100 Objects #10: Nunchaku

In the early 1970s, Bruce Lee made nunchaku (nunchucks) cool, but the nunchucks craze coincided with something much bigger: the birth of a radical new Asian American identity.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

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• 0:35Roman Mars?

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• 1:19Roman Mars?

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• 1:48Roman Mars?

  So we're here to talk about nunchucku, and I want to ask you first, nunchucks or nunchucku? Like, how do you say it? What does it mean when you say one versus the other? How do you use it?

• 1:59Speaker 01

  I don't know. I mean, everybody usually just says nunchucks, right?

• 2:03Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  That's just sort of the standard way of doing it. I say nunchucku, I don't know, maybe just out of a little reverence for the object itself. And also, you know, a nod to its origin.

• 2:16Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  But yeah, nunchucks. Nunchucks is fine.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, we're going to be talking about this for a long time. You know, nunchucks is going to be, it rolls off the tongue much easier.

• 2:29Roman Mars?

  This is historian and culture critic Jeff Chang. His own personal history with nunchucks started when he was five years old.

• 2:37Roman Mars?

  He and his brothers would watch the classic Bruce Lee movie Fist of Fury.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  I grew up in Hawaii, so on a regular, hot, humid day in an afternoon, watching these things and just going crazy.

• 2:55Roman Mars?

  Fist of Fury is a 1972 kung fu classic from Hong Kong dubbed in English. Bruce Lee plays a martial artist who is trying to settle the score after his famed teacher is killed by Japanese occupiers.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  And then there's that amazing scene in the dojo where he's just...

• 3:13Speaker 02

  Whenever you're ready, I'll take on any Japanese here.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  He comes into the dojo and he's about to beat up all these karate men. Surround him!

• 3:23Roman Mars?

  The camera pans up, and you see all these karate fighters in a circle surrounding the lone Bruce Lee.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  He gets kicked and sort of rolls over, does a somersault, and comes up, and he pulls out some nunchucku, like from who knows where he had it hiding? Maybe in his pants or something like that? But he pulls it out, and everybody's like, looking at each other like, ooh, it's that.

• 3:48Roman Mars?

  You can totally picture it. Nunchucks whipping his villains, flying right and left. He is unstoppable. But it was the sound that really did it for Jeff.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  When you whip the stick, it's whoosh. It's like, you know, it's just activating all these different senses.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  And then we would, after that, like, go and find toilet rolls. I remember this, like, and string and tape and try to make our own little things and whack each other on the heads with it.

• 4:19Roman Mars?

  Five-year-old Jeff didn't know it then, but that toy he made, emulating the weapon on screen whipping around Bruce Lee's body, was also a symbol of something much larger: the emergence of a new radical political and cultural identity forming in America.

• 4:37Roman Mars?

  From 99% Invisible and BBC Studios, this is A History of the United States in 100 Objects. I'm Roman Mars. Today, how nunchucks, through sheer force of their cultural relevance, went from ancient weapon to symbol of resistance, not only uniting Asian-Americans in the fight for their own rights, but also connecting them to every other group pushing back from the margins.

• 5:04Roman Mars?

  The story of the nunchucks is also a bit of the story of Bruce Lee, Hollywood's first Asian-American action hero who brought martial arts to the mainstream big screen. So when does Bruce Lee, when and how does Bruce Lee first learn to use nunchucks?

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Well, maybe we can go back a little bit and talk about Bruce as a martial artist.

• 5:25Roman Mars?

  The man, the myth, the legend, Bruce Lee, was born in San Francisco in 1940, but grew up in Hong Kong, which was then under both British colonial occupation and Japanese occupation during World War II. But from a young age, it was obvious this guy was a star.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  So Bruce was a child actor in Hong Kong. He was really good with his body, so he became the cha-cha champion of Hong Kong. He was kind of magnetic in a lot of ways, and he's at the same time living this double life. He's like fighting in the streets. He just loves fighting. He's the kind of person who, I imagine, you know, like, gets hit in the face, is like, oh, that tasted good, like, I'm going to get you back. And, you know, like, there's some folks who just love the taste of blood on their lips.

