What Bruce Lee’s Films Taught Me About Writing My Mother’s Voice

I know by worrying about a room of mostly white readers I undermine myself, but it’s become instinct. And, honestly, I just get tired.

It’s nighttime in Taipei. Blinking store signs linger in my vision as spots and blurs. My mom drives a little too fast and jagged, making me car sick. I try to hide it and my mom tries even harder to talk to me. “Okay,” she says, “Pronounce it again for me.”

“Shape,” I say, drawing out the long ‘A.’

“Shiuap,” she repeats.

“Shape.”

“Shia—op.”

“Shape! Shape! Shape!”

“Shiuup! Shoiap! Shi-aapee!” At this point, we’re both laughing, and her driving is very jagged. We have this conversation every few years. I don’t know what it is about my mom and long As, or specifically the word ‘shape.’ She just can’t figure it out.

Do you feel close to my mother in that moment?

I don’t. That’s not to say I don’t think the scene works. I nudged and reshaped it until it read easier than it felt in real life. The way my mom says ‘shape’ sounds more like she’s saying “shut up!” too fast—spitting it out mid-argument, skipping the ‘T’ in the middle, only grazing the ‘U’ of ‘up,’ going straight for that strong ‘P’ at the end.

In truth, she didn’t say, “Pronounce it again for me.” She said, “再說一遍,” which translates to ‘say it again.’ But “Pronounce it again for me”—though not a phrase my mom would ever naturally say—held more emotional truth, you know? I needed to make clear early on that the scene is about being ESL, communication in a multi-cultural family. Switching it to ‘pronounce’ and adding ‘for me’ rooted the scene in more specificity, in our mother/daughter dynamic.

I often fudge the translation of my mother’s Mandarin, dub over her English, to better serve my writing. Faithfully transcribing what she says, the deep language barrier in our family, would eat up all my time. My Mandarin vocabulary is very limited. I still rely mostly on words I learned as a kid, overusing them until they’re reedy sounds. When my mom and I fight, I hear myself as a giant toddler throwing a tantrum, too inept at explaining myself to do anything else. This is maybe another reason for the fudging and dubbing: I don’t like my voice either.

In high school, when writing felt private, neither my mother nor our Asian identity seriously appeared on my pages. It wasn’t until moving to New York for college, when writing became more serious and public, that I was struck by a heavy, sudden self-awareness.

To write my mother’s voice is to confront the nuances of Asian identity on a frustratingly small syntactical level. It means, on a word-by-word basis, negotiating between accents, languages, identities. By putting my mother’s voice on the page, I ask readers to chip in—put in the time to examine those nuances, to expand on what it means to be an English speaker. Yet, usually when the time comes to turn in my piece for workshop, I dub over my mom instead. Because would anyone really read that closely? Would they care? I know by worrying about a room of mostly white readers I undermine myself, but it’s become instinct. And, honestly, I just get tired. I don’t always want to confront Asian identity within every, single, word. Especially if no one will read that closely anyway. But if even I tire, default into dubbing over my mother, how can I ask anyone else to be patient enough to listen?

In college classrooms, where I was surrounded by mostly white American peers, professors taught us how to edit dialogue for brevity; no one sounds exactly like the curated dialogue on their pages, they said. This felt like being given creative license to give my mother the voice I’d always wished she had. A voice that’s still Asian and ESL, but just in the most convenient, easily resolvable ways. I would make her English smoother, our conversations more monolingual, for the ease of the people workshopping me, but also as my own wish fulfilment. I’d dub over my mother with the voice of a quieter and more communicative mother, one who could laugh through any language barrier and drive around any uncomfortable gaps between us.

*

Despite being a native English speaker, Bruce Lee was dubbed over in almost all of his films. In all the obvious ways, Lee was not American leading man material. His masculinity wasn’t like the other brooding male leads of the time. He didn’t look like an everyman—which is just a roundabout way of saying Lee wasn’t white. But the most glaring issue for producers was that he didn’t sound ‘American,’ let alone white. He was an American-born citizen, but his voice was proof of his multi-cultural upbringing, that he was ‘foreign.’

It’s unclear who, exactly, dubbed as Bruce Lee’s English voice. Despite how iconic their voices have become, the English voice actors from the period go largely uncredited. Michael Kaye is retroactively credited on IMDB, but the man who most loudly claims the role of Lee’s voice is Ted Thomas, an English officer who stumbled into voice work while overseas in Hong Kong. Thomas went on to own an English dubbing company, Axis International. Thomas explained the dubbing process in an interview on a fan’s oral history WordPress blog, “We would sit in a crowded studio, maybe 200 feet square, thick with cigarette smoke, you could hardly see the screen, and matching your voice to a mouth that was about ten feet across on the screen.”

Thomas has the cadence you expect from a voice in old martial arts films—expressive but stilted, very dated. He has a clear voice but it’s never as crisp as Lee’s. Thomas can let some vowels go flat, consonants go soft, there’s audible ease of English being his first language. Or, maybe it’s the audible ease of Thomas being comfortable living within English, feeling at home. No one has ever looked at him and assumed he couldn’t pronounce a word, assumed his voice wasn’t worth listening to.

