The Brief

In 1966, Bruce Lee was an exciting young martial artist from Hong Kong — a volcano of speed, skill and swagger who had caught the eye of Hollywood producers.

As acting opportunities began to emerge in Los Angeles, Lee and his young family left Oakland, where he’d been running a martial arts school.

One of their first apartments in L.A. was at the Barrington Plaza, a trio of gleaming white towers on the Westside.

Rent for their two-bedroom was more than a touch out-of-reach for Lee, even though he had landed a supporting TV role on a new ABC show, “The Green Hornet.”

Newly-arrived in L.A., Bruce Lee bartered martial arts lessons for reduced rent at the Barrington apartment complex.

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“[My parents] could not actually afford the rent there,” said Lee’s daughter, Shannon. “So they bargained with the property manager to reduce their rent in exchange for kung fu lessons.”

The arrangement wouldn’t last.

“They got kicked out when it was discovered by the property owner that the property manager had been cutting all these side deals with the tenants,” Lee said.

Just a few short years after this setback, Lee would break through as one of the world's biggest international action heroes with star turns in a string of Hong Kong blockbusters.

His shocking death at age 32 was even more sudden.

Thursday marks 50 years since Lee died from cerebral edema on July 20, 1973, weeks before his most famous and influential film, “Enter The Dragon,” opened in the U.S. Its success set off a martial arts craze, while shattering stereotypes of the submissive Asian.

The final fight scene in "Enter The Dragon."

Even in death, Lee is still one of the most famous Asian Americans, with a fandom spanning cultures and generations that embraces his films and philosophy exploring personal growth and adaptability.

Lesser known about Lee are his years in L.A., before he left for Hong Kong in 1971 to take the lead roles that eluded him in Hollywood – a period filled with exhilarating moments but also struggles.

Bruce Lee, shirtless, with an unidentified man, often sparred in the backyard of his house in Bel Air with his students.

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After the family was forced to leave the Barrington, they bounced around to homes in Inglewood and Culver City before settling in Bel Air.

To Lee’s disappointment, The Green Hornet ended after only one season, so he pivoted to working on sets as a fight choreographer. He also became a trainer to such stars as Kareem Abdul-Jabar and Steve McQueen, who became close friends.

Young fans pose with Bruce Lee, as one of his students, Steve McQueen, sits nearby.

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Lee didn’t just stick to Hollywood, he befriended a wide cross-section of Angelenos. He opened a studio in Chinatown where he taught Jeet Kune Do, a style of martial arts he developed.

He could also be spotted at dances organized by Chinese American college and grad students. A teenage cha-cha champ in Hong Kong, Lee whirled around partners like Gay Yuen, who studied at UCLA and ran in the same social circles.

“When the band would take a break, he would show off his martial arts moves, his strength and his skills,” Yuen said, recalling how Lee would get down on the dance floor to demonstrate one of his signature feats, the two-finger push-up.

Bruce Lee (center in dark shirt) poses with other martial arts enthusiasts at the Jun Fan Gung Fu Institute he founded in L.A.'s Chinatown.

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Decades later, Yuen is the board chair at L.A.’s Chinese American Museum, which is presenting an exhibition timed to the anniversary of Lee’s death. Featured is a life-sized statue of him that will be donated this week to the Bruce Lee Foundation run out of L.A. by his daughter.

Elsewhere in L.A., Lee’s legacy is on display through murals and the seven-foot-tall bronze statue installed in Chinatown’s Central Plaza on the 40th anniversary of his death in 2013.

The 7.6-foot-tall bronze statue of Bruce Lee is installed in Chinatown's Central Plaza.

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Bruce Lee is featured on a mural on Hollywood High School, next to Elvis Presley.

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The tributes serve as reminders of Lee’s ties to the city, a place where he planned to return after conquering the Asian box office.

“We left our dog here and everything when we went to Hong Kong,” recalled Shannon Lee. “Once [my father] had accomplished what he wanted to accomplish there, the idea was to move back and continue to pursue films.”

Bruce Lee poses with son Brandon and daughter Shannon. Brandon Lee grew up to be a rising film star before an accidental shooting during a production ended his life at 28.

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A life-changing invitation

Lee hadn’t started out seeking out a film career in the U.S. or to become an Asian American trailblazer.

