republic with its capital in Beijing or the Republic with its temporary capital in Taiwan after 1949.13 However, Lo reads the same char­ acteristics differently, believing that Hong Kong inhabitants identify with the imaginary China of Lee's films. Precisely because "Lee's body is unable to offer a solid ground for locating a specific entity, 'Hong Kong; " Lo sees a homology between this slippery identity-in-non-identity with Hong Kong's own ghostly presence fading out of British colonial status and into mainland China. 14 The same lack of nation-state specificity grounds the third-world reading of Lee. Hsiung-Ping Chiao notes that Lee's anti-western aggression "was con­ genial not only to Chinese, but literally to all people who felt that they had been degraded by western Imperialism (South Americans, Arabs, and Orien­ tals)."15 Vijay Prashad not only remembers seeing Enter the Dragon on its re­ lease in India, but also contrasts the film with the Bond series as follows: "Bond was the agent of international corruption manifest in the British MI-5, while Lee stood his ground against corruption of all forms .... With his bare fists and his nunchakus, Lee provided young people with the sense that we could be victorious, like the Vietnamese guerillas, against the virulence of interna­ tional capitalism." In order to malce this interpretation that Lee is fighting in solidarity with what he elsewhere calls "the army in black pajamas," Prashad has to overlook the inconvenient fact that in Enter the Dragon Lee is himself an MI-5 agent. 16 Furthermore, the horror many diasporic Chinese audiences had of communism constrained Lee's image from any explicit socialism. STELLAR TRANSIT 223 At the time of the original release of Lee's features, the kind of third-world internationalism Prashad remembers fondly was, as he details, closely inter­ woven with ethnic minority politics in the United States. For example, David Desser has traced the popularity of Lee's films with African American audi­ ences,17 and the importance of non-Caucasian audiences for later crossover actors such as Jackie Chan and Jet Li is both well known and also manifest in the ethnicity of many of their American co-stars. 18 However, as Jachinson Chan has pointed out, if there was ambivalence in Hong Kong about whether Lee counted as a genuine local, the same is true in the United States for his status as an Asian American. 19 Perhaps in these circumstances it is not so surpris­ ing that much of the literature on Asian American culture makes only passing reference to Lee. Apart from Chan's work, the only other major exception is that ofSheng-mei Ma, who places Lee's nationalism as part of a broad Chinese and Asian phenomenon, including Asian American culture. 2° Cha.11, however, places Lee as a breakthrough in the representation of Asian American men, who appear feminized in figures such as Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan. Competing Masculinities As part of a monograph about Asian American masculinity, Jachinson Chan's discussion of Bruce Lee analyzes both the triumph of the underdog narrative and Lee's 1nasculinity. It is exceptional in this regard, since most commenta­ tors malce no connection between Lee's underdog triumphs and the type of masculinity he deploys. Even for Chan, masculinity exists only in the singu­ lar and there is no discussion of different ways of being masculine. Maybe this is also why other authors do not discuss Lee's embodied masculinity; maybe it seems "natural" that only a masculine man could symbolize the communal reempowerment they see in his narratives, and "masculine" only means one thing.

For example, Kwai-cheung Lo notes Matthew Turner's research on the turn to a "modern western mode of health, posture and physique'' in Hong Kong in the 1960s, adding that "a unique combination of western bodybuilding and Chinese kung fu (with an admixture of James Bond karate and mainland flying action) were brought together in the figure of Bruce Lee." 21 This is a tell­ ing observation, suggesting a tension between other Chinese masculinities and western muscle culture, but Lo does not pursue this line of enquiry any further.

Similarly, in her essay on race and masculinity in martial arts cinema, Yvonne Tasker hints at different masculinities when she comments, "The Chinese hero often fights for and as part of a community, while within the American tradi­ tion the hero has become an increasingly isolated figure." 22 Tasker implicitly 224 CHRIS BERRY treats Chinese community and American individualism as fixed cultural char­acteristics here, rather than as figures in the dynamic contestation of what a real man is in different but increasingly interconnected spaces in the wake of colonialism, imperialism, and global "free trade." Kam Louie's recent study of Chinese masculinity gives us a better under­ standing of this. He details two longstanding masculinities, both valorized in Chinese society. Wen or refined masculinity is symbolized by Confucius and the gentleman scholar-official, and emphasizes culture-based power rather than physical prowess. Highly attractive to women, the wen man may dally with them, but in the end must give up erotic pleasure to fulfill his ethical obligations.

