From Bruce Lee to Chinatown: Sue Ann Kay reflects on her Seattle roots

“I’m 79, and in the Chinese calendar, you’re a year old when you’re born. So I’m using that I’m 80, because it sounds better,” Sue Ann Kay, a longtime Seattleite and Chinatown-International District advocate said with a laugh, during her recent Q&A with the Northwest Asian Weekly.

After Kay spoke at the Landmarks Board Meeting in September, advocating for the preservation of Bruce Lee’s first dojo on University Way preserved as an historic landmark (which the board did not approve), Carolyn Bick of the Northwest Asian Weekly caught up with her to learn more about Kay’s life.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

NWAW: Tell me about your background, and your childhood. Were you encouraged to seek out new experiences and experiences not then typical for girls and young women?

Yes and no. I mean, in our family, my sister and brother got to go into music. And my mother put me into baton twirling classes and ice skating, which was a little different. Now I wish I had some music background.

We had a good childhood on Capitol Hill, and we always went to the Chinatown-International District. So, our childhood was filled with going there to eat out with family and see what was happening. And yeah, in those days, the Chinese Baptist Church there on 8th was sort of a gathering point. I was a church dropout. But yeah, my sister and sister and mother, yeah. So we’ve been around Seattle since, well, I was born here.

I’m a product of Stephen’s [Elementary] School, Meany [Middle School], and Garfield [High School]! I graduated in ‘63 from Garfield.

NWAW: You said “yes and no,” with regards to seeking out experiences that weren’t necessarily typical of girls and young women at the time, and you also mentioned being a “church dropout.”

My mother and my grandmother were pretty strong influences in that I knew that my grandmother lost her husband [after she came to the United States].

She came in the ‘20s, and I think she was here for about 11 years, and then she lost her husband. So, she was a single parent with six kids.

[I remember] learning, through the years, about Canton Alley, where she raised her family. And when I was born, [my family] had purchased a house up on Beacon Hill—it’s still there.

It had five bedrooms for all those kids. And my mother and her sister—it was her brother’s kids. They all grew up there, and I grew up with them. So, a really extended family, up on Beacon Hill.

Then we moved to Capitol Hill, and I had other experiences and exposure to people other than Chinese.

NWAW: And so what kind of experiences and exposure, then, did you have that sort of maybe even broadened your views or viewpoints?

When I was 7, my best friend was Black. That continued through the years, and I think that she taught me a lot in our experiences growing up together.

I remember things like, I once threw something out of the car window when we were in high school. And she said, “Don’t do that, or they’ll say, ‘Look at those Blacks.’”

Only then it was “Negroes.” And just a lot of events like that. I’m really fortunate to have grown up in an interracial neighborhood.

And then when I went to junior high, I met a lot of Japanese girlfriends. And their backgrounds were different from mine, too. And they had just come out of [incarceration] camp, or they were born in [an incarceration] camp.

I learned about different cultures. And my growing up has influenced me. And then it just continued. I got to work with employment security, after I finished school, and I learned a lot about different social services, the labor market—I worked for DSHS and employment security, half-half. So that has also influenced me.

NWAW: How old were you when you met Bruce Lee? How did that happen?

Let’s see, I was in high school, and my father hung out in Chinatown. And so he had heard about Bruce Lee and had seen him demonstrate. And [my father] was the Boy Scout leader, so he asked Bruce if he would teach the Boy Scouts.

Bruce did end up teaching at the Chinese Baptist Church there in the CID. There’s a picture in the Wing Luke Museum. I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention [at first]. That was before I joined and started martial arts. I think my brother was like 13, or younger. I don’t know—he was a Boy Scout, anyway.

My dad also invited [Bruce] over for dinner. He was sparring with my brother in the yard and showed me a few tricks. I guess I was impressed. And then he said that I could join the class on Saturday, just come. And I did, and I was hooked. I guess I didn’t really think about it, that I was the only female in the class. He just treated me like I was another student.

I became a fairly serious student. … Because he was a friend of my father’s, I think that he always treated me with a lot of respect—like I wasn’t any less of a student. 

