There was a wooden short staff on the pavement outside a hotel in the Pran Akom district of Bangkok on the evening of September 16th, 1969. It was 31 inches long. It was carved from teak wood that had been seasoned for 47 years before the staff was cut from it. It had been carried by the man who dropped it on the pavement that evening for 19 consecutive years through two jungle campaigns, four border firefights, and 24 confirmed engagements in which the staff had ended the life of another man.
The man who carried the staff was Colonel Prasert Thongchai. He stood 6 feet tall. He weighed 200 pounds. He was the commanding officer of the Thai Border Patrol Police Aerial Reinforcement Unit, known by its acronym P.A.R.U., the most elite ground combat force in the Royal Thai Police. He had spent the previous 5 years fighting communist insurgents along the Thai-Lao border.
He was, in the autumn of 1969, the most experienced close combat operator in his country. I was the other man on the pavement. I weighed 135 pounds. I had arrived in Bangkok 4 days earlier for a meeting that did not happen. I was wearing plain clothes, dark trousers, a white shirt, a thermos of jasmine tea in my left hand.
I had walked out of the hotel lobby at 6:41 p.m. to wait for a taxi. At 6:42 p.m., Colonel Thongchai stepped out from behind a parked motorcycle. He was holding the staff in his right hand. He said one sentence in Thai. 6 seconds later, the staff was on the pavement. His right wrist was at an angle no human wrist is meant to assume, and I had not touched any other part of his body.
The colonel recovered in 3 weeks. 21 days after that, he sent me a letter that began with the words, “Please become my teacher.” This is what happened in those 6 seconds, and the reason I declined his letter. To understand what happened on a Bangkok pavement on the evening of September 16th, 1969, you must understand three things.
The first is the country itself. Thailand in the autumn of 1969 was a country at quiet war. The war had no name. There were no headlines about it in the Western newspapers. The Vietnam conflict to the east was loud enough in those years to drown almost everything around it. But along the Thai-Lao border, in the dense forested provinces of Nakhon Phanom and Sakon Nakhon and Loei, a different conflict had been burning quietly since 1965.
The Communist Party of Thailand, supported by Vietnamese and Chinese cadres, was operating jungle bases along the Mekong River. The Thai government, supported quietly by American advisers, had assigned the response to a single elite force. That force was the Border Patrol Police. It had been founded in 1953.
Its casualty rate, by 1969, was the highest of any non-combat deployed military or paramilitary unit in Southeast Asia. The men of the BPP did not return home in coffins draped with flags. They returned home in coffins draped with nothing because the country they served had not officially acknowledged the war they had been fighting.
Their commanding officers were chosen carefully. The men chosen to lead them were the most experienced close combat operators in the country. Colonel Prasert Thongchai was one of them. The second thing is what he carried. He carried Krabi Krabong. Krabi Krabong is the royal martial art of Thailand. It is older than Muay Thai.
It predates the founding of Bangkok. It is the eight-weapon combat discipline of the Krom Wang Luang, the royal guard of the Ayutthaya kingdom, and it has been practiced in its closed form since the late 17th century. The eight weapons are the Krabi, curved sword, the daab, straight sword, the krabong, long staff, the plong, short staff, the ngoh, halberd, the thuan, twin shields, the mae sun, twin daggers, and the chai sak, the war axe.
By 1969, krabi krabong was no longer widely practiced in public Thai life. It had been preserved quietly by a small number of senior masters and by the border patrol police parue unit, who had been granted royal permission in 1955 to incorporate the closed forms into their combat curriculum. Colonel Thongchai had begun his training in krabi krabong at the age of nine.
He had been training for 38 years when he met me. The third thing is the colonel himself. He was 47 years old in September of 1969. He was married. He had three children. He had had four children, but the eldest, a son named Anan, had been killed in a border firefight in 1967 at the age of 19 while serving as a corporal in the unit his father commanded.
The colonel had carried his son’s body on his shoulders 4 km through jungle terrain to a helicopter extraction. He had not asked for leave. He had returned to duty the following morning. His unit’s combat effectiveness in the year following his son’s death had been the highest in the BPP’s recorded history. He was a man with a wound.
He carried it the way he carried the staff, silently, professionally, and with both hands. I was in Bangkok in September of 1969 because of a meeting that did not happen. A Hong Kong film distributor had invited me to discuss the Thai release of an early Cantonese martial arts film I had been considering. The meeting had been scheduled for the 15th of September at the Rattanakosin Hotel in the Phra Nakhon district.