• 6:12Roman Mars?

  In school, Bruce was constantly challenging other kids, even his teachers, to fights. The trouble was, after training in kung fu since he was 13, he was good, too good. After one particularly brutal fight, the police showed up at his school and threatened to arrest him, and his parents were fed up.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  So they had to say, okay, you won't stop. We're putting you on a slow boat to America with $100, and you're going to figure it out. You're going to go back to the land of your birth, and you're going to figure it out as an immigrant.

• 6:43Roman Mars?

  But like, he hits kind of a cold reality when he arrives on the shores.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  Yes. When he comes to the US, he's realizing very quickly, oh, like, I'm not in the majority anymore.

• 6:54Roman Mars?

  It's the early 1960s. Bruce is 20, living in Seattle, an incredibly segregated city with most of the black and Asian residents crammed into just a few neighborhoods.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  He can't go anywhere he wants to go. But the flip side of it is that he starts meeting all of these other folks who have grown up as oppressed folks, who have lived through being what it means to be a racialized minority. So he begins to identify, you know, with black folks who have been beaten by cops, Japanese-Americans who have been incarcerated, poor white folks who always feel like spit upon, people who feel left out or marginalized or outcast. And I think that's what makes him decide that he wants to become a teacher to them. They ask him to teach them. And so at that particular point in time, he's thinking, the way that I'm going to make it in America

• 7:48Speaker 01

  is to open up all these kung fu schools.

• 7:51Roman Mars?

  Bruce starts teaching people in the neighborhood kung fu, but this was not something that was done at the time.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  The kung fu schools are called quuns in Chinatown. They were meant to produce folks who could literally make sure that business was running in Chinatown. So these are like the bouncers and the security guards and the enforcers and all kinds of legal and illegal business.

• 8:15Roman Mars?

  Teaching anyone who wasn't Chinese was a big no-no. And not only that, a kung fu student would only study one particular school under one particular type of person.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Kung fu, you know, was confined to these small schools in which the sifu, the teacher, had complete dominance over what was being taught. It's like, if you're studying under a sifu, you're studying in that school's style.

• 8:41Roman Mars?

  But Bruce was kind of a punk.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  He becomes a maverick. He's somebody who's actively poking his nose and sort of sticking his finger in the eye of the old sifus and saying, what is all of this fake hierarchy? What is this classical mess that he calls it? It just teaches you how to obey, and it doesn't teach you anything about how to fight.

• 9:03Roman Mars?

  In a real fight, he learned that the traditional kung fu punch, while it was flashy and might look cool, was no match for the hook or the jab of a skilled heavyweight boxer. So he started adapting, taking the fast footwork of fencing, a chokehold from judo, a punching pattern from boxing, and working it into his own practice. Bruce was making a name for himself, and it got the attention of a guy named Ed Parker, who was already popularizing karate in the US, but who now had set his sights on bringing that popularity to all martial arts. So he reaches out to Bruce.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  Hey, you got something, and why don't you come and say that something to all these other folks? You know, I'm doing this big thing in Long Beach. And Bruce says, yeah, let's do it.

• 9:49Roman Mars?

  So in August of 1964, Parker holds a big exhibition with all kinds of martial artists performing for regular Americans.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  So he's bringing in judo men, jiu-jitsu men, folks from Kauai, from the islands, to show Filipino martial arts. He's literally creating this sort of Pan-Asian, what would come to be known sort of as AANHPI, right? Asian-American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander culture, right?

• 10:16Roman Mars?

  Ed decides to give the headliner exhibition spot to Bruce, who at this point is virtually unknown. Bruce takes the stage. 3,000 eyes on him. Straight away, he drops into his one-arm, two-finger push-ups and starts talking. He says, you don't need a million forms and techniques. No high kicks, no twirling around, no set moves.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  And everybody is just gawking. They've never seen anything like it. The folks who run schools are like, you're ripping on my entire, like, training? And my teachers?

• 10:49Roman Mars?

