The Big Boss and I - An Essay

[DrNgor]

OBS: The following essay is of a biographical nature. There is some brief language of both crude and perjorative nature. Please excuse as I'm simply quoting things that I heard. Enjoy.

 

                I was in the seventh grade, sometime in the earlier months of the ’94-95 school year. A small, unathletic and nerdy white boy in attendance at Marshall Middle School, an educational establishment located in the rougher areas of south Stockton right off of 8^th Street. What the hell was I doing there? After all, I had spent most of my youth hearing stories about how dangerous that school was from colleagues who had never actually been there. Why would I choose to attend school there?

                The answer was simple: Marshall was a Magnet School, or in other words, received special funds from the government to run advanced programs. In Marshall’s case, it was both a Math/Science Magnet and a Communications one, too. The latter referred to their having   apparently decent Yearbook and Journalism classes, not to mention a Video Productions class. My interesting, however, was in the former. The idea of having advanced Math and Science classes—and getting into high school ahead of many of my fellow freshman—appealed to the nerd in me and I was able to convince my parents to let me sign up for the program.

                Marshall Middle School had seven periods, including an alternating 4^th/5^th period lunch. During my 7^th grade year, I had 5^th period lunch, which I often found myself spending alone. At some point I discovered the Chess Club room, ran by a heavyset African American history teacher named Lud Williams. Mr. Williams had been a football coach for Edison High School, Marshall’s “sister” school, at some point: the walls of his room were covered with framed pictures of all the teams he had coached before he retired and focused on social studies and chess. Mr. Williams passed away in October 2004 of cardiac arrest after battling congestive heart problems for about four years[1].

                Mr. Willliams’s class, located close to the cafeteria at the front of the school, was an exceptionally large classroom. At the back of the class was a long counter populated by Apple computers, which students could use before class or during lunch to play games on, mainly “The Oregon Trail” or “Spy Hunter.” I’m pretty sure that he had electronic chess games installed on those computers as well, although my memory is a bit fuzzy. In any case, that room was more than chess and games. It was a hangout spot. If you wanted a place to sit down and do your homework early, you could occupy your desk with your books and French bread pizza and get it done with. You could just sit with your friends and tune out the extra noise from the lunch area. Moreover, Mr. Williams’s room was the permanent home for a TV/VCR set—many of the rooms had to request those from the Leadership class, in which case the Mr. Rapaport would send out his students during 1^st period to deliver them to the teachers who needed them.

                I do not remember any of the movies that Mr. Williams showed during the ’94-95 school year, except one: Fists of Fury…better known as The Big Boss. By the time I was 12 years old, I had seen more than my fair share of Van Damme and Steven Seagal films, and The Perfect Weapon was a regular fixture in my house. I also watched the Ninja Turtles movies and The 3 Ninjas a few times because…well…because. I had also watched Revenge of the Ninja by this point, because my cousins’ parents were far more liberal with what they let their children watch than my parents were—and my parents were fairly liberal. I had recently become familiar with Bruce Lee via a showing of Enter the Dragon on Channel 31 earlier that year. But that was a edited-for-network-television version. Perhaps Mr. Williams was just old enough by that point that he did not give a [flying leap off a tall building], but the version he showed us was the original, R-rated cut.

                There I was, eating a French bread pizza and watching this movie where two guys are stabbed to death—one of them takes a hatchet to the face—and then carried into an ice factory to meet their final fates against the metal teeth of an intimidating table saw. And then a huge fight breaks out—the fight lasted longer in my memory than it actually did in the film—between two of Bruce Lee’s co-stars (later identified as James Tien and Billy Chan) and a gang of men armed with knives, hatchets, sticks and chains. In my mind, the fight just went on and on, as the good guys got in some good hits, but were gradually worn down by successive hacks and slashes until James Tien finally took a dagger to the gut and expired.

