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MUSEUM EXPERIENCE: BRUCE LEE GUIDED TOURS
The Thought
Enhance your students’ experience by visiting the exhibit “Do You Know Bruce” at the Wing Luke Museum. Exploring the
neighborhood, using Bruce Lee’s experience, adds new perspectives on the history and life in the neighborhood and in the
lives of Asian Americans, Asian Pacific Americans and Asian immigrants.
Your students can continue their exploration of the lessons in this guide through one of three educational tours.
Filling Your Cup (1.5 – 2 hours)
Students will draw connections between Bruce Lee and Seattle as a way to connect the exhibit with the Wing Luke
Museum, using one of Bruce Lee’s quotes of their own choosing, to guide and direct them through the content of the
exhibit and to explore themes of perseverance, success, shaping yourself and your environment. (Expands on Lesson #1)
Living an Honest Truth (1.5 – 2 hours)
Students will explore the events of the 1950s and 1960s through different American perspectives. They will use these
different perpectives to view how Bruce Lee shaped himself, his family, community and society. (Expands on Lesson #2)
A Sense of Place (1.5 – 2 hours)
Students will be explore the history of the neighborhood that had helped support Bruce Lee while he lived here and will
look at the legacy of the first Chinese immigrants to the United States and the impact they had made on communities
today. Students will write their thoughts and observations, being encouraged to find connections with the material they are
studying in class and the content in this space, exploring how the legacy of early immigrants made possible the success of
Bruce Lee and other generations of Americans. (Expands on Lesson #3)
Time Frame
1.5–2 hours
Materials
(Provided by the museum)
• Small writing journal
• Pencils
• Quotations by Bruce Lee
READING 1: THE FORMLESSNESS OF WATER
Life is a dynamic substance. Like water, it can be beautiful and serene or surge in a storm with destructive force. How you
choose to live determines how you fill the space they inhabit and what form of water it will take shape.
Bruce Lee is remembered as a man who roared like rushing water, whose life abruptly and sadly came to an end at 32 years
old. But in many ways he spent his teens and early adulthood as a man caught in an eddy, unsure of his potential or the
direction he should follow. By his early thirties he had become, it seemed, confident in articulating his philosophy and his
own personal truth. He had cobbled his philosophy together from many sources; some ancient, others contemporary.
In his 1971 interview with Canadian television host Pierre Berton, Bruce shared how his martial arts connected seamlessly
with his philosophies on life. Within a few years he had gone from one extreme toward a more balanced center. Bruce
describes the goal of learning to find a “natural unnaturalness” or an “unnatural naturalness” as a balance between the
extremes of emotion and a purely scientific mind. The balance is unique to the individual, not unique to a doctrine. Bruce
employs a twist on what philosophers and logicians in the West refer to as a
tautology
. A form of logic that restates an
articulated truth as its own definition.
“DO YOU KNOW BRUCE?”