  And then finally, Bruce demonstrates something that he's been developing for years: the one-inch punch.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Bruce asks for somebody to come down from the audience. He puts that person, you know, a few inches from him. He gives a guy a pillow, because he's going to need it. And then he just sort of stands there, holding up his right fist and flicks his wrist, and this guy flies back like 10 feet, falls into a chair, and the chair tips over.

• 11:20Roman Mars?

  And the crowd goes wild.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  So everybody wants to know how he did that. And that makes him an immediate sensation. His name starts circulating. It becomes almost legendary. He's a force that kind of can't be contained.

• 11:37Roman Mars?

  But beyond the main stage, there was something else happening, something that was perhaps equally important. Because backstage at this exhibition is where Bruce Lee would encounter nunchucks for the first time. It all happened when Bruce was hanging out with another fighter who had been experimenting with a weapon from Japan.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  He's picked up the nunchucks, and he's backstage, and he's kind of fooling around with them.

• 12:00Roman Mars?

  At that moment, another fighter, a master of Filipino ascrema and true master of this weapon, walks up to them and says,

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Oh, we have that in our culture. That's tabok tayok. Here, give me those. And he starts doing all these khalif forms with it. And I think at that particular moment, like Bruce is staring at this going, oh, wow, this is all related. And Bruce is kind of taken with it.

• 12:24Roman Mars?

  Nunchucks themselves don't have a single definitive origin story. Most historians trace them to Okinawa, where they likely evolved from farming tools into weapons. But across Asia, people made their own versions. A weapon with no single owner, no pure lineage. That's exactly Bruce's kind of thing. A while later, Bruce would ask his new friend if he could try nunchucks out for himself.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Bruce tells him, hey, you know, whatever happened to those, those sticks, those nunchuck things? And he's like, oh, here. And he's like, yeah, you know, like, I don't know anything about these, but this is what I would do with them. And he sort of whips them out, and he's, he's just kind of flabbergasted because Bruce has just seen this and kinetically figured out how to like, mess all this stuff around. And of course, it becomes a big part of his toolkit, his arsenal, if you will, in the movies.

• 13:15Roman Mars?

  And it's significant that it's at this exhibition that Bruce learns about nunchucks, because that event is what would launch Bruce's Hollywood career.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  The Hollywood folks who are in the, the audience, and there's lots of them. You know, there's actors, there's directors, there's producers, there's people who are barbers for the actors. They're just drawn to him.

• 13:35Roman Mars?

  And it was one of these folks, a celebrity hairstylist, who was responsible for Bruce's big break. This barber was going on and on about Bruce while he was cutting the hair of some big time Hollywood producer. And he convinces the producer to consider Bruce for his next lead role, the son of Charlie Chan.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  And it would be the first Asian American male TV lead ever. So he's like, come out and try out for this part.

• 14:00Speaker 03

  Now Bruce, just look right into the camera lens right here and tell us your name, your age, and where you were born.

• 14:06Speaker 04

  My last name is Lee, Bruce Lee. I was born in San Francisco, 1940. I'm 24 right now.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Bruce comes out and does this amazing audition in which he demonstrates some kung fu techniques on a hapless, older white dude. You can watch this, it's hilarious.

• 14:23Speaker 04

  There are various kinds of strikes. To the eyes, you would use fingers, or straight at the face.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  At one point, he's all like, yeah, the guy's a little scared, isn't he?

• 14:31Speaker 04

  Don't worry.

• 14:34Speaker 03

  All right.

• 14:34Speaker 04

  It's kind of worried.

• 14:35Speaker 03

  And he, he has nothing to worry about.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  And it's just a scintillating type of thing, like clearly he's a star. But TV's not ready. TV's not ready for an Asian American male to be a lead, let alone Bruce Lee to be a lead.

• 14:49Roman Mars?

  The network drops the Charlie Chan spinoff series completely, but it's not over for Bruce. The producer says,

• 14:54Speaker 01

  Hey, stick around. We might have another thing for you.

• 14:57Roman Mars?

