Claiming Bruce Lee's Sex: Memoirs of the Wholesome Wife, Memories of the Salubrious Mistress

The book cover of Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew (1975) features him bare-chested on the right with big, black, bushy hair topping a dark handsome face, lips pursed together and eyes intent with confident purpose. Bruce Lee, a man known for his small, slight stature and perilous strength, appears large as he leans into the frame, extending his fist toward us. We can clearly see the rippling texture of his torso and chiseled, muscled arms. The flexing of his body reveals adherence to a disciplined physical regimen and affirms his reputation of brute strength made famous by his one-inch punch. Below his medium-shot image and to the left, a very large close-up of the book's author Linda Lee's dewy and blushing face appears. She has a short, blonde, no-nonsense hairdo, coral lipstick on full half-smiling lips, and blue eye-shadowed lids; her long lashes emphasize the wideness of her eyes as she looks up at her husband's figure with adoration. The foregrounding of her image as a wholesome white woman is juxtaposed against his iconic visage as the most celebrated Asian male in global popular culture. His smaller image renders the book's premise in visual terms: we will hear about him through her intimate perspective from inside a celebrated interracial marriage. From the title of the book and its byline, "By his wife Linda Lee," the marital connection between writer and subject appears as its central conceit. The dedication to their children, "that they might know the rich legacy which is theirs alone," shows how the book's author takes specific ownership of Bruce Lee. This possession further extends with the subtitle: "the man only I knew." Published two years after his death at the age of thirty-two, Linda Lee's book promises to reveal the man behind the star as a husband and father devoted to domesticity.

To envelop Bruce Lee in the domesticity of family counters the descriptions of him as hypermasculine but asexual. That is, Bruce Lee's sexuality is understood as macho in narcissistic, nationalist, and ascetic terms by scholars and critics.¹ So Linda Lee's claiming for her husband the role of American hero, in terms of an upright and proper heteronormative and hegemonic manhood, certainly contrasts with the legacy of the Oriental coolie and Fu Manchu as outlined well in the work of Robert G. Lee. Rendering Bruce Lee as the ideal husband provides a different sexuality for Asian men, whose subjectivities are usually anxious, insecure, and disprized in US representations of marital and romantic capital. In terms of Asian North American men lacking masculine virility and sexual power in representation, scholars Jachinson W. Chan, David Eng, Richard Fung, Hoang Tan Nguyen, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Viet Nguyen, and Eng Beng Lim have called for feminist and queer readings of Asian manhoods so as not to fall into the trap of romanticizing Asian masculinity.² Indeed, what is so striking in Bruce Lee's appeal and what is so understudied in his image is his sexuality, which Linda Lee definitively binds within the normative bounds of heterosexuality, marriage and fatherhood.

This wifely and motherly claim is significant because of Bruce Lee's purported mistress, the Hong Kong B-movie star Betty Ting Pei, who stars as herself in a controversial film about his life. Released just three years after his death, the film Bruce Lee and I (1976) is a fictionalized account of its subtitle: "His Last Days, His Last Nights."³ The film, directed by Mar Lo, famously includes explicit sex scenes and bacchanalian drug consumption of both pills and pot, in the narrative context of an all-consuming, frenzied, and torrid love affair. The Chinese theatrical poster for the film, released in the United States in 1979 as I Love You, Bruce Lee, features a full-figured Bruce Lee kicking his leg high as his upper body bends down almost horizontally. In contradistinction, to the right of this powerful pose, another image shows him relaxed. Bare...