Lee illuminate how to#We have to learn over time how to interpret and interact with what we are taking in per our cultural constructs. Most children don’t have fully formed, cognitively mature memory in play until much later than the age of four. I know it because in our formative years, that is how we know our parents-through what we take in through our senses. I know him in a way that’s unclouded by any conflicts or hurts, jealousies or competition, or even any overly romanticized notions. I have come to recognize that these feelings-of what his essential nature is-are my memories of him. And how could I explain that, despite this, I feel I know him so essentially? How could I articulate that I feel I understand him in a way that others who “knew” him might not even understand him? I don’t have a letter he had written to me specifically. My father died when I was just four years old, so I don’t have many of my own stories or dazzling pieces of wisdom he passed on to me directly the way his contemporaries do. It’s the question I’m most frequently asked and one that used to deeply disturb me because I couldn’t answer it with clarity. “What do you remember about your father?” How does one honor the plain fact of their DNA while at the same time understanding that it doesn’t mean anything about one’s own soul? Or does it? Throw in my decision to spend a good portion of my life protecting and promoting the legacy of one of the humans who gifted me this life and who has meant so much to me, and questions of identity start to get pretty muddy. Perhaps that’s why I feel like my father’s core philosophy of self-actualization (yes, Bruce Lee was a philosopher!) resonates so deeply with me. I would say, though, that being Bruce Lee’s daughter and having people react to that piece of information in such overwhelming ways has made it a challenge to my own identity at times. After all, I’m not ashamed to be Bruce Lee’s daughter-I’m honored. If I skirted all the typical icebreaker questions such as “So what do you do?” and “And how did you get into that?” I started to feel not only like I was hiding, but actually lying through misdirection, and it didn’t feel good. But as I became an adult, I began to feel like I had a secret I was guarding, and the conversations became more difficult to avoid, especially after I started looking after my father’s legacy full-time. However, with most elementary school–age girls, that just meant a curious shrug of the shoulders before we put on our roller skates or rode our bikes. Of course, my friends would always find out eventually when they’d come over and see our family pictures on the walls. She said, “Let people get to know you for who you are without that information.” It was great advice, and for many years I skirted the issue in every conversation I could. When I was growing up, my mom used to tell my brother and me not to tell people that Bruce Lee was our dad.
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