  That thing turned out to be the ABC series, The Green Hornet, where Bruce plays Kato, the sidekick to the crime fighting Green Hornet.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Bruce comes in, he, he gets the part, and he goes and tries to get some acting training. And he and his acting coach are looking at these scripts. And he's like, wait a minute, they didn't give me any lines. Because nobody has ever imagined that Kato would ever speak.

• 15:24Roman Mars?

  And for the vast majority of the show, Bruce was indeed silent.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  He's a guy who saves the Green Hornet's ass because the Green Hornet can't fight for himself. He's an executive. He sits in the backseat and he kind of tells him, Kato, drive, or Kato, cook, or Kato, like, kung fu that guy. And that's what Kato does.

• 15:45Roman Mars?

  This kind of subordination, servility, this is something that Kato had inherited from earlier versions of this character, at first on the radio. An adventure of the Green Hornet.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Which is an old sort of character that's kind of blandly Oriental. They've never really figured out who this guy is.

• 16:04Roman Mars?

  Originally, the writers made him Japanese. Kato, his faithful Japanese valet knows the dual role of a young millionaire. But then, in the lead up to World War II, that seemed unsavory. So suddenly Kato wasn't Japanese anymore. He was just,

• 16:16Speaker 05

  Kato, his faithful valet.

• 16:19Roman Mars?

  Then the writers gave him a new identity. Kato was now, His Filipino valet Kato stepped through a secret panel. Then in the film serials, executives made him Korean, which they thought would be the least controversial of the Asian identities. But through all of this, nothing about the character actually changed.

• 16:41Roman Mars?

  All of this Orientalism, this frustrated Bruce.

• 16:44Speaker 04

  I mean, they're trying to get me to do too many things that are really for the sake of being exotic.

• 16:50Roman Mars?

  He said as much in an interview he did with the Canadian broadcaster, Pierre Breton.

• 16:55Speaker 04

  And I mean, it's always that pigtails and bouncing around chop chop, you know, with the Iceland and all that. I have already made up my mind that in the United States, I think something about the Oriental, the, I mean, the true Oriental should be shown.

• 17:12Roman Mars?

  Oriental, a word that was so universally used at the time, even Bruce was calling himself that. But meanwhile, across the country, there are kids who felt frustrated in the exact same way. Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, American college students were all fed up with being lumped together by white folks in power.

• 17:32Roman Mars?

  But unlike Bruce, they were going to organize.

• 17:43Roman Mars?

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• 18:29Roman Mars?

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• 19:12Roman Mars?

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• 19:23Roman Mars?

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• 19:57Roman Mars?

  We're now moving into the late 1960s, and across the country tensions are rising.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  And what we see is this growing anti-war movement, right? People rising up against the Vietnam War.

• 20:10Roman Mars?

  A lot of the anti-war movement was happening on college campuses like Berkeley, where two American-born Asian students, Yuji Ichikawa and Emma G., had been organizing. But by the spring of 1968, they'd started to notice something. For one, there were more and more Asian folks, people who looked like them, showing up at these demonstrations. And the more they looked around, the more disconnected they felt from the main message of the movement at the time.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  Young people are on the streets saying, "Bring the boys home." And they are looking at this, and they're saying, "That doesn't seem to be what the movement should be about." We're seeing people who look like our parents just getting bombed. Their home places are being torn up. If you think about it, like, that's the reason we're here. It's not just about bringing the boys home. It's about ending American imperialism.

• 21:01Roman Mars?

  Then they had this idea. They were organizers for this new political party, the Peace and Freedom Party, which had formed around an anti-war agenda. So they decided to look over their own party's voter registration lists to identify any Asian people who might have felt the same way.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  So they take their lists, they look at all the names of folks on that list, and they go, "Hmm, you know, that person's last name is Kim. That person's last name is Chang. Like, that person's last name is Wong." And they're like, "We should call all of them and invite them to this meeting." They bring this group of folks together, and it's, you know, it's not many folks. Six people or so show up, and they are having this discussion about how to address the war. And the conversation quickly takes on a new motion when folks are talking about how they actually really feel. I walk across the street, and they're calling me a "gook." People are like, "I haven't been able to get a job for so long. I, you know, I've stopped looking."