Wu or martial masculinity is symbolized by the god Guan Yu­ shrines to whom figure in many a john Woo film - and the fighters who inhabit the legendary domain of the jianghu (rivers and lakes) outside civil society.

These heroes emphasize physical strength and skill. Except when drunk, they eschew women completely, and their primary commitments are to their blood brothers. The wu fighter's body may be more revealed than the wen scholar's, which is almost always lost in billowing robes. But in neither case is the male bodyeroticized: the fighter's body signifies his martial prowess only.

23 Indeed, the very concept of the "muscle" did not exist until appropriated from west­ ern anatomy studies in the nineteenth century. 21 This specific "invisibility" of the male body in earlier Chinese culture is part of a broader absence of the re­ vealed body in Chinese fine art prior to contact with the west . 25 Louie notes, "The Bruce Lee screen persona has all three characteristics of loyalty, righteousness and mateship to justify him as a wu hero." He adds that "like the wu heroes in traditional narratives, even when the women around him are concerned about him, the Bruce Lee characters do not romance these beauties like a wen scholar would do: he always attends to his social obligations first." 26 Jachinson Chan, apparently unaware of these other masculinities, in­ terprets Lee's behavior within the conventions of American masculinity only, claiming that "the characters he portrays are not typically patriarchal or mi­ sogynistic. Lee's characters do not oppress the female characters nor do they exhibit an exaggerated James Bond-like heterosexism." 27 Within the codes of wu masculinity, however, Lee's behavior is not about honoring women, but perfectly patriarchal and misogynistic; he either recognizes his duty to protect them because of his relationship to their family, or treats them as a dangerous distraction to be ignored. This difference of interpretation also points up an underlying tension be­ tween Asian American and older Chinese expectations of the wu hero. For jachinson Chan, Lee disappointingly "perpetuates the asexual role that west­ ern culture has constructed for Asian men and does not spend the night with STELLAR TRANSIT 225 the Asian female character-something that would be unthinkable in a James Bond film." 28 But behavior that would represent masculine achievement within contemporary American codes-although not earlier English notions of gen­ tlemanly behavior- would signal failure within wu masculinity. (Although it falls outside the scope of this essay, these tensions continue to dog Chinese male martial arts stars trying to cross over into the international market. Both Jackie Chan and jet Li's awkward negotiations of sexuality demonstrate the difficulty of these mutually incompatible expectations.) Louie does not treat the two Chinese masculinities as static, nor China as a sealed unit unaffected by the rest of the world. International success consti­ tutes the Bruce Lee phenomenon as «a reassertion of a Chinese wu masculinity in the international arena;' Louie claims. But in line with Kwai-cheung Lo's comments about the cult of bodybuilding in Hong Kong in the 1960s, he also notes that "the world dominance of American media means that the western masculine ideals represented in many of the American images are becoming more and more commonly accepted in China" and acknowledges that Lee's display of his body, along with gossip about his alleged off-screen womaniz­ ing, breaks with the old wu masculinity because it "exudes much sexuality." Therefore, Lee represents not just a reassertion of wu masculinity, but also a modification "to suit the new hybrid culture of the diaspora Chinese." 29 However, Louie may understate Lee's departure from the established wu model. First, the display of the eroticized body is a startling break with almost all the martial arts stars of the past. Before the late 1960s, the heroes of Hong Kong action films appeared not only clothed but also usually covered from neck to toe in loose outfits that completely de-emphasized the body. This is true not only of swordplay heroes, but also of those associated with the kung fu fist-based martial arts like Lee himself. For example, Kwan Tak-hing, who played Wong Pei-Hong in the popular 1950s and early 1960s series, always dressed in dark traditional clothing.Jo Only with Zhang Che's films did this begin to change and open the door for Lee's consistent self-display.JI Although Lee's self-display may have been novel in the martial arts genre, the fit body as a mark of modernization has a long history in the Chinese cinema. As early as the 1930s, Li Lili appeared in bathing costumes and gym­ nastics outfits in Queen of Sports (Tiyu huanghou, 1934), and male stars ap­ peared stripped to the waist as workers building a highway to help the army get to the front and fight the Japanese in The Highway (Dalu, 1934). This film also features a notorious male nude scene, but such titillation disappeared after 1949. Bodily display in People's Republic cinema continued, but was confined to healthy and active physical participation in nation building. For example, in superficially de-eroticized sports genre films such as Woman Basketball Player 226 CHRIS BERRY No.5 (Nii/an wu hao), playing for the national team was a metaphor for devot­ ing oneself to building the nation. With this larger history in mind, Bruce Lee's own hybridization of Chi­ nese wu masculinity and American masculinity can be read as not separate from but closely tied to the various nationalist and anticolonial interpreta­ tions of the underdog narratives in his films. At the same time as Lee asserts Chinese/Asian/third-world reempowerment through his films and persona, he also does so through the assertion of masculinity. Furthermore, within a dynamic Chinese context, Lee also symbolizes choosing wu over wen masculinity to carry out this mission. This is a signifi­ cant shift. As Kam Louie points out, wu is not generally as highly valued as the more refined wen, which stresses submission to order and rule through ethics over the aggression and force associated with wu. 32 Indeed, one of the recurring themes in Lee's films is the need to overturn the conventional wen insistence on not using force. In The Big Boss, Lee's mother has warned him not to fight, but in the end the quest for justice requires him to. In Fist of Fury, the Jingwu School has trained its students to treat their skills as a form of physical exer­ cise, but Lee cannot let his master's death go unrevenged. In The Way of the Dragon, Uncle Wang tells the younger waiters to pay the Italian gangsters off rather than get into a fight, but it turns out that he himself is in the villains' pay.

