The Bruce Lee Family Curse

I’ve tried tried tried to find evidence that Bruce Lee was murdered. In conclusion, I just can’t find any. But let’s not throw out the babies with the bathwater just yet!

There is still the Lee family curse with many twists and turns that might just make you believe in the Chinese woo woo.



Bruce’s parents very much believed in the Lee family curse. Supposedly the firstborn males were affected. Bruce’s parents even called him by a female name as a red herring for any would-be demons seeking the male child. Nothing too crazy here, as it is an old Chinese tradition to call babies ugly to throw off any demons looking to feed off a family’s prosperity.

Bruce Lee’s family preferred to call him by his girl’s name (nickname): “Sai Fon” or “Little Phoenix”.

rubygemstone.weebly.com...#:~:text=Bruce%20Lee's%20family%20preferred%20to,San%20Francisco%2C%20California %2C%20USA.

Before Lee was born, his parents had lost another son and according to tradition, if you didn’t refer to him by a male name it would confuse the spirits who might steal their souls.

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Bruce also had an older brother who died before his birth. Did the first male child already succumb to the family curse? If so, why were the Lee’s still targeted? Or did the mystique grow out of proportion to rationalize a list of family tragedies?

Regardless, Bruce’s death was indeed an unexpected tragedy. It has long been posited that there was foul play involved, but there isn’t enough concrete evidence to bring this one home.

Bruce Lee’s unexpected death on July 20, 1973 sent shock waves across the world.

Today, fans continue to mourn and pay emotional tributes to the martial arts legend, but people still don’t really know why he died.
At the time, doctors cited a fluid build-up in Lee’s brain as the official cause of death, but they did not give a clear explanation as to why the excess accumulation of fluid occurred.

www.scmp.com... his-shock

Was there motive for foul play? Yes. It has been speculated that Bruce’s endeavor on filming "Enter the Dragon" may have been seen as a betrayal to producer Raymond Chow. The Golden Harvest producer, Chow, had made Bruce a star (and later Jackie Chan,) but may have felt slighted when Bruce went to American producer, Fred Weintraub. Now I don’t wish to slander or besmirch the name of Raymond Chow, but it’s not totally unreasonable to think that he was afraid of losing his golden goose phenom.

Golden Harvest signed Lee to a three-picture deal, with each breaking all Hong Kong box office records.
Those movies were followed by Enter the Dragon, the first Chinese martial arts film to be produced by a major Hollywood studio, Warner Bros.

www.theguardian.com...

Despite this working relationship, the pair’s personal relationship was said to be more fractious. Those suspicious of the official verdict wondered whether Chow didn’t have Lee offed to prevent his star man from leaving him for the vast spoils of the US.

Not only that, but with Lee gone Chow gained full control of Concord, owning the rights to arguably Lee’s most famous films.

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Bruce was a martial artist first and foremost, and an actor second. While he had dreams of being the next Steve McQueen, Bruce had always been a proponent for spreading Chinese culture and martial arts to the world. Did this attract unwanted attention from some more possessive or xenophobic ideologies?

Despite Bruce's efforts to avoid any tension with nearby kung fu studios, trouble arose in December 1964. The traditional martial arts community objected to him teaching Westerners, whom they considered to already have a natural upper hand in terms of size and strength. They also did not approve of him sharing the "secrets" of their esteemed art to those who were not of Chinese descent. In order to stop Bruce from giving away what they saw as their culture's sacred secrets, they issued the young upstart a challenge: If a kung fu master of their choosing could defeat Bruce in battle, he would have to stop teaching kung fu to non-Chinese. Their champion was another kung fu master called Wong Jack Man.

www.newsweek.com...

It has also been said the Chinese Mafia had a role in Bruce’s death. Dang the motivations just keep adding up! But keep your arms and legs in the vehicle folks, because this rabbit hole only gets more spooky from here!

