This article was originally published in the August 1974 issue of Black Belt Magazine.

For a shy, skinny boy of 10, growing up in a tough town like Hong Kong can be more hazardous than a tourist with chopsticks. Broad-shouldered bullies hang out on every corner, and street gangs patrol the path to school. But little Robert wasn't worried. He knew someone who could take care of the schoolyard samurai.
After all, when your big brother is Bruce Lee, you have a reason to feel bully-proof. That was the charmed existence led by Robert Lee, the youngest member of the family that included the man who is now a martial arts legend. Until Bruce's tragic death in Hong Kong in July 1973, Robert showed little interest in the martial arts. He was perfectly content allowing his big brother to handle the family fighting. Only occasionally did he train in Bruce's system of jeet kune do. But things changed shortly after Bruce's death. Robert began training intensively, working out a minimum of three hours a day in the apartment he shared with his mother, Grace, in the Los Angeles suburb of Alhambra. Early each morning, he rose, did calisthenics, then shadow-boxed his way from the bedroom to the kitchen. After breakfast, he would suspend a campaign button by a string in the bedroom doorway and diligently kick at the target for half an hour. He would then load his books into a briefcase and head for class at California State University, Los Angeles, where he was a business major. It's a long, lonely training program, with little more than an ideal and a memory to sustain it. Robert Lee said he was embarrassed to train in the martial arts while Bruce was around because he knew he could never be as good as his big brother.

Although Bruce and Robert were closer than a pair of nunchaku, no two brothers could have been less alike. Bruce was a human dynamo, strong, fast, well-built, with a muscle of some sort poking from every inch of flesh. He could talk as fast as he could punch, and did both with authority. Robert was quiet, introspective and well-liked by those who knew him. His slender physique was the opposite of Bruce's, and he still possesses, when viewed sideways, the approximate profile of a bean sprout. The contrast was always a minor embarrassment to the little brother, who recalls with a red-faced grin his meeting with Bruce at Los Angeles International Airport in May 1969. Robert was moving to LA from Hong Kong to attend college. Bruce Lee spotted his brother and charged over to greet him. The two embraced, and then Bruce, already an acclaimed martial artist but still several years away from becoming a big movie idol, took a step back and surveyed his younger brother with a critical eye. He wasn't pleased, and Robert knew it. "Jesus, you're skinny!" Bruce bellowed. "Don't tell anyone you're my brother, you'll embarrass me!"

Gasping for Air

Bruce quickly carted the youngster off to his home in Bel Air. The next morning, Bruce rousted hi s brother out of bed and handed him a pair of running shoes. Bruce set the pace for his three-mil e run up and down the Bel Air hills surrounding the house. Robert, gasping for air, struggled to keep up. "I couldn't take it," recalls Robert. "He was too far ahead of me." Back at the house, Bruce stared in disbelief as his little brother threw up. Robert didn't know it at the time, but he had aggravated one of Bruce's pet peeves. "Bruce can't stand for anyone to look bad," says Robert, characteristically referring to his brother in the present tense. "He bel ieves it's a disgrace to the person's own body...it shows that the person doesn't like himself." If nothing else, Bruce was determined to put a few pounds on his lanky brother's frame. By the second day, Bruce was whipping up potent concoctions in his blender, a prime feature of which was cod liver oil, and coaxing the stuff down Robert's throat. "Boy, that was really a torture," recalls Robert. "Bruce was like a drill seargent. He'd mix it everyday himself to make sure I'd drink it . It had milk, weight-gain protein powder, banana, ice cream, egg shells and peanut butter. He made me drink a quart every day." For the next two weeks, Bruce religiously fed the goop to his brother until Robert had gained 12 pounds. Then Bruce abandoned the program, feeling it was Robert's decision whether or not to continue. "That was Bruce's way. He wouldn't really order you to do something, he would just suggest it and tell you what would happen if you didn't. He made you realize that what he wanted was also what you wanted. And you usually wound up doing it." Bruce Lee was so ambitious about his career and fanatical about his training, said younger brother Robert, that his family viewed his passing as a case of Bruce's working himself to death.