According to Cheng Yu, this narrative pattern conforms to "the Chinese maxim of being able to bear provocation and not having to fight unless abso­ lutely necessary." 33 Indeed, it is the case that in extreme circumstances wu ag­ gression may be unleashed. However, The Way of the Dragon also marks an important deviation from the usual codes and a point where Lee's modern and transnational neo-wu masculinity appropriates from American codes. Usually, the legal and ethical breaches that wu violence constitutes must ultimately be eliminated, even if they are used to restore order. This is why Lee is arrested at the end of The Big Boss and even shot by the Chinese foreign settlement police at the end of Fist of Fury. However, in The Way of the Dragon, instead of being arrested Lee bids goodbye to his young female cousin, returning to Hong Kong and leaving her to run her restaurant in peace. This is equivalent to the cliche of the cowboy who rides off into the sunset, regretfully leaving the young widow after saving her life and homestead. By Enter the Dragon, Lee has appropriated the American masculinity codes of the gunfighter film even more fully, when he is specially hired by MI-5 to take on the evil Han. There is another way in which Lee's neo-wu masculinity appropriates American masculinity. The moment at which he can no longer turn the other cheek is not only marked by his engaging the enemy with the full force of his fury, in the typical wu manner. It is also when the shirt literally comes off and i STELLAR TRANSIT 227 he bares his muscular upper body. Unlike all other Chinese martial arts stars, Lee displays his muscles as the 1950s sword-and-sandal film stars had done and Schwarzenegger and Stallone were to do in the near future. Furthermore, the response of women characters to Lee signals that this is not just a display of weaponry but also an erotic moment. However, continued difference be­ tween neo-wu and American masculinity can be discerned in Enter the Dragon. Both Lee's Caucasian and African American colleagues have no qualms about sleeping with the girls Han provides on the night before the tournament~in­ deed the African American character's behavior conforms to racist stereotypes about hypersexuality. In contrast, Lee refuses all such temptations, conform­ ing to the core wu value of eschewing involvement with women lest they sap his strength or damage his concentration. Bruce Lee and the Queer Body Not only women are attracted to Lee's stripped torso. His body is appropri­ ated for queer viewing pleasure in both films and critical literature. In The Way of the Dragon, Wei Ping' ao reprises the role of the traitorous translator from Fist of Fury. In the first film, he worked for the Japanese karate school that assassinated the Jingwu master. This time he works for the Italian gang­ sters. In Fist of Fury, he already embodied the physically weak and fawning "sick man of Asia," but in The Way of the Dragon what was just a certain lack of masculinity becomes fully fledged effeminate homosexuality. Not only does he flounce around in a variety of Elton John-style outfits, but he also makes no effort to hide his attraction to Lee's character. Tony Rayns refers to two occasions when he "is required to fondle Lee's biceps and pectorals." Indeed, during one effort to pressure Lee into working for the gangsters, Wei does find himself running his fingers across Lee's (clothed) chest and mumbling, "What rippling muscles!" However, their very first meeting is even more suggestive.