The distributor had canceled the morning of by telegram. I had decided to stay an extra two days. There was no return flight to Hong Kong until the 18th. I had used the two days the way I always used unplanned time in unfamiliar cities. I had walked. I had visited two small gyms.
I had eaten at three street stalls along the Chao Phraya River. I had not announced my presence to anyone. Five days earlier, on September 11th, 1969, a Cantonese language Hong Kong magazine had run a four-page feature on me. The feature had reached Bangkok newsstands on the morning of the 15th, the same morning the meeting had been canceled. An officer in Colonel Thongchai’s unit, who read Cantonese, had bought the magazine.
He had brought it to the commander’s attention. The commander had read it in his office. He had read it twice. Then, he had asked his sergeant where the man in the magazine was staying. The sergeant had found out. The sergeant had told the commander. The commander had put on civilian clothes. He had taken his staff.
He had taken a taxi to the Rattanakosin Hotel. He had been waiting outside, behind a parked Honda motorcycle, for 1 hour and 22 minutes before I walked out of the lobby. I walked out of the lobby at 6:41 p.m. The doorman bowed. I returned the bow. I stepped onto the pavement. The evening air was warm and heavy, the particular density that Bangkok takes on at the end of the rainy season, when the sky has been clearing for two days, but the streets still hold the moisture from the last storm.
The sky was the blue-gray of Bangkok evenings. I was looking left, watching for an oncoming taxi. I felt him before I saw him. This is a specific sensation that I have written about in private notebooks several times in my life. It is not mysticism. It is not supernatural. It is the specific neurological signal that the human body produces when another body, within 12 feet, in a state of organized readiness, has aligned its attention on you.
The signal arrived at 6:41:47 p.m. I did not turn my head. I kept my eyes on the street, but I shifted my weight very slightly from my right foot to my left, so that if I needed to pivot, I could pivot in either direction with equal speed. I waited. At 6:42:11 p.m., Colonel Prasert Thongchai stepped out from behind a parked Honda motorcycle 4 ft to my left.
I turned my head. He was wearing a brown short-sleeved shirt, dark trousers, leather sandals. His shirt was not tucked in. His left hand was empty at his side. His right hand was holding a wooden short staff. I noted, in that first half second of observation, four things. The staff was plong, 31 in, the shorter of the two staff weapons in Krabi Krabong.
It was teak wood. It had been polished by years of palm contact to a dark amber color that no commercial varnish can replicate. The polish was uneven, heavier in the lower third of the staff, where the operator’s primary grip lived. This man had been holding this staff in the same place for many years.
The staff was held in the Uchikomi grip, Thai variant, at the lower third. This grip is used in Krabi Krabong for a single specific purpose, a strike traveling in a horizontal arc from the operator’s right shoulder toward the opponent’s left temple, with the option of redirecting into a vertical descending strike if the first arc is intercepted.
His feet were set in a stance I recognized. It was the Yang Chern Kru stance, the master’s stance, the stance taken by senior practitioners only after they had been authorized by their teachers to teach the system to others. This man was not merely a Krabi Krabong student. He was a Krabi Krabong master. His eyes were not the eyes of a street fighter. They were not angry.
They were not hostile. They were committed to a specific outcome that he had already decided upon before he had stepped out from behind the motorcycle. I did not move. He spoke first. He spoke in Thai. The Thai was formal, slightly archaic, the register a senior officer uses to a subordinate, but with a softening particle at the end that I did not, in 1969, recognize.
He said, “Khun Bruce Lee, phom kho yon thot phom.” “Phom yak choe khun nai phasa Thai rao thang song khao chai.” I would learn the translation later. It was, “Mr. Bruce Lee, I beg your pardon. I wish to meet you in the language we both understand.” The language he meant was not Thai. It was not English. It was not Cantonese. It was the language he was holding in his right hand.
I had three options. The first option was to retreat into the hotel lobby. The doorman was 9 ft behind me. I could be inside the door in approximately 1.4 seconds. The colonel with the staff could close the distance in approximately 1.1 seconds. The retreat was not survivable. The second option was to attempt to de-escalate verbally.
I did not speak Thai well enough in 1969 to do this with any precision, and the man in front of me was not in a state of mind that could be reached by words. I could see this in his eyes. He was not angry. He was not hostile in the sense that street fighters are hostile. He was committed. The third option was to accept the language he was offering.
