Everybody was NOT Kung Fu fighting: Fighting Stereotypes and Reclaiming Cultural Identity
Whenever I say I do Chinese Martial Arts, I generally get two types of responses from people. Those who ask me what it is because they genuinely have no idea — and I don’t blame them, and people who ask if it’s like Karate, Kung Fu Panda, Bruce Lee, or Shang-Chi. I don’t mind the questions because I have a pre-prepared script, polished and practiced from the many times I’ve had to explain in public, a somewhat impassioned spiel on how Karate is actually Japanese, how the Wuxi finger hold is ridiculously baseless, how I am in fact not related to Bruce Lee even though I am a Chinese-American who does Kung Fu, and while Shang-Chi does use various traditional Chinese weapons, the ten rings sadly aren’t one of them.
Although with sarcasm in the mix, I do truly feel strongly about accurately expressing Kung Fu not only because the Hollywood caricature falls short because of its role in uprooting and dismantling Western media’s cultural invasion of Chinese cultures through historic exoticization, appropriation, and stereotyping. After twelve years of turning a sport into a passion, practicing Kung Fu has empowered me to adopt a unyielding spirit to “fight” the limits and stereotypes assigned to people who look like me and proudly reclaim my cultural identity as a Chinese-American from manipulation and misrepresentation perpetuated by mainstream society.
I was seven years old when the first Kung Fu Panda movie was released, around the same time I started learning Kung Fu in a modest classroom at my Chinese Sunday school. The animated movie with the panda-turned-dragon-warrior and his fighting friends was groundbreaking for me because, for the first time in my life, there was a mainstream kids’ movie about Kung Fu. And seven-year-old me did Kung Fu and she could now tell all her friends about it and thanks to “Po”, they would all get it. Right? Now, with hindsight fifteen years later, I realize that as much as I loved the series growing up, it wasn’t as revolutionary as seven-year-old me found it to be.
In part, Kung Fu Panda reflects Western media’s deep-entrenched obsession with appropriating Asian cultures stemming from its theme song, Carl Douglas’ “Kung Fu Fighting”. Contrary to popular belief, the Jack Black and CeeLo Green version was just a cover with the original created long before the movie franchise during a time when blatant appropriation of East Asian cultures was commonplace in Hollywood. In the song’s original 1974 music video, Douglas is dressed in a costume equivalent of a Japanese Karate gi while slicing the air with “Karate chops” in front of an all-white audience — all while singing about “China men” and Kung Fu (Youtube, 2014). Whatever artistic or stylistic liberties deemed necessary in the video were intentional. Douglas didn’t accidentally mix up Kung Fu with Japanese culture. He outright sings “It’s an ancient Chinese art” yet pays no homage to the Chinese origins of Kung Fu throughout his deliberate performance. Thus, the song advances a false homogenization of East Asian cultures by intentionally confusing Chinese with Japanese, and in doing so — trivializes Kung Fu, in Douglas’ words “an ancient Chinese art”.
This appropriation and stereotyping of Asians is not only intentional but has been a feature, not a bug, in mainstream media since the mid-19th century. Asian, particularly Chinese immigrants were labeled as the “Yellow Peril” who would threaten Western values including Christianity, democracy, and technological progress. Using “Yellow Peril” xenophobia, the media portrayed Asians and Asian-Americans as evil and undesirable while “popular illustrations emphasized ‘exotic’ features, such as eye shape often rendered as narrow slits and skin color often exaggeratedly yellow” (BGSU). Even a century later, I remember other children in elementary school pulling back the corners of their eyes, innocently chanting the playground rhyme “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees”. This along with countless other micro and macro-aggressions in everyday interaction reveals how deeply permeating the history of Asian exoticization is.
This was the exoticization that laid the groundwork for every-Asian-must-know-Kung Fu stereotype, which seems relatively harmless at first. However, the Kung Fu stereotype reflects the same sentiment of exotic othering emphasized throughout history and more specifically, is an act of “cultural invasion” that manipulates and misappropriates the cultural meaning of Chinese martial arts, reducing it to “slapstick comedic relief” (Wong, 2023). It is not a pop culture trend or happenstance of directors asking Asian-American actors if they can do martial arts. It is not sociological; exoticization was historically constructed for domination. Paulo Freire, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, describes cultural invasion as manipulative tactics where “invaders penetrate the cultural context of another group, in disrespect of the latters’ potentialities” (Freire, 1970). The invaders are the “authors, actors, and molders” in imposing narratives, standards, and values onto the cultures of the invaded, leading to cultural inauthenticity and conquest.