At the end of an earlier attempt to browbeat the restaurant, Wei literally bumps into Lee for the first time on his way out. Annoyed at first, his tone changes when he steps back and gets a better look at Lee. Reaching down between Lee's legs to where Lee's cloth belt is dangling, Wei picks it up and tucks into his waistband. "Watch where you're going;' he tells Lee sweetly. The symbolic possibilities of the belt action leave little doubt that Wei hopes Lee might be going his way {Fig. 13.2). The queer appreciation of Lee's body is also realized in the critical lit­ erature. For Stephen Teo, who is fiercely insistent that his Chinese "cultural nationalist" interpretation of Lee is the only correct one, queering Lee inter­ feres with Lee's devotion to his cause: «These critics speak of Lee's 'narcissism', 228 CHRIS BERRY FIGURE 13.2. A little belt action in The Way of the Dragon. a codeword for homosexual imagery, and only grudgingly acknowledge his nationalistic stance." He notes that "a section of gay critics" describes the scene in which Lee trains in his room in The Way of the Dragon, looking at himself in a mirror, as "onanistic," and "One western critic has even gone to the ex­ tent of quoting Lee's wife, to point out that 'he had one undescended testicle,' so as to prove that Lee was plagued by an inferiority complex ... leading to bodybuilding, martial arts, and narcissism in later life." 34 In fact, all these quotes come from one source, Tony Rayns. Putting aside for a moment the issue of Teo's outrage, there is an interesting slippage in Rayns's discussion of The Way of the Dragon that reveals his investment in the film. Rayns does indeed describe the training scene as "narcissistic (it involves a mirror) to the point of being onanistic," and adds that, "The audience ob­ serves it voyeuristically, through the eyes of the character's female cousin, who enters the room unknown to him." He then observes that, "In later scenes, the audience surrogate is a homosexual member of the villain's gang, who is required to fondle Lee's biceps and pectorals admiringly on two occasions." 35 In fact, there is an important difference between the female cousin and Wei Ping'ao's character, Mr. Ho. As Rayns describes, Lee's cousin spies on him and the audience is given a point-of-view shot from her perspective. But in the two scenes where Mr. Ho admires Lee, the audience maintains a separate, third per­ son perspective, and there is no point-of.view shot. In other words, to identify with Mr. Ho in this moment of gay pleasure, as Rayns' slippage indicates he does, requires spectatorial projection. Teo's sarcastic anger at Rayns reveals both incompatibility between the queer appropriation of Lee and various triumph-of-the-underdog readings, and also that the transnational circulation of Lee's neo-wu masculinity has positioned him in a world of American masculinity. First, the tension between STELLAR TRANSIT 229 queer appropriation of Lee and the underdog interpretations pivots on how Lee's bodily display is understood and which scenes are emphasized. In the underdog interpretations, Lee's bodily display at moments of high anger prior to fighting is highlighted as a display of superior physical weaponry. In gay appropriations, staring at himself bare-chested in the mirror is highlighted as the male-to-male narcissistic foundation on which to build a gay appreciation. In the underdog interpretations, Lee's body is a vehicle for the assertion of power. In the gay appropriations, it is an object of desire. Of course, Lee may be desired as a powerful and masculine man. Indeed, Tan Hoang Nguyen explains that Bruce Lee's star image provides the foundation for that of a gay porn actor named after Lee's son Brandon and noted as the first Asian star top rather than bottom." But this does not change the fundamental shift from subject with which audiences identify to object of desire. Furthermore, if the gay spectator is also imagined to be white, like Tony Rayns, then the pleasure Bruce Lee seemed to reserve for Chinese, third-world, and Asian American audiences appears re-appropriated or "stolen" by their symbolic oppressors.