I set my thermos of jasmine tea on the pavement to my left, slowly, with my left hand, so as not to interrupt the line of communication that was being established between us. The thermos made a small clink on the concrete. The sound was the only sound I had made since stepping out of the lobby. I straightened.
I lowered my hands to my sides. I said, in the small amount of Thai I could speak, “Crap. Phom kho yon thot khun.” “Yes, I beg your pardon also. And then I waited. The Colonel waited 4 seconds after my reply. This is what professional combat operators do. They allow the moment of psychological transition. The period between we are not yet fighting and we are now fighting to settle.
The amateur attacks during the transition. The professional waits for it to end. At 6:42:24 p.m. the Colonel began. His right foot moved forward 6 in. His weight transferred. The staff lifted from its lowered position at his side. His shoulder rolled. The small unconscious preparation that arrives a quarter second before the technique itself begins.
The principle I have written about and underlined in a notebook in a drawer in Hong Kong. The principle that the preparation has been practiced as many times as the technique itself. I watched the shoulder. Second one. The staff left his shoulder at, by my estimation, 51 ft per second. This was faster than any Western club strike I had encountered.
The advantage of the plong in krabi krabong is its length to weight ratio. At 31 in and approximately 1.8 lb, the tip of the staff travels significantly faster than the equivalent point on a baseball bat, a riot baton, or a Western fighting cane. The mass is concentrated in the central third.
The strike velocity at the tip is amplified by the lever of the operator’s full arm extension. The strike was a horizontal arc traveling from his right shoulder toward my left temple. It would have struck my temple in 0.41 seconds. I had 0.41 seconds. Second two. I did not retreat. A retreat against a swinging weapon is the most common error in untrained weapon defense.
The staff striking arc widens as it extends from the operator’s body. Retreating moves the target into the widening arc, not away from it. The correct response is to advance into the staff’s origin, where the arc is narrowest. I advanced 11 in forward on a 45° angle toward his right hip. My left hand rose, not to block the staff, but to catch the air in front of the staff’s tip.
This is the Jin Na principle from Wing Chun. When a circular weapon is intercepted, the interception point must be the inside of the circle, not the outside. Intercepting the outside is met with the full mechanical advantage of the swing. Intercepting the inside neutralizes the advantage. Second three. My left palm met the staff at a point 11 in from the Colonel’s right hand, inside the arc, before the tip had developed its full velocity.
The staff did not stop. It would have taken 300 lb of force to stop a strike of that mass and speed at the midpoint. I did not weigh 300 lb. I did not have 300 lb of force. I did not need to stop the staff. I needed to redirect it. My palm absorbed approximately 41% of the strike’s lateral force and converted it into a downward vector.
The staff’s tip, instead of continuing toward my left temple, traveled downward and forward past my left ear, past my left shoulder, into the empty space behind me. The Colonel’s right arm, committed to a horizontal arc, was now committed to a downward one. Second four. My right hand rose.
It rose at the speed of a hand reaching for a teacup, slow by combat standards, but invisible to the Colonel because his attention was now on his own staff, which had failed to land where his body had expected it to land. My right hand found his right wrist, the wrist of the hand holding the staff, at the point 1 in below the styloid process.
This is the Yang Shi point in traditional Chinese medicine, located between the tendons of the extensor pollicis longus and the extensor pollicis brevis. It is a nerve bundle convergence. A firm pressure on Yang Shi causes the small intrinsic muscles of the wrist to release their grip strength for 3 to 5 seconds.
I did not press hard. I pressed with the weight of a thumb on a fountain pen. Second, five. The Colonel’s grip on the staff opened, not because I had pried his fingers apart, because his fingers had been instructed by his own nervous system to open. The staff began to fall in the same motion, continuous without the pause that separates one technique from the next.
I rotated his right wrist 11° clockwise and 4° toward the center line of his body. This rotation placed the wrist at an angle of approximately 115° from neutral. The human wrist tolerates rotation up to approximately 110° before the ligaments of the lunate and scaphoid bones begin to stretch. At 115°, they tear. I rotated to 115° and stopped.
I did not exceed it. Second, six. The staff hit the pavement. It hit on its left end, bounced once at a height of approximately 4 in, and came to rest 2 ft from the Colonel’s right foot. The Colonel was now standing motionless. His right arm was extended forward. His right wrist was held in my right hand, rotated to a position that would have torn the ligaments if I had applied four more degrees of rotation.