Yes, Asian American. While primarily recognized as being from Hong Kong, Lee was born in San Francisco to parents who’d been touring the U.S. with a Chinese opera troupe.

He was raised in Hong Kong, and coming from a showbiz family, fell into acting as a child, racking up roles in some 20 films. But when he moved back to the country of his birth at age 18, his focus had switched to teaching martial arts. Having trained under kung fu masters in Hong Kong, Lee was thinking about starting a chain of self-defense schools.

In 1963, Lee opened his first school in Seattle, where he had studied philosophy at the University of Washington and met his wife, Linda.

Bruce Lee's wife Linda, seen sparring with him at a rental in Culver City, was also a student of kung fu.

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The second school was in Oakland, where he was living at the time he got a life-changing invitation in 1964.

Celebrity karate master Ed Parker asked him to showcase his skills at a tournament in Long Beach.

At the inaugural International Karate championships, a rapt audience inside the Long Beach Municipal Auditorium watched Lee debut the one-inch punch:

Applause filled the auditorium as Lee effortlessly performed two-finger push-ups.

Entree into Hollywood 

Lee’s explosive strength and precision left a strong impression on a particular martial arts enthusiast in the crowd. Jay Sebring was a celebrity hairstylist who famously dated the actress Sharon Tate. His high-powered clients included a Hollywood producer named William Dozier who was looking for a young Asian male to play the son of the fictional detective Charlie Chan.

Sebring enthusiastically recommended Lee for the role and in 1965, Lee traveled from Oakland to the 20th Century Fox studio for a screen test, where he demonstrated kung fu moves on an unsuspecting crew member.

It was Lee’s first foray into Hollywood, thanks in no small part to Sebring.

Several years later, the hairstylist would forever be entered into lurid Hollywood lore: he was among those murdered by the Manson family in the summer of 1969, along with Tate.

Man About Town

The Charlie Chan spinoff never got made. Dozier, the producer, instead secured Lee a supporting role on The Green Hornet as Kato, the masked crime-fighting valet to the titular hero.

Bruce Lee landed his first TV role as Kato in "The Green Hornet."

The ABC show lasted only one season, running from 1966 to 1967. But being on the first of many Hollywood sets offered invaluable lessons, Lee’s daughter said.

“In Hollywood, he learned a lot about process, filmmaking and scriptwriting and camera angles and shots, which informed his ability to make the movies in Hong Kong later,” Shannon Lee said.

Post-Kato, Lee stayed in the Hollywood orbit, choreographing fights on film sets and teaching martial arts to celebrities. He earned enough money to buy a ranch in Bel Air, where his family would live until they relocated to Hong Kong in 1971.

After "The Green Hornet" was canceled, Bruce Lee found work as a fight choreographer.

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He also spent a lot of time in Chinatown, where people spoke his native Cantonese and the dim sum tasted like home. His daughter said he got his hair cut by a barber named “Little Joe” for years.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar would visit Bruce Lee's home in Bel Air to train.

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Bruce Lee performs opposite Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in fight scene in Game of Death was released after Lee died.

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It was on College Street that Lee opened his third martial arts school in 1967. The students were a tight-knit group who would dine together in Chinatown after training, his daughter said. They would also train with Lee at his homes, mingling with celebrity students like Abdul-Jabbar.

Yuen of the Chinese American Museum said among the young people who used to hang out in Chinatown, Lee was known for having been on TV and being particularly advanced in martial arts. Other than that, “he was just like another person in the group," Yuen said.

In June, a new Bruce Lee mural was unveiled on Hope Street in downtown L.A. to promote the Max show "Warrior," which was conceived by Lee.

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“It wasn't like, ‘Wow, Bruce Lee,’ right?” Yuen said. “The boys would be challenging him and go ‘Hey, when are we going to fight?’ and they’d spar, kiddingly.”

Only when she stops to think about it does Yuen realize how surreal it is to see someone from her youthful past become a global cultural icon, one that her museum is honoring as a symbol of strength in the face of anti-Asian violence and discrimination that persists today.

“There's someone like Bruce Lee, who says 'We're going to fight back,'” Yuen said. “And for that, we’re thankful.”

California clocked its second-worst snowpack on record Wednesday, a potentially troubling signal ahead for fire season.

It’s an alarming end to a winter that saw abnormally dry conditions briefly wiped from California’s drought map in January, for the first time in a quarter-century.