Lee had history with triads, having supposedly beaten up the son of a local gang leader in one of his many street fights as a youth – the kind of trouble that led him to move away to the US as a teenager.

One conspiracy theory claimed that since Lee refused to pay Hong Kong triads for protection money on his film sets, they ordered him killed.

www.scmp.com...

Okay, curse or no—It’s clear a high profile guy involved in big business like Bruce had garnered favorable and unfavorable attention from many sources. We could just chalk it up to Hollywood intrigue and weirdness, right? After all, celebrities tend to get involved in scandals and many die young for various reasons.

As stated, I just can’t find the smoking gun that killed Bruce. But no one else can either. My best conclusion is that he died from a bad reaction to medications/ substances that you couldn’t intentionally produce to commit a murder. In other words, it would have been a very clumsy one-in-a-million shot murder attempt. But this is a conspiracy, so it’s not totally impossible that the coroner reports were affected as well. With a legend like Bruce, anything’s possible. However, I do accept that he had medical predispositions that didn’t mix well with the cocktail of meds he had taken. The below source is a more detailed workup on his health/ death if you’re inclined.

[continued...]

Some facts about Bruce Lee's death are public [3]. On the day of his death, he and the producer of his films, Raymond Chow, drove to the house of Betty Ting Pei, who was thought to be the mistress of Lee. Lee spent some hours alone with Ting Pei and used marijuana before driving to the house, and while there Lee actively acted out some scenes of an upcoming movie. He experienced headache and dizziness around 7:30 pm, after drinking water. Ting Pei gave him an ‘Equagesic’ pill (a combination of meprobamate and aspirin which he had taken before) and Lee went to the bedroom to rest. Raymond Chow left at that time. At 9:30 pm, Ting Pei found Lee unconscious. She called Chow who went to the house and tried to wake Lee up without success. They called a doctor, who spent another 10 min unsuccessfully doing cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Lee was sent to the nearest hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

At autopsy, there were no signs of external injuries and no tongue bite. Severe cerebral oedema had resulted in brain weight of 1575 g compared with the normal 1400 g [4]. Traces of marijuana were found in the stomach. Bruce Lee's death was officially ruled to be the result of cerebral oedema caused by hypersensitivity to Equagesic.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...

So case closed? Hardly!

Following Bruce’s death, Raymond Chow unceremoniously cobbled together footage from Bruce’s final film project "Game of Death," to release a Bruce-sploitation film of the same name. The plot of the Chow version is vastly different from Bruce’s original vision. The Chow version certainly raises some eyebrows. The film is centered around an actor who is killed on set with a live bullet instead of a prop gun.

In this movie, Bruce Lee is a very famous martial-arts master who stars in many films. After an unsuccessful murder attempt against him, everyone thinks his is dead, but he's just hiding, preparing his revenge...

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A gang is extorting money from celebrities - actors, musicians etc - threatening to injure them, or worse, if they don't pay them protection money. Billy Lo, actor and martial arts expert, refuses to cooperate so first they assault him then they kill him. But is he really dead?

www.imdb.com...

Now this might not seem so unusual if not for the Brandon Lee connection. Bruce’s son was infamously killed in almost precisely the same manner as foreshadowed in the plot of "Game of Death" while filming "The Crow." It's almost as if someone was trying to send a clear message to the Lee family!

Both Lees died while working on their fifth feature film. Bruce was in post-production work for Game of Death (filmed in 1972), while Brandon was eight days away from completing principal shooting for the 1994 horror thriller The Crow, in which he plays a rock musician who rises from the dead to take revenge on the men who brutally murdered both him and his fiancée.

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As for Brandon, he was accidentally killed after being shot by a prop gun that may have carried a live round besides blanks while filming The Crow, a production that was plagued by mishaps. The police's final statement, released after a lengthy investigation, was that no foul play was suspected.

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Whether accidental, family curse, or foul play, the strange coincidences keep stacking up. It’s hard to ignore the amount of strangeness surrounding this family and the tragedies that resulted.

