100 Objects #10: Nunchaku

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0:39You can't turn back time, but you can revisit those memories with a Hallmark card. When you give a Hallmark card, you give a reminder of the relationships, emotions, and moments that make up their big, meaningful, magical life. So make the moment last. Make it a Hallmark card. Shop at hallmark.com or wherever Hallmark cards are sold. So we're here to talk about nunchaku, and I want to ask you first, nunchucks or nunchaku? Like, how do you say it? What does it mean when you say one versus the other? How do you use it? I don't know. I mean, everybody usually just says nunchucks, right? Yeah. That's just sort of the standard way of doing it.

1:19I say nunchaku, I don't know, maybe just out of a little reverence for the object itself. And also, you know, a nod to its origin. But yeah, nunchucks, nunchucks is fine. 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. This is historian and culture critic Jeff Chang. His own personal history with nunchucks started when he was five years old. He and his brothers would watch the classic Bruce Lee movie, Fist of Fury. I grew up in Hawaii, so on a regular hot, humid day in an afternoon, watching these things and just going crazy.

2:05Fist 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. And then there's that amazing scene in the dojo where he's just... Whenever you're ready, I'll take on any Japanese here. He comes into the dojo and he's about to beat up all these karate men. Surround him! The camera pans up and you see all these karate fighters in a circle surrounding the lone Bruce Lee. He gets kicked and sort of rolls over, does a somersault and comes up and he pulls out some nunchaku.

2:50like 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. 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. When you whip the stick, it's whoosh. It's like, you know, it's just activating all these different senses. 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.

3:32Five-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.

3:50From 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.

4:17The 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? Well, maybe we can go back a little bit and talk about Bruce as a martial artist. 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. So Bruce was a child actor in Hong Kong.

4:57He 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. 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.

5:36After one particularly brutal fight, the police showed up at his school and threatened to arrest him. And his parents were fed up. 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. But like he hits kind of a cold reality when he arrives on the shores. Yes. When he comes to the U.S., he's realizing very quickly, oh, like, I'm not in the majority anymore. 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.

6:18He 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 is to open up all these Kung Fu schools.

7:04Bruce starts teaching people in the neighborhood Kung Fu. But this was not something that was done at the time. The Kung Fu schools are called Kunz 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. 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. Kung Fu, you know, was confined to these small schools in which the Sifu, the teacher, had complete dominance over what was being taught.

7:49It's like, if you're studying under a Sifu, you're studying in that school style. But Bruce was kind of a punk. 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. 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.

8:37Bruce was making a name for himself, and it got the attention of a guy named Ed Parker, who was already popularizing karate in the U.S., but who now had set his sights on bringing that popularity to all martial arts. So he reaches out to Bruce. 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. So in August of 1964, Parker holds a big exhibition with all kinds of martial artists performing for regular Americans. So he's bringing in judo men, jiu-jitsu men, folks from Kauai, from the islands to show Filipino martial arts.

9:18He'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? 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. 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?

10:02And then finally, Bruce demonstrates something that he's been developing for years. The one-inch punch. Bruce asks for somebody to come down from the audience. He puts that person, you know, a few inches from him. He gives the 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. And the crowd goes wild. So everybody wants to know how he did that. And that makes him an immediate sensation. His name starts circulating. It becomes almost legendary.

10:45He's a force that kind of can't be contained. 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. He's picked up the nunchuckus, and he's backstage, and he's kind of fooling around with them. At that moment, another fighter, a master of Filipino Eskrima and true master of this weapon, walks up to them and says, Oh, we have that in our culture.

11:22That's tabuk tayuk. Here, give me those. And he starts doing all these Kali 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. 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.

12:01Bruce tells him, hey, you know, whatever happened to those sticks, those nunchaku 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 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. 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.

12:36The Hollywood folks who are in 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. 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. And it would be the first Asian American male TV lead ever. So he's like, come out and try out for this part.

13:13Now Bruce, just look right into the camera lens right here and tell us your name, your age, and where you were born. My last name is Lee, Bruce Lee. I was born in San Francisco in 1940. I'm 24 right now. 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. There are various kinds of stripes. To the eyes, you would use fingers. Or straight at the face. At one point, he's all like, yeah, the guy's a little scared, isn't he? Don't worry. All right. He's kind of worried. He has nothing to worry about.

13:50And 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. The network drops the Charlie Chan spinoff series completely, but it's not over for Bruce. The producer says, Hey, stick around. We might have another thing for you. That thing turned out to be the ABC series The Green Hornet, where Bruce plays Cato, the sidekick to the crime-fighting Green Hornet. Bruce comes in, 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.

14:34Because nobody has ever imagined that Cato would ever speak. And for the vast majority of the show, Bruce was indeed silent. 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 back seat and he kind of tells him, Kato, drive, or Kato, cook, or Kato, like, kung fu that guy. And that's what Kato does. 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. Which is an old sort of character that's kind of blandly Oriental.

15:14They've never really figured out who this guy is. originally the writers made him japanese kato his faithful japanese valet knows the dual role but then in the lead-up to world war ii that seemed unsavory so suddenly kato wasn't japanese anymore he was just kato his faithful valet 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. All of this Orientalism, this frustrated Bruce.

15:57I mean, they're trying to get me to do too many things that are really for the sake of being exotic. He said as much in an interview he did with the Canadian broadcaster Pierre Breton. And I mean, it's always that pigtail and bouncing around, chop, chop, you know, with the eyes slant and all that. I have already made up my mind that in the United States, I think something about the Oriental, I mean, the true Oriental should be shown. 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.

16:37Japanese, Chinese, Filipino-American college students were all fed up with being lumped together by white folks in power. But unlike Bruce, they were going to organize.

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18:38People at their best get their beauty rest for 100 years. We're now moving into the late 1960s. And across the country, tensions are rising. And what we see is this growing anti-war movement, right? People rising up against the Vietnam War. A lot of the anti-war movement was happening on college campuses like Berkeley. where two American-born Asian students, Yuji Ichioka and Emoji, 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.

19:22Young people are out in 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, that's the reason we're here. It's not just about bringing the boys home. It's about ending American imperialism. 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.

20:05So 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.

20:43People are like, I haven't been able to get a job for so long. I, you know, I've stopped looking. 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, you know, 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. And Oriental is a rug. We are Asians and we are from America. Then they're like, ding, ding, ding. The lights go on. You know, everybody's like excited.

21:24And they come out and they form a group that they call the Asian American Political Alliance. Asian American. It seems commonplace now, but this new political identity was radical. Up until then, U.S. 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.

22:00But now, they were done with all that. 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. 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. 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.

22:51After 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 Weintraub, a Warner Brothers executive who wanted him to star in a new film project, literally called Kung Fu. 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 going to go out for that part. Bruce nails the audition.

23:27But 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. 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 going to definitely make it here. And they make him an offer he can't refuse. Finally, it's a leading role, a chance to prove his star potential to the executives in the U.S.

24:03And it is a hit. It becomes a sensation. It breaks all box office records and becomes a star. literally overnight. 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. 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 Yellow Face and just continues the tradition of how Hollywood looks at Asia.

24:52You got to 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. 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. He's like, OK, I understand. This is where I have to be. I have to be here in Asia where they can see me.

25:31So 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 U.S. 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. 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.