His left hand was still at his side. His face was perfectly composed, the composure of a professional combat operator who has in the previous 6 seconds received more information than his 38 years of training had prepared him to receive in a single exchange. His eyes were on mine. He did not blink. I held the wrist at 115° for 1 full second. Then, I released.
I stepped back one pace. My hands lowered to my sides. The Colonel’s right arm fell slowly to his side. He flexed his fingers slowly three times. The grip strength was returning. The Yang Shi point holds for 3 to 5 seconds. I had been measuring. He flexed his fingers within the window I had predicted. The wrist itself was injured.
The ligaments had been stretched, though not torn. He would not have full rotational mobility for approximately 3 weeks. He could still grip. He could still walk. He could still drive a car, but he could not for those 3 weeks swing a staff. He did not look at the staff on the pavement. He looked at me. For 11 seconds, neither of us spoke.
Then, he bent down slowly, using only his left hand for balance, and picked up the staff from the pavement. He held it with his left hand. He looked at the staff. He looked at me. He said in Thai, very quietly, “Kun Bruce Lee kop kun krap.” “Mr. Bruce Lee, thank you.” He turned. He walked slowly toward the parked Honda motorcycle.
He got on. He started it. He drove away. He did not look back. The taxi arrived for me at 6:48 p.m. I picked up my thermos of jasmine tea from the pavement. I got into the taxi. The pavement, by the time the taxi pulled away from the curb, was empty, except for one small mark on the concrete where the end of the staff had bounced once, 4 inches into the air, and come to rest 2 feet from a man’s foot.
I flew back to Hong Kong on September 18th. I did not mention the encounter to anyone. I resumed pre-production on what would become The Big Boss. The film opened a little over a year later. The events of the pavement on September 16th, 1969, were not, in any way, part of the public record of my life. 3 weeks after I returned to Hong Kong, on October 7th, 1969, I received a letter at the Hong Kong studio offices.
The envelope was thick. The paper inside was Thai military stationery. The heading of the Thai Border Patrol Police, the seal of P A R U, the rank insignia of a colonel. The letter was handwritten in Thai. The handwriting was small, precise, the handwriting of a man trained from childhood to write field reports under firelight.
The letter was four pages long. I had it translated. What follows is the substance of what the colonel wrote. The original is in a small wooden box in the bottom drawer of a desk in a storage room in Los Angeles. Mr. Bruce Lee, forgive me for writing to you. My English is poor, and I do not wish to communicate through an interpreter who would not understand what I am asking.
I am dictating this letter in Thai to my deputy. He has been my deputy for 9 years. He will not speak of it. 3 weeks ago, on the pavement outside your hotel, I committed a violation against the man I had been raised to be. I attacked you with a weapon. You were unarmed. You were drinking tea. You had not raised your voice or your hand toward me or toward anyone in the country I serve.
I attacked you because I had read about you in a Chinese language magazine, and because in my pride, I had decided that a young man in a movie magazine could not possibly do what the magazine said he could do. I attacked you to prove to myself that I had not wasted 38 years on a discipline that a magazine could replace.
You answered me in 6 seconds. You did not hurt me. You did not embarrass me. You did not break my wrist. Although in those 6 seconds, I was aware, as a professional, that you could have broken it by adding four more degrees of rotation. You stopped before the breaking point. You returned my staff to the ground in a position where I could pick it up without bending dangerously.
You allowed me to leave with the dignity I had not earned. I have spent the 3 weeks of my recovery thinking about what you did. I have not been able to sleep for more than 4 hours a night. I have asked my deputies, my wife, my chaplain, all the people who hear me when I speak. I have asked them what to do. They have all said the same thing.
They have said, “Write to him.” Mr. Bruce Lee, I am writing to ask you to become my teacher. I will travel to Hong Kong. I will leave my command if necessary. I will pay you what you ask. I am 47 years old. I have one son left now, and he is 8 years old. If I have 10 years remaining of useful learning in my body, I wish to give those 10 years to the discipline I encountered on the pavement on the evening of September 16th.
Please consider this request. With the highest respect a man can offer a stranger who has spared him, Colonel Prasert Thongchai, Commander, Thai Border Patrol Police, Aerial Reinforcement Unit, Bangkok.” I read the letter four times. I read it once on the morning of October 7th in the studio office. I read it a second time that evening at the small desk in my apartment in Kowloon Tong.
I read it a third time the following morning. I read it a fourth time 3 days later on the night of October 10th. I did not write back immediately. I sat with the letter for a week. I knew by the end of the second reading what my answer would be, but the giving of the answer required care. The Colonel had written four pages in formal Thai, dictated to a man he trusted, asking me to teach him the discipline that had stopped him on a pavement.
