Like Water

Maeda positions Lee’s career as a product of—and significant contributor to—long-evolving transnational exchanges across the Pacific, and he argues forcefully that his subject’s achievements in blending cultural traditions are worthy of celebration ... the book provides lucid analysis of Lee’s lasting significance. ~Kirkus Reviews

Decades after his untimely death, Bruce Lee, like water, still flows across the globe as an inspiration to the marginalized, the colonized, the immigrant, the dispossessed, and the oppressed. Daryl Joji Maeda’s powerful new book places the martial arts megastar/philosopher and his multicultural circle in the critical context of transpacific studies. Maeda does a masterful job of giving us a different way of understanding Bruce Lee and his legacy by avoiding the ‘classical mess’ of pinning the mercurial Lee to Asia or America rather than allowing him to float across the vast Pacific. ~Gina Marchetti, author of Citing China: Politics, Postmodernism, and World Cinema

Marvelous and momentous. Maeda’s knowledge of Bruce Lee is breathtakingly comprehensive and impressive and has completely expanded and transformed my understanding of Lee. Like Water is easily the most consequential and definitive book on Lee that has been published to date. ~Robert Ji Song Ku, co-editor of Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader

Conceived as a multifaceted cultural history, Like Water tells the story of the making of Bruce Lee as a transpacific icon. Foregrounding the larger geopolitical and cross-cultural forces at work, Daryl Joji Maeda tracks Lee’s incessantly migratory footsteps from his on-the-road birth at a Chinese hospital in San Francisco to his mysterious death at his paramour’s pad in Hong Kong. As a cultural history, the book is rich and expansive, compiling a montage of big subjects such as Chinese immigration, Cantonese opera in America, and the history of Chinese cinema. As a biography, Like Water draws the contours of Lee’s life while highlighting flashpoints of his legend. ~Yunte Huang, University of California Santa Barbara

Maeda argues that Lee’s films, which combined elements of Spaghetti Westerns, James Bond films, and Cantonese opera, were equally the result of the vision of one man, who also lived between worlds, and the cultural and economic exchange that took place in the 20th century following World War II … Maeda’s point is that without cultural exchange there would have been no Bruce Lee. Maeda’s study of Lee reminds us that without cultural appropriation there would be no culture. ~Washington Examiner

Maeda’s contribution is significant. The book is an easy and enjoyable read, even as it is also a major contribution our understanding of the biography, the context of the work, and the many culturally significant aspects of Bruce Lee, from his fight for fame to the nature of his contributions to film, popular philosophy and physical culture. ~American Literary History

Maeda’s cultural history is compulsively readable. Like Water focuses heavily on Lee’s life, but it also treats Lee as a literal embodiment of the complex forces of imperialism, colonialism, and attitudes toward Asians in the United States during the mid-20th century. It provides a lot of background for readers who may not have that context, but it may leave some hungry for still more... General-interest readers looking for an accessible, well-researched account of Lee’s life will find Like Water a good fit, as will more serious readers. ~The Los Angeles Review of Books