By that time, Robert was actually beginning to like the stuff. And in other ways, he learned to adapt to life in the Bel Air mansion, which had become a family hostel. In addition to Bruce, his wife Linda and their two children, Brandon and Shannon, Robert and his mother each had their own bedroom in the house. While Bruce vigorously pursued the martial arts and show business, Robert quietly began his college studies. Studying at the Bel Air house required a substantial amount of concentration. Just as Robert would settle into an evening's schoolwork, kiai shouts would ring from the backyard where Bruce whack ed away at the punching sack. And when the jeet kune do founder was inside reading one of his countless volumes on anatomy or martial arts philosophy, he would place a burlap-covered foot stool next to him at the desk, pounding on the stool with one hand while turning the pages with the other.
Whenever Bruce came across a technique or idea that caught his fancy, he'd move out into the middle of the room and experiment. Often, he would recruit his brother to act as a guinea pig. Robert recalls numerous occasions in which he braced himself for the impact of Bruce's celebrated power , then woke up in the backyard a few seconds later. On a typical day, recalls Robert, Bruce would get up at about 7 a.m. and warm up with weights before breakfast. Then he'd relax by reading, watching television, playing with his kids or making business calls. An early lunch was followed by heavy reading and eventually a rigorous evening workout. Before going to bed at 11 p.m., he'd outline on a cassette tape the things he wanted to achieve the next day and review the tape he had made the previous night. The house was even more hectic on weekends. Movie stars would drop by for a quick lesson, and Bruce always made himself available to help friends. Among the celebrity students were Steve McQueen , James Coburn and Stirling Silliphant. Robert often had to duck out of the house to find a quiet place to study. "Bruce never took a rest," his brother says. "He was always running around doing something."

Growing up with a Legend

During the Hong Kong days, while the boys were growing up, the Lee house was also congested. Robert and Bruce shared the house with their parents older brother Peter, sisters Agnes and Phoebe, and five cousins. During the afternoons, Robert would stay home with his schoolbooks and study, while Bruce would be off with his friends fighting in the street. Bruce belonged to a loose-knit group at the time, and no one was quite sure where he went or what he did. He had girlfriends, but he never brought them home. He had scars and black eyes, but he never explained how he got them. Bruce's fighting skill, already becoming something of a legend, paid big dividends for his little brother. One day at a soccer match, 7 year old Robert accidentally touched the ball, and one of the players angrily slugged him in the stomach. Robert ran home to tell his brother, and Bruce dropped everything and stormed out of the house to track down the bully. Unable to find him, Bruce unleashed a string of cuss words that made little Robert swell with brotherly pride. Although he would later become an avid student of philosophy at the University of Washington, Bruce Lee was anything but a model student while growing up in Hong Kong. "He never studied his lessons," says Grace. "He didn't like schoolwork, and if Bruce didn't like something, he wouldn't do it." Grace finally hired a private tutor for Bruce at $150 a month. An obedient son, Bruce would dutifully leave the house to visit the tutor, carrying an armload of books. He seldom reached his destination. "Where's Bruce?" the tutor would ask Grace over the phone an hour or two later. Eventually, Bruce would return to the house, his clothes ragged and torn, his books unopened. To avoid hurting his mother's feelings, he'd swear he had been studying with the tutor all the time. "Bruce was usually off with friends, fighting in the street," recalls Grace. "He didn't know the tutor had just called. I'd ask him where he'd been, and he'd said, he just finished studying." On the days when he made it past the bullies on his way to school, Robert was at the head of his class. "Competition is really keen," he says. "You really have to kill yourself to keep your head above water." In Hong Kong, less than half the graduating high school students pass the tough battery of final examinations and receive their diplomas. "if you don't pass the exams, it's like you never went to high school. It's impossible to get a job." Robert breezed through his finals, with the notable exception of the compulsory physical examination. Luckily, Bruce wasn't around to watch when his little brother nearly failed the test because he couldn't do the required 25 push-ups. Bruce had left Hong Kong for the United States several years earlier, making the trip before he himself would have been required to take the academic part of the rugged exams.

The Hong Kong Heartbreaker

With Bruce in the United States, Robert began to develop a talent and identity of his own. Together with some friends, he founded a rock group called the Thunderbirds in 1966 and quickly became the rage of teenage Hong Kong.
His sudden stardom took the shy 18 year old by surprise. Robert was unaccustomed to receiving so much attention, and he still blushes at some of the comments he was goaded into making for Hong Kong fan magazines. An instant celebrity, Robert was the authority on everything from music to kissing girls. In an article titled "To Kiss or Not to Kiss," he expounded at length about his love life to the readers of the China Mail: "I enjoy going out with girls," he was quoted as saying, " but not those who act like gilded fillies. It makes no difference whether a girl wants to be kissed on the first date or not ... I don't even hold her hand until the third or fourth time!" Robert Lee was a successful musician in Hong Kong before he moved to Los Angeles to live with his brother, Bruce, while attending college.

Before long, the fan magazines carried another piece of gossip to their readers: Robert, it was rumored, was planning to abandon his career in Hong Kong to attend college in the United States. The rumors turned out to be true. Unable to find a satisfactory college in Hong Kong in which to pursue business administration, Robert consequently accepted his brother's offer to fly to California and live in Bel Air. Robert left a city full of lovelorn admirers in his wake. "I hope my fans will understand that I have to think about my future," he said in the China Mail.