This also explains the discomfort Teo and others have with western "formal­ ist" interpretations of Lee that appreciate the grace of his movements but wipe out the politics of reempowerment.

Second, the anxiety about homosexuality and its meanings further reveals the degree to which Lee's neo-wu masculinity is hybridized with and posi­ tioned within globalized American masculinity. Homophobia and its atten­ dant anxieties are an integral component of that masculinity. However, ac­ corcling to Louie and others, they were not an important feature of either wu or wen masculinity prior to contact with the modern west. 37 One can specu­ late on the reasons for this (see one treatment of the question in chapter 3 above). However, if earlier wen and wu masculinities provide models for emu­ lation, this emulation is built on different mechanisms from those associated with modern American masculinity. Written and oral narratives preclude pos­ sibilities for gazing upon the muscular body. The actors in "traditional" Chi­ nese popular performance modes are clothed. The one exception would be acrobats, but here absence of narrative might limit the possibilities for iden­ tification. In contrast, visual media such as the cinema and the printed image are key vehicles encouraging engagement with modern American masculinity, making the display of a strong body more important.

In these visual circumstances, there is always a tension between the male body as agent in action and object on display. Techniques such as photograph­ ing the male body displaying bulging armor-like muscles or as though frozen in action are deployed to contain the implicit threat of feminization in ob­ jectification and, according to the codes of modern masculinity, homosexu- 230 CHRIS BERRY alization. 38 However, anxiety about potential homosexuality follows modern American masculinity wherever it goes. For not only is the display of the body destabilizing, but the ultimate goal of this model of masculinity is to win the acknowledgment of other men. This homosocial aim can also tip all too easily into homosexuality if respect and admiration become the foundation for de­ sire, and therefore the boundary line between the two must be rigorously po­ liced.39 As Robin Wood has pointed out, the action movie can be understood as a site where these tensions are worked out. Under this symbolic umbrella, vio­ lence between men displaces and transforms the threat of desire, expelling it with the same force as the punches landed on an opponent. 40 Bruce Lee's neo­ wu masculinity carries the full force of this homophobic structure. However, it is further complicated and specified by the politics of imperialism and anti­ imperialism. As is often noted, there is usually a racial hierarchy amongst Lee's opponents. Taking on other Chinese or even Japanese is an easy beginning.

The ultimate test is often a Caucasian opponent, like the Russian champion employed by the Japanese in Fist of Fury, or the Chuck Norris character em­ ployed by the gangsters in The Way of the Dragon. Furthermore, there is a marked difference in the way Lee treats his differ­ ent opponents in some of his films. Whereas other Asian fighters are crushed with contempt, Caucasian opponents are taken seriously and, in the Coliseum scene in which Lee takes on and defeats Norris, even treated with respect.

