Shannon Lee remembers her father, as new Bruce Lee exhibit opens in Seattle

Record ID: 1684280

  • Title: Shannon Lee remembers her father, as new Bruce Lee exhibit opens in Seattle
  • Date: 8th August 2022
  • Summary: (SOUNDBITE)(English) MUSEUM VISITOR, MICHAEL NGUYEN, SAYING: “It's a different perspective. You know, I did when I was 12 and when I was in sixth grade, I did a lifelong research on Bruce Lee for one of my projects. But I'm always learning something new and never seen this side of him.” VARIOUS OF BRUCE LEE’S BOOKS, BOXING GLOVES AND KEEPSAKES (SOUNDBITE)(English) MU
  • Embargoed: 22nd August 2022 23:50
  • Keywords: BRUCE LEE SHANNON LEE WING LUKE MUSEUM
  • Location: SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, UNITED STATES
  • City: SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, UNITED STATES
  • Country: USA
  • Topics: Arts/Culture/Entertainment,United States
  • Reuters ID: LVA003732708082022RP1
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: After a pandemic-induced delay, a new and permanent Bruce Lee exhibition ‘Be Water, My Friend’ has opened at the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience in Seattle, with support of the Bruce Lee Foundation.
    His daughter Shannon Lee wrote a book ‘Be Water, My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee’ that was published in 2020. In an interview with Reuters, she explains this as an immersive extension of the in-depth research that was done exploring her father's life as a philosopher.
    “I didn't feel like everybody was getting the full picture of the human being. And it's really part of my mission for people to understand actually what at what level of philosopher he really was,” Lee says of the project, that’s housed in a historic yet unassuming building in the city’s Chinatown-International District. “And you know, he's so well-read, he's so well studied, he's so well-written. He, for a man who died at the age of 32, his work ethic and work product and process is really profoundly deep.”
    She still remembers little glimpses of young life with her father before he died when she was four: him holding her on his lap and playing, visiting him on set at Golden Harvest Studios, and their home in Hong Kong.
    “They're very meaningful moments to me, but they're just brief little touch points,” Lee recalls of those early memories. “But the unlimited part of my memory is that I have a real sense of him, him energetically, him, the way he made me feel, the way I felt in his presence, the. His energy, his love, his adoration, his sense of safety, being with him. And those are things because I call that unlimited, because those are the things, I got to take with me into my adulthood.”
    This isn’t the first collaboration between Shannon Lee’s foundation and the museum showcasing the life of her father. She tells Reuters they have partnered on three different occasions in the past.
    Her father’s collections of 2,800 books spanning martial arts theory, filmmaking, and philosophy will now remain at the museum permanently, along with other keepsakes that can be seen in a separate exhibit that has been a prominent ongoing attraction at the space.
    For father and son Minh and Michael Nguyen, who were on vacation from the East Coast, it was a must-visit attraction.
    “It's a different perspective. When I was 12 and in sixth grade, I did a lifelong research on Bruce Lee for one of my projects. But I'm always learning something new and never seen this side of him,” Michael Nguyen says, his father then remembering the martial arts icon from nearly fifty years ago. “I know all about Bruce Lee, not personally, but from film in 1973 when I was in Vietnam, and I like all of this movie. So, when my son asked me to take him to this exhibit, and I'm very happy to do it,” says Minh Nguyen.
    The city is rich with the legacy of Bruce Lee: Ruby Chow restaurant where he once worked, University of Washington where he studied philosophy, where he met his wife Linda Lee Cadwell, and ultimately where he was laid to rest in 1973 at Lake View Cemetery in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.
    “They always thought that maybe at some point when they finally retired, that they would return to Seattle and make their home there,” Shannon Lee says.
    (Production: Matt McKnight)
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