• 22:02Speaker 01

  And they say that they are getting beaten because people are saying, "Oh, that's the enemy. Go practice on him." So, you know, they're like, "How do we talk about this? Like, maybe we need to be able to figure out how we can all kind of come together and have a name." And Yuji just throws it out. Yuji is like, "You know, don't call us Oriental anymore. That's a rug."

• 22:25Speaker 01

  And Oriental is a rug. "We are Asians, and we are from America."

• 22:31Speaker 01

  Then they're like, "Ding, ding, ding." The lights go on, you know, everybody's like excited, and they come out, and they form a group that they call the Asian-American Political Alliance.

• 22:43Roman Mars?

  Asian-American. It seems commonplace now, but this new political identity was radical. Up until then, US immigration and military policy had forced Asian people to separate themselves by nationality as a matter of survival. Just two decades earlier, during World War II, Japanese-Americans were being disappeared to internment camps. To distinguish themselves from the ethnically Japanese, Asian families would put signs in front of their homes and businesses that read, "We are Chinese, we are Filipino, we are Korean." But now, they were done with all that.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  That's 1968, and by 1969, there's thousands upon thousands of people all across the country who are using that name. We're Asian-Americans.

• 23:27Roman Mars?

  These kids took something that people in power had been doing to them for years, lumping them all together, regardless of nationality, under the same racist banner of Oriental. And they flipped it on its head. Now they were joining forces intentionally, on their own terms. And it was powerful, like the one-inch punch.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  What's interesting is that it's already building in the culture, right? So if you look at what Bruce is doing with his friends in terms of mixing up these different types of martial arts forms from Asia and the Pacific, is heralding this new development of an Asian-America.

• 24:04Roman Mars?

  After years of frustration, the culture seemed to be changing. And it seemed to Bruce that now, just maybe, he might be able to break out of his role as the sidekick. In 1970, Bruce met with Fred Weintraum, a Warner Brothers executive who wanted him to star in a new film project, literally called Kung Fu.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  Bruce, more than anybody else in the country, has popularized this martial art called Kung Fu. And he's been on TV, so all the other Asian-American actors in Hollywood are like, "Oh, that's a lead part, but that's Bruce's part. I'm not even gonna go out for that part."

• 24:39Roman Mars?

  Bruce nails the audition. But still, the other executives in the studio are dragging their feet. They ultimately kill the idea of a Kung Fu movie. They do keep dangling the possibility of a TV series. But frustrated and without an answer, Bruce decides to take a job in Hong Kong.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Like, Hong Kong's Kung Fu film industry at that particular time is running all of Asia. And they're like clamoring, "We want that guy. We need to get that guy. He's already made it in Hollywood. He's gonna definitely make it here." And they make him an offer he can't refuse.

• 25:11Roman Mars?

  Finally, it's a leading role, a chance to prove his star potential to the executives in the US. And it is a hit.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  It becomes a sensation. It breaks all box office records and becomes a star, literally overnight.

• 25:25Roman Mars?

  Immediately afterwards, Bruce shoots another Kung Fu movie, another smash hit called Fist of Fury. And while his star is rising in Hong Kong, he finally gets news from Hollywood about his role in the TV show Kung Fu.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  He gets turned down because they say, "We can't understand his accent." And, you know, Bruce has got a British accent. He just has the wrong face. And so they give the part to David Carradine, who tapes up his eyes and darkens his skin and stoops on the set and plays it in yellowface. And just continues the tradition of how Hollywood looks at Asia.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  You gotta imagine, this is like the role of his life. He really thought he deserved it. He feels like he played the game. He really, you know, worked with these folks, and he got to know them. He trained a lot of them in Kung Fu, like, at their houses. And then they would do this to him and not give him this role, and put a white guy into a role, playing a Chinese, a half-Chinese guy?

• 26:31Roman Mars?