Applied to Kung Fu, Hollywood has invaded the authenticity and traditional cultural component of what Kung Fu entails since the deliberate exoticization of its token “Kung Fu fighting” Asian, Bruce Lee, himself. Bruce Lee was intentionally cast into roles that would perpetuate a simplified caricature of Chinese identity. His character often “plays the role of a quiet assistant but will use his martial arts skills to turn the tide in a fight” (Khozam, 2017) aided by an exaggerated high-pitched yell, implying that all he can do is fight. Yet Kung Fu philosophy, grounded in respect, self-growth, and discipline, is not about winning fights at all. But it was more convenient for mainstream media to dilute it of its depth and tradition to market Kung Fu as the “exotic” fighting that Bruce Lee does, even though Lee himself created Jeet Kune Do, a modern hybrid of different styles. Although Lee left a remarkable mark on Western cinema by introducing Asian martial arts onto the big screen, he was inevitably pigeonholed into a one-dimensional portrayal that gave him few acting opportunities outside of the yellow jumpsuit nunchuck-wielding stereotype. That same stereotype is reflected in the false illustration of Lee as synonymous with all of Chinese martial arts and the back-handed comments I get from strangers who deduce that my parents must know Kung Fu too.
It’s not the fact that people can easily associate Kung Fu with Bruce Lee or Kung Fu Panda that bothers me, I am more than happy to share what’s authentic about traditional Chinese martial arts, as a sport, culture, and philosophy. It’s the fact that mainstream society tells me, with the same breath, to be unique but not authentic that makes me question how much of the “Chinese” part of my Chinese-American identity I can wear proudly on my sleeve without coming off as exotic and other. In her book Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong writes that Asian-Americans are seen as “next in line to be white” (Hong, 2020) because of the false narrative of “model minority” that the cultural “invaders” mold and author. As a result, Asian-Americans are praised for and encouraged to be stereotypically timid, obedient, soft-spoken, non-political and thus, rule-abiding to an oppressive system. And before I started Kung Fu, that’s exactly what I thought being Chinese-American was.
Interestingly enough, Chinese culture goes against the social construct of what makes a “good” Chinese-American. I believe that Chinese identity is rooted in the idea of “unyielding” or bu qu (不屈), first introduced in-text between 700–400 BCE and emphasized during the late Qing dynasty against Western and Japanese imperialism (zdic, 2020). My grandparents have always told me to stand up for myself and others in times of injustice with the phrase 路见不平拔刀相助, which literally means “if you see an uneven path, pull out your sword to help”. Thus, to the dismay of the model minority myth and the approval of my Chinese ancestors, I hope, I never wanted to be the poster child of the timid Asian girl. That’s why I picked up Kung Fu in the first place twelve years ago. I wanted to be bold, strong, and unapologetically, unyieldingly, myself.
Practicing Kung Fu is an act of reclaiming my cultural identity through my lens and not that of Western media or mainstream society. They say you shouldn’t do something with spite, but part of my journey learning Kung Fu in the early days has been to prove people wrong, defy stereotypes though I didn’t fully understand at the time, and wear my culture proudly on my sleeve. I was exposed to the meaning behind every kick, block, and punch, not to harm but to defend yourself, to grow stronger as an athlete and a person. Kung Fu literally translates to “hard work” and like the “unyielding” spirit in Chinese culture, it embodies perseverance through discipline. As I grew physically and mentally stronger, and felt more connected to my Chinese culture learning the philosophy behind the sport, I became more confident of my cultural identity. In the face of silkscreens and silhouettes of exoticized film characters who only showed a silver of their appropriated Asian identities, I wanted to become my own role model. A normal Chinese-American girl who happens to do Kung Fu. Not timid and soft-spoken, but not high-pitched yelling and nun-chuck swinging either. Practicing Kung Fu has allowed me to put into practice becoming “unyieldingly” Chinese-American, to stand-up for the authenticity of the sport and by extension my culture, and uproot the perceptions and stereotypes tethered to my identity.
Works Cited:
“不屈”字的解释: 汉典. 漢典 zdic. (2020, July 10). https://www.zdic.net/hans/%E4%B8%8D%E5%B1%88
BGSU. (n.d.). Asian immigration: The “Yellow Peril.” BGSU University Libraries. https://digitalgallery.bgsu.edu/student/exhibits/show/race-in-us/asian-americans/asian-immigration-and-the--yel
Freire, P. (1970). Chapter 4. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (pp. 150–155). essay, The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc.
Hong, C. P. (2020). Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. Profile Books Ltd.
Khozam, J. (2017). “So, Do You Know Kung-Fu?": Asian Portrayal in Hollywood Films. The Toro Historical Review, 3(1). Retrieved from https://journals.calstate.edu/tthr/article/view/2674
mmtfb. (2014, April 3). Carl Douglas Kung Fu Fighting (Original Music Video) [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmfudW7rbG0&t=2s
Wong, S. (2023, September 15). Can pop culture kick the kung fu Asian stereotyping habit?. Aeon. https://aeon.co/essays/can-pop-culture-kick-the-kung-fu-asian-stereotyping-habit