I’ll leave you with one final piece of woo woo that may just clinch the demon curse for non-believers. Prior to Brandons Lee's own “Game of Death” tragic end, there was a biopic already released called "Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story." Peppered throughout the semi-biographical fantasy is a plot about a demon aiming to claim the Lee family males. In the film’s climax, there is a scene where Bruce is engaged in combat with the demon. The demon loses interest in Bruce and begins menacingly approaching a young boy, Brandon. In real life, Brandon Lee would die not longer after.

See for yourself.

a reply to: AlroyFarms

This is a really interesting thread. I didn't know Bruce died from a bad reaction to the headache medicine. Knew about Brandon though because its on Unsolved Mysteries and they do talk about the curse and interview his mom.

I do believe in the curse I mean if his family believed in it who am I to disagree with them I'm not even Asian I have no idea hehehehe!

a reply to: AlroyFarms

The Golden Harvest producer, Chow, had made Bruce a star

Bruce was already a star in Asia from his time on Green Hornet which was aired in Hong Kong. Raymond Chow wanted to make Bruce a Hong Kong 'martial arts' movie star, but Bruce didn't like the movie 'style' of the time and thought they should be more westernised in their story instead of the 'silly' ancient chinese look, which lead to the look of Lee's films. Chow banged out cheap movies on a weekly basis but Bruce wanted to be more professional like Hollywood, so worked tirlessly. Some also believed Bruce was having an affair with Ting Pei, but this has been denied.

I only know this because of an acquaintance I did work for in my 20s. He started one of the first 'supermarket' style martial arts suppliers in the UK (early 80s), a promoter of Hong Kong movie/marital artists, praticed Tai Chi and knew Linda Lee.

a reply to: AlroyFarms

35 or so years ago a load of us used to go into a Chinese restaurant for lunch regularly, I reconised the triad symbol on the older Chinese gent who always served us and asked him about the Indian restaurant that was due to open across the road from his in a quiet little town ,He smiled at me and said don't worry about that and it burned down a few nights later .

I used to play Mahjong with a few Chinese people in a restaurant when I was waiting for a then girlfriend to finish her shift at night and know you do not mess with triads ever , They really do have the care factor of 0

a reply to: Kurokage

Thanks for the insight. That does support the theory a bit that Chow wanted more control over Bruce and felt betrayed when he went to do "Enter the Dragon."

a reply to: stonerwilliam

Yikes! I certainly wouldn't want to mess with Triads. They seem like the ultimate case of FAFO. They would have certainly had their hands in the entertainment business too.

a reply to: AlroyFarms

When you travelled as much as I did in the UK I noticed ALL the menus were printed by the same firm and all looked identical .

I did work for a Chinese restaurant owner and got on well with him and he told me jokingly we all look the same to you , He went back to Hong Kong for a month handed his passport to a friend who came over then posted it back , The same with his car he laughed at me and said how many of these cars with exactly the same registration plates are running around in the UK , the answer was over 25 with one tax plate and insurance policy .

But what little I knew about those triads they were not to be messed with

a reply to: AlroyFarms

That does support the theory a bit that Chow wanted more control over Bruce and felt betrayed when he went to do "Enter the Dragon."

Chow wanted control of Lee and the movie production, but Lee wanted to control the look and fight scenes of his movies and worked 24/7 to make the best movie he could with what he had. Really until Wang Yu's The Chinese Boxer and Bruce Lee's movies, the Hong Kong movies were more sword play with a back and fourth style of fighting, they changed it with the well-choreographed hand-to-hand fighting.

How they saw their movies was very different, back then Chow had a production line (He made over 600 movies in his career). Bruce wanted to be the biggest star, Lee always wanted to have a career in Hollywood and thought he could be bigger than McQueen but the racism kept him out of the top spots until 'Enter The Dragon', but we'll never know if that would've changed it?