He had written in the letter the most difficult sentence a man of his rank and experience could have written. “I am asking you to teach me.” A reply that was too short would have insulted him. A reply that accepted his request would have been dishonest. I wrote my response on the night of October 14th. I wrote it in English.
The Colonel’s deputy could translate it. The reply was three paragraphs long. “Colonel Thongchai, I cannot become your teacher. The reason is not that I do not respect you or that I think you incapable of learning. The reason is that you have already had a teacher. Krabi Krabong is older than my discipline. It is older than the country I was born in.
It is the inheritance of your people and it was placed in your hands at the age of nine by men who had carried it from their own teachers, who had carried it from theirs back through 19 generations of Thai soldiers and royal guards. You did not lose to me 3 weeks ago because Krabi Krabong is incomplete. You lost to me because no weapon system, however complete, is the answer to every situation.
What you have been carrying for 38 years is not a tool. It is a language. The language is complete. The mistake, and it is a mistake every master of every weapon eventually makes, is to believe that the language is the only language in the world. I cannot teach you a second language. I can only show you that one exists.
You saw it on the pavement. That is enough. The rest, Colonel, you will find by returning to your teachers and asking them the question you had not previously thought to ask. Not, how do I strike? But, what does my weapon assume? With respect, Bruce Lee, I mailed the reply on the morning of October 15th. I did not expect a second letter.
The second letter arrived 4 months later in February of 1970. It was one paragraph long. Mr. Bruce Lee, I have returned to my teachers. I have asked the question. They did not have an answer at first, but they have begun to look for one and I have begun to look with them. We are old men. The looking will take years, but we have begun.
Thank you for refusing my request. It was the most useful refusal I have received in my life. Colonel Prasit Thongchai I placed both letters in a small wooden box in the bottom drawer of my desk. I did not write back to the second letter. I did not need to. The conversation had reached its natural end. I never met Colonel Thongchai again.
But I have wondered in the years since what happened on the parade grounds of the PARU compound in Hua Hin in the four months between the Colonel’s first letter and his second. I have wondered what question he asked his teachers. I have wondered what they said when they did not have an answer. Krabi Krabong in 1969 had been a closed system.
The eight weapons, the eight stances, the 147 sealed forms passed down from master to student for 19 generations. The system had not been modified by tradition, by oath, by the explicit instructions of the Thai royal court since the reign of King Rama the fifth in the late 19th century. In 1893, the Krom Wang Luang, the royal guard, had been formally retired from active service.
The art had been preserved in its frozen form. The masters who continued to practice it had been ordered by royal decree to teach only what they had been taught and to add nothing. For 76 years, the system had been closed. Colonel Prasit Thongchai returned to his teachers in October of 1969 with one question. The question was not in the curriculum.
The question was, “What does my weapon assume?” His teachers, three of them, all in their 70s, all senior practitioners of the royal lineage, did not have an answer. Krabi Krabong in its closed form was not designed to be asked that question. The system assumed itself. It assumed the weapon. It assumed the opponent had a similar weapon or a similar absence of weapon.
It did not assume an opponent who would advance into the strike and convert the swing into a downward vector with an open palm. The three teachers in the autumn of 1969 began to look. The looking took 11 years. Between 1969 and 1980, the Thai Krabi Krabong masters, under the quiet patronage of Colonel Thongchai, who funded their meetings from his commander’s salary, opened the system for the first time in a century.
They invited masters from other Thai disciplines, Muay Boran, Lerdrit, Mae Mai Muay Thai. They invited Burmese Bando masters across the border. They invited Filipino Eskrima masters from Manila, invited Cambodian Bokator practitioners from the refugee communities that were forming in Northeastern Thailand as the Cambodian war intensified.
They asked, in every meeting, the same question. What does our weapon assume? The answers came slowly. The system, a century-old, did not modify quickly. The masters argued. They sometimes did not speak to each other for months. They restarted twice from positions they had previously abandoned. By 1980, when Colonel Thongchai retired from the border police at the age of 58, Krabi Krabong had quietly incorporated three new principles that had not existed in its closed form.
The three principles were these. First, the weapon must be trained against the body that knows the weapon does not exist. This meant, in practice, that Krabi Krabong students after 1980 began training against empty-hands opponents, something the closed system had never required. Second, the strike must be trained to be redirected, not only to be intercepted.