                We were nearing the end of the lunch period when a balls-to-the-wall brawl broke out at the aforementioned ice factory, with the villains even calling in a bus full of armed thugs to deal with the restless workers. That was when Bruce Lee, whose character had made a promise to stop getting in senseless brawls, finally stepped up and started distributing the beatage. Bruce’s character kicks the living snot out of everybody and gets promoted to foreman of the factory—which by this point, has already been established as a front for heroin smuggling. Drugs! Murder! Dismemberment! All shown in a classroom full of 12 and 13-year-old kids during lunch hour.

                As you grow up, you inevitably hear stories of teachers getting fired for doing inappropriate things. When I was going to high school, I heard rumors of one teacher getting sacked for showing From Dusk till Dawn to his class. You can show R-rated movies to your class, granted that you have their parents fill out a permission slip first and arrange for those students whose parents don’t sign it to do some other activity. I vaguely recall, for example, my parents having a discussion over whether or not my sister should be allowed to watch Clan of the Cave Bear at school, which reportedly had a rape scene. While some teachers undoubtedly had loyal students who wouldn’t rat them out, that was not always the case. It was, however, the case with Mr. Lud Williams and his lunch hour chess club.

                After Bruce Lee’s character, Chang Chao’an, is promoted to the post of foreman, there is a scene in which the crooked manager of the ice factory invites him to a restaurant for dinner. In attendance are three prostitutes from the local cathouse. One of them catches the attention of an increasingly-drunk Chang Chao’an, who even starts to hallucinate that she’s actually his cousin (and love interest) Chow Mei, played by 18-year-old Maria Yi. Following the dinner, the film switches over a bedroom scene with Bruce Lee passed out on a bed at the brothel while one of the hookers, a Miss Wu Ma (played by Thai actress Malalin Bonnak), undresses for the camera. Yeah, the sound of snickering pre-teens filled the room and Mr. Williams hurriedly had one of his students press the stop button on the VCR. And none of his loyal students said a word to their parents.

                The next day, Mr. Williams seemed unfazed in wanting to show us the rest of the film. And there we were again, watching a second brief scene of Miss Bonnak lifting her top to show her drug scars to Bruce Lee’s Chang Chao’an. Mr. Williams ignored that, just reminding us that there was a neat scene coming up where Bruce discovers the dead bodies of his friends frozen in ice blocks. And yup, that scene did occur, immediately followed by a bloody fight where Lee massacres many of the bad guys using knives and hatches—there is an infamous cut scene in which he slices a man’s head in half with a saw that is alluded to. That basically leads into the finale, where Bruce Lee faces off with the the Big Boss himself, the head drug smuggler played by Han Ying-Chieh.

                Let’s start with the elephant in room: Yes, Mr. Williams had no business showing an R-rated film to a bunch of 7^th and 8^th graders in the Fall of 1994 (or Spring of ’95). The movie is chock-full of graphic violence and has more than its fair share of nudity, which would get any veteran teacher ousted from his/her position. The film is inappropriate for a bunch of preteens and there’s no denying that. Okay, I’m done. Mr. Williams has been in his grave for almost 20 years now and there is no point in harping on this subject. And to be perfectly honest, this paragraph is written by “Blake as a potentially-concerned parent” rather than “Blake as a hormone-charged teenager who had just witnessed an uncut Bruce Lee movie first hand.”

                I bet if I had told my parents about what I had beheld, there would have been an interesting conversation between them about how to react. My dad, a sport journalist, would have probably been reluctant to get the administrators involved, considering the respect he would have had for Coach Williams for whatever contributions he made to high school football. My mom would have been a bit more up in arms, probably more account of the Miss Bonnak’s boobies rather than the more-abundant stage blood on display. In any case, instead of telling my parents about what had transpired at school, I did the next best thing: during summer vacation, I convinced them to buy me a the Fox Video VHS 4-pack of Bruce Lee movies, which included Fists of Fury.

