Bruce Lee and Linguistic Racism: Vocal Violations of Bruce Lee's English-Language Voice Track

Abstract

Bruce Lee and Linguistic Racism: Vocal Violations of Bruce Lee’s English-language Voice Track Paper Proposal Martial Arts Studies Conference 2018 Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park University of Hong Kong Bruce Lee was a bilingual speaker of both Cantonese Chinese, the language of his youth in Hong Kong, and English, the language of his birthplace and adulthood in the United States. Across the four and a half kung fu films that propelled him to global superstardom, we can only hear his English speaking voice in just one film: Enter the Dragon. This is the case since his first three films were produced primarily for a Mandarin speaking Chinese global market without any intention for export to Anglophone countries such as the United States. This opportunity first availed itself with Enter the Dragon, the first film co-production between Hong Kong and United States designed from the beginning to capitalize on the global kung fu craze with the United States its intended first market before the film would circulate internationally with the help of Warner Brothers. Despite Bruce Lee’s elevated status as a skyrocketing kung fu film star of global magnitude, he was treated disrespectfully during the filming of Enter the Dragon. Artistic differences arose between Lee and the film’s American producer, director, and scriptwriter. Under this hostile environment the director and scriptwriter conspired to have Lee lose face by intentionally rewriting the script to include as many words as possible containing the letter “R” with “Braithwaite” standing as the most damaging. This is because for Asian speakers of English, the “R” is often mispronounced as an “L” or sometimes as a “W.” Preying on this accent issue, Lee experienced a case of intentional linguistic racism. This along with the issue of Anglophone ears that discriminate against Asian accented English will be addressed. For Lee’s remaining oeuvre, it is the British voice actor, Ted Thomas who dubbed in postproduction, Lee’s English-language dialogue. So for Bruce Lee, it was not just getting Hollywood to accept the possibility of an Asian lead actor as box office gold, but also getting Hollywood to accept the possibility of an Asian lead actor speaking an Asian accented English as not an automatic killer of box office gold.