""You know, when you do a celebrity bio there's a certain kind of format," he says on a recent afternoon in a downtown Los Angeles bookstore, where outside at one point gunshots and police sirens interrupted the calm inside. "The mission is to dig up all the dirt you can. The essential narrative is, 'This person wasn't an angel.'""
""I already had been pondering the question of why it is that Bruce Lee is a hero to people all around the world who feel like they've been stepped on," he says. "So when he starts appearing on walls, I was like, 'Oh, there's a bigger story here, and he's representing something new now to a new generation of Asian Americans.'""
Jeff Chang accepted an early proposal to write a Bruce Lee biography but encountered years of editorial turnover, competing contracts, and repeated delays. By 2021 the project resurfaced yet left Chang uncertain about following a conventional celebrity-bio format focused on scandal. During the pandemic Chang worked long days at a racial justice institute while anti-Asian violence spiked and images of Bruce Lee began appearing on walls across U.S. Chinatowns and other cities. Chang reevaluated Lee's significance, seeing Lee as a global hero to people who feel oppressed and as a symbol resonating with a new generation of Asian Americans, prompting a different framing for the book.
Read at The Mercury News
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