Shannon Lee on Bruce Lee's Childhood & Why IP Man kicked him out of his school

my father was born in 1940 in the year of the dragon and in the hour of the dragon so he was a dragon through and through november 27th sagittarius my father was raised in hong kong he was part of a showbiz family very first on-screen appearance is when he was an infant but he went on to act in over 20 films before the age of 18. my father started training in wing chun foo at the age of 13. so he would be in school during the day acting at night studying wing chun gong fu with his sifu ip man perform some imitate a crane a monkey a praying man he would walk down the street with weights in his hand and punching the air and just always trying to figure out how to do things better how to be faster and he got really good really quickly to the dismay of a lot of the senior members in the school he also became the cha-cha champion of hong kong he was the crown colonies champion he had a lot of fire and he was always moving his nickname was mositing which means never sit still at the time it was really against tradition to teach chinese gungfu to anybody who was not chinese he was actually kicked out of it men's school at one point because they found out that he wasn't 100 percent chinese learning it's a constant discovery he had been getting into a lot of trouble participating in these illegal rooftop matches where different gongfu schools would come together and go up against each other to see who was better so he was competing in these and if he wanted to claim his us citizenship he had to come back before he turned 19. [Music] and so his parents put him on a ship and sent him to the united states most people think of bruce lee as being from hong kong but actually he's american his mother is half german so he himself is quarter european when my father came to the united states his training had been in wing chun and then when he started teaching he called what he taught dun fang gong fu because john fan is his given name so it was like bruce lee's kung fu but it was essentially wing chun his first student was jesse glover he was an african-american man taki kimura who was a japanese man he really took on anyone who had a real desire to learn his school was very revolutionary in that way in early 1965 he had opened his second school in oakland he was part of a community of martial artists who were really interested in playing with tradition and really talking more about what works as opposed to staying within the lines of form already he had john fangungfu so he was going around touting this all the time and he had an open door policy and was teaching this to anyone the san francisco chinatown community did not appreciate that they were the old guard and they wanted to shut him down they issued a challenge to him and they said we're going to bring over our champion and we want to fight you and if you lose you have to stop teaching i have no fear i was born in oakland's chinatown and i started to study kung fu at a very young age and the master jack man wong had this mythical fight with bruce lee so i remember hearing people say our teacher fought with bruce lee you know that was really just mind-blowing after the fight even though he had won he was very disappointed he was winded and his traditional rigid training had not prepared him for a fight of this nature out of that he decided to do away with his traditional training and he literally studied boxing the simplicity of it fencing for the ability to bridge the gap quickly but also newtonian physics he studied biomechanics and kinesiology and so he was really revolutionary in just looking at the human body and saying if i want to optimize this for combat what do i do maybe you better train every part of your body one of his students was preem abdul-jabbar who was you know over seven feet tall and from working with him and training with him he gained a huge new perspective in how he would have to change his approach to encounter someone like that and then how to also teach someone whose body is that way i can show you what i know but ultimately you have to test it and figure out what works best for you to move you're moving and when you move you are determined to move he really saw himself as an individual guide to his students to say how do you want to express yourself as a fighter do it man and i'm gonna do it you see you wanted to bridge the gap between thought and action to be so in tune with your instincts that you are expressing yourself honestly right now personally smart fighter it's not just a good fighter because i think in martial arts some people train so hard to be strong but they don't know actually in a fight it's the mind that needs to be better than the skill people are different you know

Channel: BruceLeeEditz

Views: 30,249

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Id: pK2OYuxWrzk

Length: 5min 14sec (314 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 24 2022