  After that, Bruce has had it with Hollywood. He has had it with America. He decides to stay in Hong Kong for the foreseeable future.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  He's like, "Okay, I understand. This is where I have to be. I have to be here in Asia, where they can see me."

• 26:45Roman Mars?

  So these Hong Kong action movies, they don't, they're not just huge in Hong Kong. I mean, they're huge, huge in Hong Kong. But they make it over here. Tell me about where they thrive, how they sort of infiltrate culture here in the US.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  This is a moment where Hollywood is collapsing. You know, the old studio system that's been going strong for over half a century is showing a lot of signs of cracking.

• 27:12Roman Mars?

  The movies Hollywood had poured millions into were flopping at the box office. The older generation was at home watching their color TVs, and the kids didn't want to watch another Sound of Music or Hello, Dolly.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  And so what's the breath of fresh air that comes along? Well, 1971, Melvin Van Peebles independently releases this movie called Sweet, Sweetback's Badass Song. And it just is a sensation.

• 27:37Roman Mars?

  The movie follows Sweetback, a black performer at a brothel who fights back against racist police officers. And it completely shattered the way old Hollywood worked.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  It makes over a million dollars off a tiny, teeny, tiny budget. And it makes that money just by playing in the inner cities, like, in the scariest parts of America.

• 27:58Roman Mars?

  The movie was released to gritty grindhouse theaters that played everything the mainstream rejected on a 24-hour loop.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  They just play blaxploitation movies, they play foreign films, they play porn movies, right?

• 28:12Roman Mars?

  Sweet, Sweetback is a classic of the blaxploitation genre, a new form that was exploding at the time, where black protagonists took down white authority with violence, style, and glamour.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  So Kung Fu movies come in on the heels of that. Kids are coming in, and they're watching these blaxploitation movies. They're there for an afternoon, it's super hot. And so they're just gonna watch all the movies that are playing in there. Shaft maybe comes on, like, and then the Chinese boxer comes on. And they're like, "What is this?" But it's dubbed, you know, the dubs are kind of corny and a little hilarious. And at the same time, they're kicking butt, you know? And the plotlines are pretty much the same. These are folks who are on the margins. They've been harmed, they've been disenfranchised, and they're avenging their folks against these tyrannical and corrupt bosses and politicians. So they stick around, and they realize, "Oh, wow, these are great."

• 29:08Roman Mars?

  In 1972, Fist of Fury opens in New York's Chinatown Pagoda Theater. And for the first time in the theater's history, half of the crowd was non-Chinese. And it's this movie where Bruce Lee gains a whole new audience, a deeper layer to his fame.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  When Bruce first came out in the mid-'60s as Kato, he wasn't a hero for the Asian-American radicals. He was just like, "Oh, that's another sort of guy who's gonna serve his white master." But when Fist of Fury plays, a lot of those folks who were calling themselves Asian-American, they're sitting there in the theater, and they're watching Bruce Lee kicking down that sign that says, "No dogs and Chinese allowed." And they're seeing black folks, white folks, Latino folks, you know, Indian, American Indian folks. They're all going crazy, just like they are. And so they're realizing, "Oh, this is a moment, and this is a thing. This guy is an underdog, like, he's fighting on our side.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  He's exactly what we want to see represented and to be about."

• 30:13Roman Mars?

  By 1973, the kung fu movie craze is at an all time peak. In that year alone, six kung fu flicks out of Hong Kong hit number one at the box office, and 15 more hit in the top 50 as they played in Chinatowns and segregated neighborhoods across America.

• 30:30Roman Mars?

  Which movie encapsulates this sort of peak of this era? I mean, to me, I think it's probably Enter the Dragon, but maybe you have a different opinion about this.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  No, I think Enter the Dragon is absolutely it, yeah. And the reason it does is because, you know, it comes in this year, 1973, where we're kind of at peak third world culture, if you're looking at it that way.

• 30:50Roman Mars?

