Be Water, My Friend: The Early Years of Bruce Lee (review)

It is perhaps overly tempting to draw a straight line from a young boy who cannot sit still and behave to a man who excels in martial arts, and to Mochizuki's credit, he offers here a more complex portrait of Lee's early life. The antsy boy is also a courteous son who won't let his mother languish without a dance partner; the reluctant student is also a child smitten with books of his own choosing; the quick-tempered hooligan is also the martial-arts pupil who eventually learns that nonresistance can be as powerful a force as simple pugilism. Mochizuki concludes his narrative with the eighteen-year-old Lee on route to America—packed off to friends by his disappointed family—in the middle of an epiphany: "Bruce watched the swirling water from the deck of the ship. He saw how water always found a way around an obstacle and continued on." Mochizuki lacks the lighter touch of a Don Brown in dealing with the formative years of a prominent figure, and children who come for the exploits of a kung fu master receive instead a rather heavy-handed homily on the virtue of self-restraint, with the flashier details of Lee's career relegated to an endnote. Dom Lee's acrylic and beeswax illustrations, while no doubt fascinating from a technical angle, are stiff in composition and monotonous in their unrelieved sepia tone, presenting rigidly posed scenes that seem to have been etched on whole-wheat toast. Children who participate in martial arts instruction will be particularly drawn to this title, but expect to fill in lots of blanks about the second half of Lee's tragically short life.