Cheng Yu points out that Lee eschews "his usual tactics of shrieking, grimac­ ing, or sneering at his opponent." 41 For Cheng, this marks a move towards realism, but for Vijay Prashad the fight is "a battle between Chinese civili­ zation and western civilization, between the paper tiger of U.S. imperialism and the rising tide of the Red East." 42 For Sheng-mei Ma, on the other hand, going to Rome and fighting in the Coliseum is a classic manifestation of the double cousciousness that submits to colonial values at the same time as it re­ sists.43 Tony Rayns concludes from this scene (contrary to Teo)s claims about his grudgiug ackuowledgment of nationalism) that "The Way of the Dragon ... constitutes an aggressive assertion of identity, both as an individual fulfilled through martial arts and as a Chinese proud of his race." But under the rubric of the "narcissism" that Stephen Teo sees as a code word for homosexuality, he also writes, "the eutire sequence is predicated on the fighters' mutual respect for each other's art ... [Lee] kills him in a spirit of reverence. After the killing, he drapes the dead man's tunic and black belt over the body, and kneels be­ side it in silence." 44 (Fig. 13.3) The tension between Lee's need to overcome Norris and his respect for him reaffirms Sheng-mei Ma's observations about double consciousness. It STELLAR TRANSIT 231 FIGURE 13.3. Reverence for the white man's body in The Way of the Dragon. also underlines how much Lee desires acknowledgment from his American opponent. On a metaphorical level, this reveals a tension at the heart of the anticolonial politics of remasculinization epitomized by Bruce Lee. 45 If Lee's star image affirms the ability of Chinese men to win in the international arena, it also affirms their submission to the values of modern American masculinity.

This tension echoes that between homosexuality and homosociality that Sedg­ wick notes at the core of modern American masculinity. Furthermore, the loving homosociality of the Coliseum scene contrasts significantly with the fate of the Wei Ping'ao characters. First, these absolutely despised characters do not even have the status of an opponent. As a result, they also do not even make the bottommost rung in the hierarchy of Lee ad­ versaries discussed by other writers. In Fist of Fury, Lee's first revenge killings are the two henchmen who assassinated his teacher, one Chinese and one Japa­ nese. They are dispatched in one brief fight scene with a series of furious and unrestrained blows to the stomach and are found hanging from a lamppost the next day. Wei Ping'ao's traitorous translator is next. But where an actual fight scene is used to dispatch the assassins, he does not merit this. Lee disguises himself as a rickshaw driver whom Wei hires one night. Taking him down a blind alley, Lee turns and lifts the rickshaw by the shafts with Wei in it, tossing it to its destruction. His aim is to get Wei to confess who ordered the assassi­ nation. Gutless and without loyalty even to his foreign masters, Wei quickly tells Lee it was Suzuki from the Japanese club. Claiming to have been "only following orders," he begs for mercy. But when Lee turns, Wei grabs a brick to bludgeon him. Lee turns back in fury, but the film does not even consider it worth showing us the actual crushing of this insect-like figure, and we cut immediately to the next morning and Wei's body hanging from a lamppost.

In The Way of the Dragon, Lee does not even deign to lay a finger on Mr. Ho, 232 CHRIS BERRY his homosexual suitor. Rather, after the Coliseum scene, when Ho runs up to Uncle Tang to tell him the bad news, his Italian boss also drives up and shoots him before he can confess. In other words, he is treated as an afterthought. The contrast between Lee's loving killing of Chuck Norris in the Coliseum and treatment of Wei's characters as vermin is thought provoking. Could it be that in the cosmos of Lee's neo-wu masculinity, the slender body that used to signify the refined wen scholar now signifies effeminacy and even "the sick man of Asia"? Where wen refinement was combined with education to signify wis­ dom and the superior power of the cerebral over the merely muscular, along with a sure command of ethics, in the neo-wu cosmos it is bundled together with spinelessness and disloyalty to signify not only failed Chinese mascu­ linity, but also the "fag" or "pansy." )achinson Chan is optimistic about Lee's behavior towards Mr. Ho, his homosexual admirer in The Way of the Dragon. He reads Lee's stoic response to Ho's come-ons as a tolerant attitude compared to the homophobic violence that might be expected from a macho American hero. 46 But within the neo-wu, the overall treatment and fate of Wei Ping'ao's characters in both Fist of Fury and The Way of the Dragon configures Ho's be­ havior as being not even worthy of a violent response. A particular exchange and translation mechanism is at work here. Tan Hoang Nguyen notes that in the economy of gay porn star Brandon Lee's image, his relatively assimilated Americanness contrasts with the migrant and marked Asianness of the bottoms he is often paired up with. This may be a subset of a larger pattern that Lee's neo-wu masculinity is the archetype for.

