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100 Objects #10: Nunchaku
Brief
The episode follows the arc from Lee’s early struggles—born in San Francisco in 1940, raised in Hong Kong, typecast as a subservient TV sidekick on The Green Hornet—to his Hong Kong stardom with Fist of Fury (1972) and global breakthrough Enter the Dragon (1973). Chang links that cinematic moment to the late-1960s birth of Asian American political identity (the Asian American Political Alliance, 1968) and to the era’s ‘third-world’ cultural politics that connected anti-imperialist struggles worldwide. The popular uptake of kung fu aesthetics in Black and brown communities (and vice versa) made nunchaku both a toy and a feared weapon; mainstream coverage dubbed them “killer sticks,” and five states moved to ban possession in the year after Enter the Dragon. Those bans—Chang argues—were less about the stick itself (roughly under 3,000 nunchaku sold annually, compared with millions of guns) and more about who wielded it. The bans largely persisted for decades and only began to be rolled back around 2018. The episode closes reflecting on Lee’s death in 1973 at age 32 (brain swelling from an allergic reaction to equiogesic) and on the longer cultural legacy: how a short life and a simple weapon helped reshape Asian American self-definition and cross-cultural popular culture from kung fu theaters to hip-hop (e.g., Wu-Tang) for generations to come.
Why it matters
Jeff Chang recounts Bruce Lee first encountering nunchaku backstage at Ed Parker’s Long Beach exhibition in August 1964, where Lee performed for an audience of about 3,000 and demonstrated his famous one-inch punch.
Key details
- Nunchaku likely evolved from Okinawan farming tools into weapons and had no single definitive origin; Bruce Lee adopted them into his screen arsenal after seeing Filipino and Japanese stick-fighting forms combined backstage (Jeff Chang).
- Bruce Lee’s Hong Kong films Fist of Fury (1972) and Enter the Dragon (1973) transformed his image from TV sidekick (Kato/Cato on The Green Hornet) into an international action star; Enter the Dragon paired Lee with Jim Kelly and John Saxon and hit U.S. audiences at the 1973 peak of transnational 'third-world' and Black/Asian solidarity in pop culture.
- The rise of kung fu and Blaxploitation films fed one another in the early 1970s; Fist of Fury’s New York Chinatown run (1972) drew half non-Chinese audiences and helped make kung fu films mainstream in segregated urban theaters (Jeff Chang).
- Moral panic followed Enter the Dragon: mainstream outlets labeled nunchaku 'killer sticks,' and five U.S. states banned possession the year after the film’s release (the episode places those bans in the immediate post-1973 period); Jeff Chang notes the bans were targeted at people holding them, not the objects—the U.S. sold under ~3,000 nunchaku per year versus ~15 million guns annually.
- Those state-level bans remained in force for decades; the episode notes that nunchaku prohibitions began to be repealed in 2018 (Jeff Chang).