So much of how we learn to carry our voices is molded by how little or how much people listen, how much effort people decide we’re worth. This is especially true within multi-lingual families. As much as my mom’s English is molded by how we speak, so is my Mandarin. Where I give up easy, my mom is patient. More than patient, she’s accepting of our awkward silences and stumbles. When I have to pause telling her about my day because I don’t know how to say ‘intern’ in Mandarin, she’ll jump in: “實習生.” Whenever she can’t find the right words, she’ll hop on her phone to translate for me.

No one has ever looked at him and assumed he couldn’t pronounce a word, assumed his voice wasn’t worth listening to. 

Voices like Ted Thomas speak like they own the English language, inherited it like they would a family heirloom. People are just so generous with white voices. In a very different way, my mom is always so generous with mine.

I used to have this recurring nightmare that I’ve written into a lot of other essays and short stories: I’m in my room. I hear a voice I don’t recognize. Knowing the only people home are my mom and me, I tiptoe out to investigate. It turns out, the voice is my mom. She’s on the phone and her voice is made up of smooth long As, and it’s so deep. It sounds like she’s making shady business deals. I stumble in and she goes back to her accented English like nothing’s happened. Every time I’ve read this nightmare out loud at workshops people smile with their eyes. I’ve never landed how ominous it feels.

I’ve thought a lot (probably too much) about what it means. Maybe I’m threatened at the idea of my mom becoming more assimilated. Maybe I’m secretly harboring an intense internalized racism and fear sneaky Asian people. Maybe I don’t even know my own mother. Maybe I just watch too many poorly dubbed martial arts films.

But the answer that I see in myself is that I can’t stand the sound of my mother’s voice. I’m not always patient enough to teach her to say long As and do the mental translation work to get to know her. I find it hard to stay in the same room as her voice, hear it bounce off the walls.

Writing this essay, I picture her driving in the car, but I hear that crisp nightmare.

When speaking to me, my mom rambles into admissions. Recently, she admitted she thinks I’m strange. Well, actually, she said I feel like a “陌生的東西.” Which means I feel like a ‘strange thing’ to her. But the ‘strange’ of “陌生,” is more specific than ‘strange’ as in odd. It’s the ‘strange’ of ‘stranger,’ unfamiliar and foreign. It never occurred to me that she sensed a disconnect. It snapped me back into attention, I pressed my ear closer to the phone, eager to listen more carefully.

*

In a 1971 interview on the Pierre Berton Show, Lee is first introduced as “the newest Mandarin superstar!” Berton asks Lee how that can be when Lee doesn’t even speak Mandarin. Lee explains the art of dubbing in martial arts movies, his voice remaining crisp and careful. From his tongue, every English word becomes distinct vowels and consonants. This may sound obvious, given that it’s a celebrity interview, but Lee is always on. He cannot afford to mess up, and he knows it.

Halfway through the interview Berton says, “I’m told that you got the job on The Green Hornet, where you played Kato the chauffer, mainly because you’re the only Chinese-looking guy who can pronounce the name of the leading character, Britt Reid.” Lee laughs and clarifies “I meant that as a joke, of course.” Lee goes on, “and it’s a heck of a name, man. Every time I said it, at that time, I was super conscious.”

Bruce Lee on the set of a movie, weaving an act of translation into his performance, is what I imagine now while writing about my mom.

His presence on the small screen with The Green Hornet is much quieter than his presence in interviews. He was the breakout star as Kato, the perfect sidekick—quiet, stoic, so that at the end of the day, this was still a show about the white American hero.

Even now, directors and producers place more value in white voices than the accented English of Asian Americans. It’s uncomfortable to watch Bruce Lee open his mouth and hear a white man. But I want to be clear that dubbing is not just an act of erasure. At its core, dubbing is a means of translation, of giving a larger, more diverse audience access to art. And dubbing is fundamental to how martial arts films operated.

While the mismatch of lips and voice looks funny today, Aaron Magnan Park—a professor at the University of Hong Kong and speaker at the 2018 Martial Arts Studies Conference—notes that it was actually an “aesthetic choice” on the part of Hong Kong studios like Shaw Brothers. These were always films made for a variety of Asian viewers, Cantonese and Mandarins speakers alike. The mismatched lips are just part of the viewing experience of a multi-lingual project.

In that Pierre Berton interview, Berton remarks, “doesn’t that sound strange when you go to the movies? Especially in Hong Kong, in your own town, and you see yourself with somebody else’s voice?” Lee laughs it off, and insists no, this is just the nature of how these films are made. Berton presses on, “your lips never quite make the right words, do they?” Lee explains, “That’s where difficulty lies, you see, the Cantonese have a different way of saying things . . . I have to find something similar to that and keep a kind of feeling going behind that, something matching the Mandarin.”

Bruce Lee on the set of a movie, weaving an act of translation into his performance, is what I imagine now while writing about my mom. In watching martial arts films, I’m reminded that translation is allowed to be messy, awkward. To have the room to make mistakes—or, rather, room to make ‘aesthetic choices’—is to live freely within a language (or between multiple), to make it our own. The texture of our voices—the letters we skip, the words we create our own pronunciations for—mark our identity, make our voices recognizable to loved ones. So, I’m trying now to let the dialogue be clunky, to thud on the ground. Because my mother should feel free to make English her own. Because to speak in stumbles and hybrid-languages, to feel, at times, 陌生 to each other, is fundamental to what it means for us to communicate.