  When Jeff says "third world culture," he's referring to a movement where Black and Asian activists, among other groups, started seeing their struggles as part of something bigger. Not just a fight for rights at home, but a connection to people pushing back against power everywhere, in Vietnam, Algeria, and the Congo. The idea was that a so-called ghetto in Oakland had more in common with a foreign village under a colonial rule than anyone in power wanted to admit. And that feeling was everywhere in culture. One of the top albums in 1973 was called "The World is a Ghetto." Bob Marley was gaining popularity everywhere. Hip-hop was literally invented that year.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  We're at sort of this peak moment where folks are just looking for a different kind of hero, and that's Bruce. That's what Bruce Lee is.

• 31:43Roman Mars?

  In Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee teams up with Jim Kelly, a Black martial artist, and John Saxon, a white martial artist, to form a multicultural fighting squad. It really is just taking everything and showing a kind of commonality, a common struggle.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  And you know, it's funny because it didn't, it wasn't really planned this way. So, for instance, they chose three actors as leads because they were actually unsure that Bruce Lee was going to be able to carry a movie all by himself. Right? So let's put a Black man in there, of course, and not the blaxploitation, and of course, let's put a white man in there.

• 32:21Roman Mars?

  Whatever they intended, the movie spoke directly to the third world movement. There's an iconic scene where the Black member of the trio, Jim Kelly, is riding through a harbor in Hong Kong, looking around at people living on these crammed houseboats.

• 32:37Speaker 06

  They don't live so big over there. Ghettos are the same all over the world. They stink.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  The ghettos, all over the world, they're all the same. That's one of those lines that is just like, what could be more third world than that particular line? And it's one of those lines that just sings down the generations.

• 32:56Roman Mars?

  And of course, there's the incredible scene with Bruce Lee and his nunchucks, where a shirtless Bruce, surrounded again on all sides, takes the nunchucks from one of the men and fends off three different attackers.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  When Bruce is in these scenes with his nunchucks, people are just magnetized, right? And then the natural reaction is you're going to go out and you're going to make your own, you're going to go and buy some, you're going to try to do it yourself.

• 33:25Speaker 01

  And so suddenly, there's all these young people, like mostly Black folks and yellow folks and brown folks, just in the streets with nunchuckus.

• 33:34Roman Mars?

  In a way, the nunchucks are the perfect symbol for this moment. Here's this weapon, not born from any single nation, but a mashup of fighting traditions across Asia, one that is now being embraced by a coalition of minorities in America. It's scrappy. It's the kind of thing you pull out when you're surrounded on all sides, when you're backed into a corner.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  And this scares the hell out of people, who are already feeling threatened by blaxploitation movies and kung fu movies. They just don't want to see this image of, you know, young folks of color with weapons.

• 34:11Roman Mars?

  Immediately after Enter the Dragon was released, officials started referring to the people who used nunchucks as "muggers" and members of street gangs. Mainstream outlets like The New York Times ran articles saying that they were turning up in the hands of youth across America. Newsweek called them "killer sticks." And the following year, five states banned them entirely. Unlike laws for pocket knives or baseball bats, where police usually have to prove you intend to use them as a weapon, nunchucks were classified alongside brass knuckles and sawed-off shotguns. Simply having a pair sitting in your bedroom could mean a felony charge.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  I was looking at the number of nunchuckus that were sold on New York, and it was something, it came up to like, maybe like, less than 3,000 a year. There's like 15 million guns that are sold a year, right? So that tells you that it wasn't about the nunchuckus. It was about the folks who were holding the nunchuckus. And even more, it's about what that meant to folks who are seeing those folks with the nunchuckus.

• 35:12Roman Mars?

  It wasn't until 2018 that these states finally began to repeal their bans. But even as the government tried to ban nunchucks, they couldn't stop them from influencing culture. The kung fu movies sort of somewhat ride, you know, in the wave of the blaxploitation movies, but then the kung fu movies sort of feed back into Black culture as well. Can you talk about the adoption of the sort of kung fu aesthetic and things like that in Black and hip-hop culture?

• 35:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, young Black and brown kids in the inner cities who are discovering these kung fu movies and they're going crazy, you know? And, and it continues, right? It continues all through the 80s and the 90s. And in 1993, right, like 20 years after Enter the Dragon, we get Wu-Tang Clan. You know?