I think what I’ve mentioned before in interviews is that I really appreciated that he taught me how to protect myself, before there were women’s classes. He used me to demonstrate to the rest of the class with an umbrella how to protect myself and use it as an extension of my arms. And I’ve never had to use it or really don’t think about that’s something that I would do. But I think that it does stick with you, and when you practice it, it becomes that your aware of your surroundings. And I don’t know if I could ever protect myself, but I’ve been exposed to what I could do if I had to.

NWAW: You mentioned that you were hooked, after your first class. What specifically hooked you when you took that first class?

I think it was the Chinese culture. He introduced me to Yin and Yang, and he gave me that book, the Tao Te Ching. I just became interested in Chinese philosophy, although I’m not a real good student of anything.

But yeah, the culture intrigued me. And acupuncture—I got really interested in that… it was during a time when doctors at the University of Washington were calling it “voodoo.” Acupuncture wasn’t accepted here in the 60s.

So all of that was new to me, and fascinating.

My sister went through the university studying Chinese history and culture, but I didn’t, so I did get it a different way, I guess, and it was kind of a different group of friends … a lot of Garfield students—like Doug Palmer is one of them, wrote a book.

We’re all tied. You know, you run into people and then you find out about them and their backgrounds. Everyone had kind of a new awakening to something that wasn’t offered before. And Bruce was pretty charismatic.

NWAW: Did your family support you studying martial arts?

They never questioned it. I just went every Saturday.

NWAW: You mentioned that with Bruce, you were not treated any differently. Was that your experience broadly within the field of martial arts, or was Bruce really stand-out in that?

I have experienced sexism and racism through the years, and become more aware of it. But when I think back to that period, I was carefree and just open to anything. And I didn’t put up with a lot of negativity. It was a fun period growing up.

I didn’t do the competition round [in martial arts].

Part of the class was Tai Chi. And now, you know, there are Tai Chi classes and Qigong classes. I tried to go to see if I could keep it up, but I’m not really structured to do it on my own. I’ve never wanted to learn from someone else, after I learned from Bruce. I don’t know if that’s because of Bruce, or because I’m just not one to master anything. I just sort of dip in and see what it’s all about. 

But when you’re that young, too, it leaves a lasting effect—it was a lasting imprint. It’s like, “Wow, I got to really feel what the energy, the chi in Gung Fu was about, because in the classes we did the sticky hands. And I remember it was like an “Aha!” moment, because Bruce went around and did it with everyone in the class. And you do figure eights with your arms and you can feel the give and flow of the energy, so that if you were being hit and you connected to the arm, you could just deflect it. 

I didn’t really master any of that, but to be introduced to that type of an education—it was like another class that I had at the university, only it wasn’t at the university.

NWAW: Were there any parts of your heritage that clicked or came more sharply into focus, or that you even just felt more connected to, after taking Bruce’s classes?

I took Chinese language classes at the YMCA and I had the opportunity to teach English conversation in China.

So I took a year off [in 1986]. That was the first time I felt like I had to see beyond Seattle.

I took that opportunity and I asked my work if I could take a year off and come back. I wrote a letter and said I would be more valuable to them because I could be bilingual, although I came back and I wasn’t bilingual, because I taught English. 

That year really taught me a lot, too. I mean, over there I was revered because I was a teacher.

The whole class stood up, when I entered the classroom. [I was] like, “What?”

It was a period when [Chinese students] were still wearing blue jackets and were pretty reticent to speak out. 

On campus, I think they had to go two weeks without a shower. Water was not really available—I guess it was living quarters built by the British or something.

They had to stoke the wood fire outside to heat the house. I was in Wuhan…nobody had heard of Wuhan. I had not heard of Wuhan, although it was a city of six million people. It was a port city in the middle of China on the river. And then we see COVID, and now everybody’s heard of Wuhan.

I’ve had great opportunities, but I guess what I feel like there are so many Asian leaders that are doing wonderful things in our community.

I think it was my parents, too. My dad just—I don’t know how he did it, but he let us know that it was okay to be Chinese, and be proud of it.

We grew up learning about Columbus and everything in grade school, [but] I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about, “Hey, I’m Chinese,” or whatever. And at school, they were pretty careful to include all kinds of people in different activities. I guess that says something about Seattle, or the times.