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Be Water, My Friend: The Early Years of Bruce Lee by Ken Mochizuki and llustrated by Dom Lee is the picture book biography of Bruce Lee.  I have to admit that I’ve never had much interest in Bruce Lee but because my husband is a fan I’m well aware of him, his movies, and we even own one of his books, Tao of Jeet Kune Do.  This biography is really interesting.

The book jacket:

Growing up in Hong Kong in the 1940s and 1950s, young Bruce Lee had an active mind, boundless energy, and a knack for finding trouble.  As he grew older, Bruce also developed an interest in martial arts.  He thrived on the grueling training but struggled to understand and apply the principles of gentleness and yielding that the master taught.  Only after he set sail for the United Sates at the age of eighteen did Bruce truly embrace the value of martial arts and discover his own path to inner calm.

Bruce Lee eventually became a pioneer of martial arts cinema, and his legacy lives on in popular culture.  But it is his boyhood journey toward self-discovery and his courage to overcome obstacles that will inspire all who search for their way in the world today.

Ken Mochizuki does an excellent job taking the young reader (and this mom!) into the life of Bruce Lee.  He was a good kid but often skipped school stating that he didn’t need an education because he was going to be a famous film star one day.  Knowing he needed a outlet for his boundless energy, he enrolled in Master Bruce’s martial art class where he trained for four to six hours a day.  But when his master learned that Bruce was using his skills to fight others on the street, he taught him that he was misusing his skill.  He taught him the discipline of gentleness, harmony, and yielding.  Bruce was confused about this principle but finally understood when he realized that “Water, the softest substance on Earth, could never be hurt because it offered no resistance.  But with enough force it could break through anything in the world”

This particular biography ends as Bruce Lee is sailing to America at the age of eighteen.  But there is a great afterword which tells the rest of Bruce Lee’s story until his untimely death at the age of thirty-two in 1973.  Ken Mochizuki stresses that Bruce Lee fought against the Asian stereotypes that were often seen in film by refusing to play parts in movies that stereotyped Asians, stressed education, literacy, and interracial dating and marriage.

I highly recommend this biography for fans of Bruce Lee or for those who are ready to discover him for the first time.  Join me in an author interview today with Ken Mochizuki where Ken reveals what is favorite thing about Bruce Lee is.  Can you guess?  Before I read Be Water, My Friend I didn’t know this fact about Bruce Lee.

In addition to Be Water, My Friend:  The Early Years of Bruce Lee , Ken Mochizuki is also the author of the picture books Passage to Freedom: The Sugihara Story (reviewed here), Baseball Saved Us, Heroes, and the young adult novel Beacon Hill Boys. Illustrated by Dom Lee.

Are you a Bruce Lee fan?  Or know of somebody who is?  Do you have any trivia for us?

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