LEE'S LEGACY

SHANNON LEE, daughter of the late actor and martial-artist Bruce, shares her struggles in and out of the limelight.

- Words: JOYCE YIP

Shannon Lee remembers her father's funeral at the Kowloon Funeral Parlour on July 25, 1973.

It was chaos.

“Thousands of people lining the streets, large crews from every news outlet, fans crying on the sidewalks. It was an open-casket affair and my mother, brother and I were dressed in traditional white Chinese mourning garbs ... I remember the chaos like a tornado swirling all around me, while I was shut down in the eye of the storm,” recounts Lee in her 2021 book, Be Water My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee.

The father, of course, was the martial artist and actor Bruce Lee. His daughter, who's now CEO and owner of the Bruce Lee Family Companies, and president of the Bruce Lee Foundation, was only four years old at the time.

Too young to grasp the emotional impact that comes from losing a parent – or, as he was to the world, a superstar – whom she never got to know, Lee admits that growing up with the label “Bruce Lee’s daughter” has at times been “awesome yet challenging”. But today, at the age of 56 and more than five decades after his death, her late father’s legacy remains the lighthouse in her search for peace.

Revealing her identity was discouraged by her mother Linda, who believed she was shielding her children from unnecessary prejudice. Yet for toddler Shannon, it was a weird secret to keep, especially since she wouldn’t fully understand her father’s global fame until her late teens, by which time the name Bruce Lee meant something beyond a lost presence within her home.