This meant that students began drilling the experience of a strike failing to land in the intended location and learning to recover from that failure mid-arc. Third, the master must ask his weapon, once a year, what it assumes. This was the oldest of the three, in a sense, because it was a return to a principle that the system had once contained in the time of King Rama the First, but had lost in the closure of the system in 1893.
The three principles were not written down until 1993, when Colonel Thongchai, by then a retired old man of 71, published a slim volume in Thai called Sing Ti Awut Kong Rao Mai Ru, What Our Weapons Do Not Know. The book was 47 pages long. It did not mention me by name, but on the dedication page, in Thai, it said, “To the man on the pavement who showed me a language I did not know existed.
I have spent 24 years learning to speak it. I will spend the rest of my life teaching my students to listen for it.” Colonel Prasit Thongchai died in 2014 at the age of 92. He had survived his son by 47 years. He had retired from the border police in 1980. He had become the senior preserver of Krabi Krabong for 34 years. He had personally trained, by his deputies’ count, more than 400 students.
Among those students were the current senior instructors of the Krabi Krabong programs at three Thai universities, the chief hand-to-hand instructor of the modern Royal Thai Army, and a small group of border police Paru officers who continue, today, the lineage their commander had been forced to question on a Bangkok pavement on the evening of September 16th, 1969.
The wooden short staff he had dropped on that pavement, the 31-in plong he had carried for 19 consecutive years before that evening, was donated in his will to the Thai National Museum of Martial Arts in Ayutthaya. It is on display today in a glass case in the second floor gallery. The placard beside the case reads, in Thai, “The staff of Colonel Prasit Thongchai, who learned, on the evening of September 16th, 1969, that the weapon he had carried for 19 years did not know the question it had not been asked.
” The placard does not mention me. I would not have wanted it to. I have been asked in my life what the most important thing I taught was. I have given many answers in interviews and in letters across the 11 years and 11 months of my public career. None of them have been honest. The most important thing I taught was a question I did not know I was teaching on a pavement in Bangkok on the evening of September 16th, 1969 to a 47-year-old Thai colonel who had been carrying the same staff for 19 years.
The question was, “What does your weapon assume?” Every craft assumes something. Every system, when it has been practiced for 19 years or 38 years or 19 generations, has embedded inside it a set of assumptions that the practitioner has stopped seeing. The longer the system has existed, the deeper the assumptions are buried.
The greatest masters are not the ones who have learned their system most completely. They are the ones who have remembered that the system has assumptions at all. This is true in fighting. It is also true in painting, in medicine, in the law, in the way a man raises his children, in the way a country governs itself.
Every system assumes, and every system can be opened not by replacing it, but by asking it the one question it had not previously thought to ask. Colonel Prasert Thongchai did not need to learn my martial art. I told him so. I refused his request. I refused it because the answer he was looking for was not in my system. It was inside his own, hidden under 19 generations of practice waiting for a question that had not been asked in 120 years.
He asked the question. His teachers, three old men in their 70s, looked for the answer with him. They found three principles. The three principles became the modern revision of Krabi Krabong. The modern revision has, in the four and a half decades since, trained more than 400 Thai students, three university programs, and the entire close combat curriculum of the modern Royal Thai Army.
I did not teach that revision. The time masters taught it. I did not modify Krabi Krabong. I had no right to. I am not Thai. I do not carry the lineage. All I did on a pavement in Bangkok on the evening of September 16th, 1969, was hold a wrist at 115° and stop. The rest, the colonel did himself. There is in the second floor gallery of the Thai National Museum of Martial Arts in Ayutthaya, a glass case containing a 31-in wooden staff.
The staff is teak wood. It has been polished by a man’s right palm over 19 consecutive years to a dark amber color that no commercial varnish can replicate. The polish is uneven, heavier in the lower third where the operator’s primary grip lived. The placard beside the case is in Thai. The placard does not mention me.
It mentions only a question. The question is the gift the colonel left to his country. I am Bruce Lee. I died on the 20th of July, 1973, 3 years, 10 months, and 4 days after the evening on the pavement in Bangkok. The staff did not die with me. The question did not die with me. They are still in the glass case in Ayutthaya.
They are still being asked every year on the parade grounds of the Paru compound in Hua Hin by men I have never met in honor of a colonel who, on a Bangkok pavement on the evening of September 16th, 1969, was given 6 seconds to learn that the language he had carried for 19 years was not the only language in the world. It is not. It never was.
