City at the Edge of Forever by Peter Lunenfeld

Author:Peter Lunenfeld [Lunenfeld, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

9 HOT FOOD, COLD WAR

UNTITLED #31 (FREEWAYS) | 1994 | PLATINUM PRINT | 2 ¼ X 6 ¾ INCHES (5.7 X 17.1 CM)

Martial Arts and Culinary Arts, or How Blowback Made Los Angeles the Best Place in America to Fight and Eat

Be formless, shapeless, like water.

—Bruce Lee

Home is where you lay your taco.

—Roy Choi

It starts with a one-inch punch. The blow isn’t telegraphed. Instead, it explodes as though jet-powered. The volunteer foolhardy enough to be the test dummy flies off his feet into a chair haphazardly dropped behind him. The year is 1964; the place is Long Beach, a hardscrabble port town; and the crowd, well, they know they’ve just witnessed something historic, and they go berserk.

At the moment fist connects with chest, one world comes into view and another withers away. Southern California was always on the Pacific, but to truly become of the Pacific it had to experience a series of shocks that rippled out from the American imperium’s hot and cold conflicts in Asia during the second half of the twentieth century.

War may not be on the minds of people passing through LA’s Chinatown when they hit the little plaza where Jung Jing Road meets Sun Mun Way, but fighting just might be. That’s because right next to what used to be the infamous eighties punk club Madame Wong’s stands a seven-foot-tall statue of the most famous martial artist who ever lived. His body is ridiculously vascular, the skin pulled so taut over his muscles that every rib, tendon, and vein is visible. His right arm is extended in a defensive posture, but the palm is out, ready to strike. His left grips a stick, connected via a short chain to another stick of equal length tucked under his arm. For anyone who has ever watched a kung fu movie, it’s not hard to guess that these sticks are nunchuks and that this body belongs to Bruce Lee, martial arts wunderkind, unreluctant sex symbol, and the first Asian global superstar.

It was the veterans of America’s Pacific wars, occupations, and peace-keeping missions who brought the martial arts to Southern California, spreading an idiosyncratic and infinitely transmutable mash-up of fighting and philosophy outside the few ethnic enclaves that saw it as an intrinsic part of their culture, as opposed to yet more fodder for the melting pot. Servicemen stationed overseas, especially at the American base in Okinawa, picked up the rudiments of karate and judo. The ones in Korea learned a variety of skills that would only later become known in the United States as tae kwon do, and still others encountered Chinese disciplines that went by various names, including wushu, gung fu, and kung fu. As Black Belt magazine noted in 1974, “No group of Americans has done more to promote the . . . martial arts in the United States than Armed Forces personnel.”

One such vet was Ed Parker, who picked up a few basic skills on the streets of his native Honolulu and then studied more seriously during his three years in the Coast Guard.

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