• 36:07Roman Mars?

  Bruce Lee made a huge impact. He and his nunchucks represented a huge change in the way that the world saw Asian Americans and how they saw themselves, which is pretty remarkable, given how short his life actually was. Bruce Lee died in 1973, when he was only 32 years old, at the peak of his career, only a few months after Enter the Dragon was released.

• 36:32Roman Mars?

  The official cause of death was an allergic reaction to Equijic, a prescription painkiller that he'd taken earlier that evening to treat a headache, and he died from swelling to the brain.

• 36:45Roman Mars?

  I wonder if you thought about what would have happened to Bruce Lee if he hadn't died so young?

• 36:51Speaker 01

  I do, I do wonder about that. I think about it actually a lot. I think about it in the context too, in terms of representation. And I think about how it took almost 50 years for us to get to a place where you could have Michelle Yeoh receive an Academy Award in a role in which she could represent all these different ways that we appear. So not just sort of a kick-ass kung fu master, but she could be a bedraggled housewife and laundromat owner, and she could play literally dozens of different types of roles and represent the broad range of what Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  And it, it hurts me that it's taken that long for us to be able to kind of get to that particular point. I, I like to think that had Bruce lived, that he might have been able to move away from just being a martial artist, and that he could have been able to explore all of these different types of things that represented the breadth of his humanity. It kind of makes me a little melancholy thinking about that.

• 38:05Roman Mars?

  It's devastating to imagine this, this alternate reality where Bruce Lee doesn't die at 32, where he keeps working and keeps shifting culture at the same time.

• 38:16Roman Mars?

  Perhaps there would have been a time, sooner or later, where he could have set the nunchucks down, that he would no longer have to win people over by fighting.

• 38:34Roman Mars?

  Jeff Chang is the author of Water, Mirror, Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America. He's also the author of the classic Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation.

• 38:53Roman Mars?

  A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios. It's hosted and curated by me, Roman Mars. This episode was produced by Ellie Lightfoot. Our other producers are Priscilla Alabi and Brenna Daldorf. Our associate producer is Isaac Fisher. This series was edited by Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Mixing by Charlie Brandon King. Fact checking by Amy Bracken. Our theme song is by Swan Real. From 99% Invisible, our executive producer is Kathy Too. From BBC Studios, our executive producers are Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Our production coordinator is Shan Pelé, and the production manager is Mabel Finnegan-Wright. Artwork by Stefan Lawrence.

• 39:38Roman Mars?

  99% Invisible is part of the SiriusXM Podcast family headquartered in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California. And BBC Studios is headquartered in beautiful White City, West London. If you want to get in touch or have an object for us to consider, email us at [email protected].

• 40:25Roman Mars?

  This episode is presented by Air France. Air France Business Cabin offers comfort from start to finish. Enjoy priority check-in and boarding, followed by access to peaceful lounges. Onboard, savor menus created by renowned French chefs, paired with wines and champagne selected by Smollet. Stay connected with free high-speed Wi-Fi. Then unwind in a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with a mattress topper developed with Sofitel My Bed, a signature touch of French hospitality. The art of travel elevated, because Air France Business Cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional.

• 41:04Speaker 07

  What's up, sports fans? I'm Rachel Damita, here to tell you about my show Courtside Club. If you love hoops and hot takes, then you're in the right place. Want to hear about Katelyn Clark's unstoppable rise in the WNBA? How stars like Wemby and Luka Doncic are dominating the NBA? Or maybe you just want the tea on this week's most viral sports moments. Don't worry, we'll keep you updated on all of it. So grab your popcorn and come hang with us. Courtside. You can listen to Courtside Club wherever you get your podcasts. Oui et ah.

• 41:36Speaker 07

  There's a fire inside you you can't ignore. Stand still? Not a chance. You're a lifelong learner who's come this far. Now, we are here to help you keep going further. Capella University, what can't you do? Visit capella.edu to learn more.