Lee reinvigorates wu by appropriating elements of modern American mascu­ linity; power is produced in exchange for jettisoning various aspects of earlier Chinese masculinities. In this way, the Lee persona's trajectory resembles the classic production of the Lacanian subject through a process of subjection, whereby one is acknowledged and given status in return for subjecting oneself to the Law of the Father. In the process the "fag" is produced as the hated part of the self that is to be repressed and symbolically expelled. However, in the case of Bruce Lee the intersection of the colonial and masculinity in the pro­ duction of neo-wu masculinity further marks the despised "fag" or "pansy" as Chinese, and the model to be admired and emulated as white. Here an irony emerges in Bruce Lee's otherwise completely unironic persona: while appear­ ing to overcome all odds and defeat the imperialist, this is only achieved by subscribing to his larger value system. Here again we have another manifesta­ tion of the "double consciousness" Sheng-mei Ma notes in Lee. In these complex circumstances, I would like to conclude by returning to Meaghan Morris's discussion of Lee as a teacher. She discusses an episode in a film about Lee, where he and his wife Linda are shown going to the movies STELLAR TRANSIT 233 together. They watch Breakfast at Tiffany's. When Mickey Rooney's suppos­ edly humorous character, Mr. Yunioshi, comes on screen, the audience howls.

Linda laughs) too, until she notices Bruce's stony reaction. Morris's point is about how Linda learns across the cultural divide as a result of being with Bruce:" The personal dimension of my discomfort when watching Bruce Lee movies is similar. Much as my eye is caught by his spectacular body, it is also drawn to the smaller asteroid trailing in its wake-Wei Ping'ao-and the homophobia produced simultaneously with Lee's neo-wu masculinity. And further, I cannot help notice the specific racialized structure of that homopho­ bia. To equate the fag with Chineseness and ideal masculinity with America is not only homophobic, it also inscribes a trace of self-hatred onto Chinese re­ masculinization.

Notes 1. Fiske, "Television," 392~393. 2. There are nu1nerous books and websites devoted to Bruce Lee. For this essay, I have drawn heavily on Little's biography, Bruce Lee: A Warrior's Journey. Made with the coopera­ tion of Lee's widow, this book does not dwell on the rumors that surrounded his death in the bed of a Taiwanese actress, all of which can be found readily in other "unauthorized" accounts. Earlier biographies include Thomas, Bruce Lee: Fighting Spirit; Lee, The Bruce Lee Story; and Clouse, Bruce Lee: The Biography. 3. On the television series, see I-Iama1noto, Monitored Peril, 59-63; Ma, Deathly Em­ brace, 60-61.

4. Meyers et al., Bruce Lee to the Ninjas, 221; cited in Morris, "Learning," 183.

5. Lee's first three fihns had different English titles in the United States. The Big Boss (Tangshan daxiong) is known there as Fists of Fury. Fist of Fu,y (Jingwumen) is known as The Chinese Connection. The Way of the Dragon (Meng long guo Jiang) is known as The Re­ turn of the Dragon. 6. Rayns, "Bruce Lee and Other Stories," 28.

7. For example, see Chiao, "Bruce Lee," 33. For Chiao, Lee's choreographic style is understood not only under the rubric of realism but also as simultaneously western in com­ parison to the Chinese fantasy-style that emphasized wirework and so forth. It is true that this dominated the ~wordplay martial arts films that Lee's kung fu films replaced. However, many earlier kung fu films from the 1950s such as the famous Wong Fei-hong series also featured relatively "realistic" styles of fighting. 8. Cheng, "Anatomy," 25.

9. Rayos, "Bruce Lee: Narcissism," 112.

10. Teo, "True Way," 70. From formalism to fan worship, self-serving western read­ ings of martial arts films that ignore the colonial and neocolonial dynamics and therefore repeat the colonial dynamic of resource extraction are too numerous to mention. 11. Lo, "Muscles." 234 CHRIS BERRY 12. Chu, Hong Kong Cinema, 38. 13. Teo, "Bruce Lee," 110-114. 14. Lo, "Muscles," 111.