                My brother, who had been the one to hype me up about Enter the Dragon a couple of years before, had not seen The Big Boss before. He did watch it with me, and then later had me show it to some friends of his after school one day. One of those friends was a fellow named Mike Hilal, whom my brother hung out with during his Junior year in high school. So there we were, my brother, Mike, and I, watching Fists of Fury in our living room after school—before my dad arrived home from his first job—and doing our usual snickering at the bionic legs and over-the-top blood, while wowing Bruce Lee’s speed when he finally gets in on the action. And then we get to the brothel scene and Mike Hilal has the most adolescent response to what’s going onscreen I’ve ever seen: “I’m glad they didn’t get some actress with some saggy-ass titties for this scene.”

                Shortly after that, I was spending the night at one of my friend’s house and I brought this along for some reason to show to him and his younger brother. Same movie, same story. We giggle and snicker at the violence and bionic legs jumping sequences, while my friends thought the early scene of the thugs hitting the kid at Nora Miao’s stand to be especially hysterical.

“Get outta here, ya’ little bastard! Go! Get!”
[Kid runs off, crying]
“What’s wrong, Ching?”
“They stole my rice cakes and kicked me.”

That last line ended up melding with a similar one from Drunken Master and would later be quoted by my friends as:

                “They stole my rice cakes, and wouldn’t pay, and then they beat me!”

So we get to the final fight between Bruce and Han Ying Chieh and it ends on that goofy-yet-awesome moment of the latter flinging a knife at Bruce, who kicks it and makes it fly into the bad guy’s stomach. My friend and his brother saw that, let it sink in for a few moments, and then went into hysterics, exclaiming: “Stupid gook movie!”

                For the record, the next time I had a sleepover with this friend, I brought over Return of the Dragon (aka Way of the Dragon) and that basically converted him into Hong Kong cinema, along with Drunken Master and Wing Chun a year or so later. Said friend also became a fan of K-Pop (like S.E.S.) and J-Pop (like Kuraki Mai) and dated several Asian girls over the course of his life. So, whatever prejudices my friend might have had as a 13-year-old, he quickly grew out of them, thanks in part to my influence. Or so I’d like to think.

                I watched The Big Boss less and less as the years went on, usually preferring Way of the Dragon and Game of Death when I wanted to watch Bruce in action. Nonetheless, I do have to credit Bruce Lee, and specifically the experience with Fists of Fury in the 7^th grade, with setting the foundation for what has become a three-decade long obsession with Asian movies. Jackie Chan really opened the door for me, but Bruce Lee primed me for it all. I doubt I would have gotten that VHS 4-pack in the summer of ’95 without having watched The Big Boss first. Without that base, I might not have been quite ready for Jackie Chan when Rumble in the Bronx came out that year. And then who knows how my own personal tastes and hobbies might have evolved?

 

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[1] - https://www.recordnet.com/story/news/2005/03/13/memorial-tournament-honors-late-marshall/50680855007/

 

[NoKUNGFUforYU]

I remember watching Fist of Fury/The Big Boss in 1970's Berkeley where it played with the Harder They Come at the artsy Northside theater for what seemed like two months. When Han Ying Chieh takes off his glasses this hippie gal behind me said "Next he's taking out his false teeth."

I was 14  at the time.

[J.J. Hayden]

Big Boss was my fav as a kid (if you you take out the bikes from GOD, which easily bias a 6yo), I used to re-enact every fight scene with my playmobile in great detail, including a blue hat for that Thai foreman, LOL. It's funny how my parents were fine with me watching it despite the violence, my mum understood it was "art". As for the boobies, usually she'd dive in front of the TV like it was a hail of bullets, but I guess that one slipped past her  I disagree that it's "inappropriate" for kids to watch this stuff, you know your kids and what they can handle. In a school, different story, but I wouldn't be complaining. LOL

[PandaPawPaw]

Playmobil FTW!

I think BB was the first BL movie I saw on CH4 in the UK and I don't think I was amazed by it at first or liked it much but over time it became my favourite BL film.

Story is good. Fights are cool. Acting is decent. Cinematography is nice. Good all round really.

Edited January 3, 2023 by PandaPawPaw

[J.J. Hayden]

1 hour ago, PandaPawPaw said:

Playmobil FTW!

Damn!! I could've done with that as a kid.