Keeping the Memory Alive

It's been almost a year since Bruce Lee succumbed in Hong Kong to what one expert diagnosed as a cerebral edema (swelling of the brain), but which the Lee family has come to regard as simply a case of working oneself to death. But in the apartment shared by Robert and Grace, Bruce has never really been gone. He is spoken of in the present tense not only to keep the memory alive, but also as if there was no way to stifle such a strong, vital human dynamo.
Robert finds comfort in recalling that his brother never lived to see his greatest fear: growing old and weak. "Bruce would tell me that he saw people all around him growing weak with age, and he finally realized he might get old himself one of these days. He really hated that thought. He never wanted to wake up, look at himself in the mirror and feel weak. He really dreaded that. "For Bruce, martial arts were an act of self love. He would tell me that if I liked myself, I would try to help myself. It's not that he made me do martial arts, it's that I feel like I should do it, for his sake and mine. Bruce was so far ahead of all us other martial artists, no one could touch him." Robert devotes three hours a day to catching up. Twice a week, he studies with Herb Jackson and Ted Wong, two of Bruce's original students, at Jackson's converted machine shop at the Los Angeles Marina. There, the three diligently exercise and practice techniques while trying to avoid Jackson's drill press and lathe. Wearing his prized possessions, Bruce's specially designed steel-toed shoes, Robert practices his kicking on an old punching bag in the corner, trying to remember what Bruce would say if he could only see his fighting stringbean of a brother. "Bruce was a natural at martial arts," says Robert, huffing and puffing. "I really have to work at it!" But the intense interest Robert now has in jeet kune do is not motivated as much by the desire to emulate his brother as by the desire to further develop his own individuality. He says that up until the time he came to the United States to live with Bruce, he was "physically and mentally weak."

In Hong Kong, "you don't have to make decisions, everything is decided for you. When you're growing up, you're very much under your parents' guidance and care. They make the decisions," he says. "Over here [in the United States], when you're 18, you go out on your own. In Hong Kong, your parents support you until you get married. So you don't have to make that many decisions. You just listen to what your parents tell you." Bruce had been leading a life of his own since he was 18. Robert listened and watched and finally began to make his own decisions, to have confidence in himself and to live life on his own terms. Perhaps Robert realized his individuality just in time because today he faces the stiffest test his self-confidence may ever get. He is the brother of a legend, and many of the people he meets are interested in him only because of that legend, "Are you as good as your brother?" some people have asked him. Others have demanded to see his lunge punch or his side kick. Now that Robert knows who he is, he can handle the demanding role. A few years ago, he says, he would have been insulted if a person was only interested in Bruce. "I would have wanted to talk about my music, what I had to offer. I was a very weak person. When you're weak, you're constantly trying to prove yourself. I knew I wasn't any good at the martial arts at that point. I had to prove myself in music. But now I have no need to tell people who I am or what I can do." Robert's current interest in the physical aspects of his brother's art is something else. Although he trained semiregularly during the last few years of Bruce's life, he never pushed himself as he does now. He admits he was lazy then, but there was another reason for his reluctance: "I was kind of embarrassed to work out while Bruce was around. Everybody he trained with seemed to know what he was doing. And being Bruce's brother, I was afraid I would make him look bad, being so lousy. So I never tried."

Challenges From the Envious

The change in attitude that now prompts Robert Lee to work out every day hinges mainly on a surprisingly practical consideration. It is no secret that Bruce was constantly being challenged by those who felt the need to prove themselves by fighting him. Bruce knew that someday, particularly if he wasn't around to handle the challenge himself, somebody would try to take on his little brother. "Quite honestly," says Robert, "I started training seriously to protect myself for self-defense." While he makes it clear that he is far from reaching his brother's level of skill, Robert is no longer afraid of the possibility that challenges might come. "Before, if people had challenged me to a fight, I wouldn't have met it. But the reason I wouldn't have met it is that I was scared. I didn't have the ability." Talking about the day of his brother's death is still an ordeal for Robert, and he speaks softly to protect his mother from overhearing the details which still bring her anguish. He had learned the tragic news by telephone from Hong Kong: "I had just bought my new stereo and was walking in the door with the turntable under my arm, when the phone rang. It came as a great shock, but I learned to accept it. There was no other alternative." Robert tries to balance his memories of the old days with his hopes for the future. "The martial arts will never be my whole life, as they were for Bruce," he says. "I also have business and my music. I think of what Bruce often told me: "Be yourself, know yourself. Do not let the style dominate you - you are your own person! "