15. Chiao, "Bruce Lee," 37.

16. Prashad, "Bruce Lee," 54, 64.

17. Desser, "Kung Fu." 18. See, for example, Marchetti, "Jackie Chan." 19. Chan, Chinese American Masculinities, 75.

20. Ma, Deathly E1nbrace, 54-55. 21. Lo, "Muscles," 106-107.

22. Tasker, "Fists," 316.

23. Louie, Chinese Masculinity, 1-22ff. 24. See Heinrich, The Afterlife of Irnages, especially chapter 4. 25. }Iay, "Body Invisible." 26. Louie, Chinese Masculinity, 145, 147. 27. Chan, Chinese American Masculinities, 77. 28. Ibid., 89.

29. Louie, Chinese Niasculinity, 13, 147-148. 30. On the Wong Fei-hong (a.le.a. Huang Feihong) series, see Rodriguez, "I-Jong Kong." 31. Not only did Zhang make his stars display their bodies, but, like Lee, this display has also provoked queer readings, as in Stanley Kwan's 1996 documentary film Yang+ Yin:

Gender in Chinese Cinema. 32. Louie, Chinese Masculinity. 33. Cheng, ''Anatomy," 24.

34. Teo, "True Way," 70-71, 75, 77. 35. Rayns, "Bruce Lee: Narcissism," 111. The observation about the undescended tes­ ticle is on 110. 36. Nguyen, "Resurrection of Brandon Lee." 37. Hinsch, Passions. However, this does not mean "homosexuality" was accepted or even exists as a concept in China at this time. DikOtter, Sex, 145; Sang, Emerging Lesbian, 45-46; and Martin, Situating Sexualities, 32.

38. On muscles as armor, see Dyer, "White Man's Muscles." On photographing action poses, see Meyer's comparison of Rock Hudson to other {more mobile) stars in "Rock" (pp. 261-262).

39. Sedgwick, Between Men. 40. Robin Wood's discussion of Raging Bull is exemplary. Wood, "Two Films." 41. Cheng, "Anatomy," 25.

42. Prashad, "Bruce Lee," 63. 43. Ma, Deathly En1brace, 58.

44. Rayns, "Bruce Lee: Narcissism," 112.

45. I am borrowing "remasculinization" from Susan Jeffords, Remasculinization. 46. Chan, Chinese American Masculinities. 47. Morris, "Learning," 180. CHAPTER 14 love in Ruins Spectral Bodies in Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love OLIVIA KHOO He reme1nbers those vanished years As though looking through a dusty window pane The past is something he could see, but not touch And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.I RECENT POPULAR INTEREST in Hong Kong's art cinema has been met by a critical admonition from Western film academics to consider the ethics of cross-cultural spectatorship, in particular in the context of interna­ tional film festival circulation and reception. While some attempts have been made to consider the place of these films in the lives of diasporic Chinese view­ ers, far fewer inquiries into an ethics of ethnic spectatorship have been engaged; that is, almost no one has challenged the claims for either a self-evident "Chi­ nese gaze" or Chinese identity in existing conceptions of embodied spectator­ ship.2 This essay joins these debates by proposing an inhabitable, ethnically marked, and ethically engaged position from which to view Hong Kong art cinema, specifically from a diasporic Chinese perspective. I use the figure of the specter- something neither simply disappearing nor wholly material -to challenge existing notions of embodied spectatorship so as to consider how we might conceive of the body in recent Hong Kong art cinema. This body can no longer be regarded as a dependable marker of identity, whole and fully present, since Chineseness also appears today in increasingly fragmented forms tied to diasporic experience. In considering the spectatorship for this cinema, what emerges as the most difficult and perhaps the most pressing issue is how to con­ ceive of an ethical diasporic Chinese viewing position out of the impossibility of rooted Chineseness. I will use the film In the Mood for Love to describe how a theory of spectatorship might be formed through rehearsals of and for view­ ing, just as this film, like others in Wong's oeuvre, are rehearsals of and for love. i :I !1 I! I I J!