Martial arts icon Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco's Chinatown.
Now, thanks to his daughter, Shannon, and her producing partners, his long-fabled passion project, the TV series Warrior, set in his birthplace, has completed its first season.
In the show, our Bruce-esque protagonist, played by British actor Andrew Koji, is a young martial arts prodigy called Ah Sahm, who arrives from China in 1878.
The series follows him as he looks for his estranged sister in San Francisco's Chinatown " then a den of iniquity, specifically: opium, gambling and prostitution " and dealing with violence and racism.
Warrior has been praised by critics and fans alike for its gritty realism and depiction of period-era attitudes.
One of those fans, Marc Pomerleau, an event designer who lives in San Francisco, was so inspired by the series that he decided to bring the small-screen experience to real life with a walking tour of the city, giving participants an unvarnished view of long-forgotten immigrant stories in America's oldest Chinatown.
After returning to Hong Kong shortly after his birth, Lee came back to San Francisco's Chinatown at the age of 18.
"He must have been inspired by the stories and history of SF Chinatown's alleyways when he penned the treatment which would become the hit show Warrior almost 50 years later," says Pomerleau.
"Chinatown is many things, but it is for sure a living monument to adaptability and the ability to survive in the face of overwhelming odds."
On a recent weekend tour, Pomerleau began by talking about the 1848 Gold Rush that drew hundreds of thousands of people to California from the US and abroad, including China.
In the mid-1800s, San Francisco was a lawless place, with police officers grossly outnumbered by the newcomers. Gangs like the Sydney Ducks, composed of immigrants from Australia, terrorized residents of all backgrounds and even set the city on fire.
Locals sought order and protection by taking matters into their own hands, forming vigilante groups like the Committee of Vigilance.
Into this maelstrom, Chinese immigrants fleeing poverty and instability at home arrived looking for work, only to face rampant racism and discrimination.
They were not allowed to vote, gain citizenship or own land. They were also paid considerably less than their white counterparts for railroad work.
It all culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese immigrants from entering the United States. It's still the first and only major federal legislation to ban immigration for a specific nationality.
This the historic background that infuses the walking tour, which begins at a Chinatown coffee shop. Later, we amble along the area's grid-like streets, making a few stops outside our next points of interest: Tong headquarters.
The Tongs are Chinese associations that started out as gathering places for immigrants during the Gold Rush era. They were places where the newly arrived, usually without any knowledge of English, sought various services including legal advice or protection.
The Tongs later became centers of organized crime as portrayed in Warrior. Many Tongs still exist today.
Pomerleau displays a map of Chinatown similar to this one from 1885 that color codes the gambling, prostitution and opium establishments, often run by the Tongs. It shows how widespread such activities were at the time.
The opium dens attracted not only Chinese immigrants but white visitors too, said Pomerleau. The show Warrior is fiction, but some of its characters actually existed.
Leading character Ah Toy, played by Canadian actress Olivia Cheng, was one of the most famous brothel owners in Chinatown of the 1850s. The real Ah Toy was gone by the 1870s, when the show is set.
One of the toughest moments of the tour is a stop in a shaded passageway called St Louis Alley. According to Pomerleau, girls from China as young as eight years old were auctioned off to brothels from the narrow strip.
Prostitution flourished from the mid-1800s onwards. The sex business boomed because most Gold Rush immigrants were men, and women made up only 10% of the population.
Forced to take dozens of customers a day, many of the girls who became sex workers lived only a few years, according to our tour guide.
Pomerleau shares a sex slavery contract he found in the Congressional Record from March 1875.
The contract stated that a woman named Yut Kum "consents to prostitute her body" and that her sex servitude "shall never expire" if she were to "escape and be recovered."
Scottish immigrant Donaldina Cameron was a well-known figure in the area. She provided a safe house in Chinatown from the late 1800s onwards for trafficked girls, who fell into prostitution because they were either tricked or sold outright by their families, according to historians.
Thousands of mostly Chinese girls took refuge in Cameron's establishment. Brothel owners called her the "White Devil of Chinatown."
One of the tour participants is long-time San Francisco resident Beth Ellis.
"I was deeply moved by the stories of the young girls in the sex trade in early San Francisco," she says. "I'm embarrassed to say I had no idea."
Pomerleau says Chinatown residents prefer not to talk about the dark past.
The history of Chinatown "carries powerful relevance for America's discourse of who belongs in this country and who doesn't, who's a real American and who isn't," says Pomerleau, who is part French and Japanese.
"If we don't confront and talk openly and honestly about our history, we are destined to repeat it," he says.
The lighter moments of the tour come when Bruce Lee is mentioned. Pomerleau is happy to recount stories in Chinatown, where Lee challenged the martial arts establishment of the time, boasting that his martial arts style was superior.
Though born in San Francisco, Lee was often treated like an immigrant during his years in the US. Our guide says the tour is about how immigrant communities remained resilient despite the struggles and injustices of the past.
According to the 2010 US Census, people of Chinese descent, the largest group of Asians in the city, accounted for one in five of San Francisco's 805,000 residents.
Pomerleau says he hopes the tour makes people think about "how far we've come."
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