Though precipitation to date has been near average, much of it fell as rain rather than snow. Then March’s record-breaking heat melted most of the snow that remains. The state’s major reservoirs are nevertheless brimming above historic averages and are flirting with capacity, and a smattering of snow, rain and thunderstorms are dousing last month’s heat wave.

But experts now warn that California’s case of the missing snowpack could herald an early fire season in the mountains.

On Wednesday, state engineers conducting the symbolic April 1 snowpack measurement at Phillips Station south of Lake Tahoe found no measurable snow in patches of white dotting the grassy field.

“I want to welcome you call to probably one of the quickest snow surveys we’ve had — maybe one where people could actually use an umbrella,” joked Karla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources. “We’re getting a lot of questions about are we heading into a hydrologic drought? The answer is, I don’t know.”

State data reports that California’s snowpack is closing out the season at an alarming 18% of average statewide, and an even more abysmal 6% of average in the northern mountains that feed California’s major reservoirs.

Only the extreme drought year of 2015 beat this year’s snowpack for the worst on record, measuring in at just 5% of average on April 1st, when the snow historically is at its deepest.

“I think everyone's anticipating that it will be a long, busy fire season,” said Lenya Quinn-Davidson, director of the UC Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources Fire Network.

“Without a snowpack, and with an early spring, it just means that there’s much more time for something like that to happen.”

‘It’s pretty bizarre up here’ 

In the city of South Lake Tahoe, which survived the massive Caldor Fire in the fall of 2021 without losing any structures, fire chief Jim Drennan said his department is already ramping up prevention efforts.

“It's pretty bizarre up here right now. It really seems like June conditions more than March,” Drennan said. “People are already turning the sprinklers on for their lawns.”

Without more precipitation, an early spring may complicate prescribed burning efforts. But Drennan said fire agencies in the Tahoe basin can start mechanically clearing fuels from forest areas earlier than usual.

“That means we can get more work done,” he said.

It also means homeowners need to start hardening their homes now, said Martin Goldberg, battalion chief and fuels management officer for the Lake Valley Fire Protection District, which protects unincorporated communities in the Lake Tahoe Basin’s south shore.

Goldberg urges residents to scour their yards for burnable materials, create defensible space and reach out to local fire departments with questions. The risks are widespread — from firewood, wooden fences, gas cans, plants, pine needles — even lawn furniture stacked against a house.

“In years past, I wouldn't even think of raking and clearing until May,” Goldberg said. “But my yard's completely cleared of snowpack, and it has been for a couple weeks now.”

‘A haystack fire’

Battalion chief David Acuña, a spokesperson for Cal Fire, said fire season is shaped by more than just one year’s snowpack.

Climate change has been remaking California’s fire seasons into fire years. And California’s recent average to abundant water years have fueled what Acuña called “bumper crops of vegetation and brush.”

“Most of California is like a haystack. And if you’ve ever seen a haystack fire, they burn very intensely because there's layers of fuel,” Acuña said.

Like Quinn-Davidson, Acuña wasn’t ready to make specific predictions about fires to come.

But John Abatzoglou, a professor of climatology at UC Merced, said the temperatures and snowpack conditions this year offer a glimpse of California in the latter decades of this century, as fossil fuel use continues to drive global temperatures higher.

How this year’s fires will play out will depend on when, where and how wind, heat, fuel and ignitions combine. But it foreshadows the consequences of a warmer California for water and fire under climate change.

“This,” Abatzoglou said, “is yet another stress test for the future in the state.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Thousands of immigrants who are lawfully in California are set to lose their food assistance benefits, known as CalFresh, starting this month.

The new restrictions stem from H.R. 1 — also known as the “Big Beautiful Bill” — which Congress passed last year.

The changes remove eligibility for certain noncitizens, including people with refugee status and victims of trafficking. It also applies to immigrants from Iraq and Afghanistan who have special immigrant visas for helping the U.S. government overseas.

 ”These are folks … many of whom have large families that we have a commitment to as a country because we welcomed them and invited them here to find a place of refuge,” said Cambria Tortorelli, president of the International Institute of Los Angeles, a refugee resettlement agency. “They’re authorized to work and they’ve been brought here by the U.S. government.”

The federal spending bill, H.R. 1, made sweeping cuts to social safety net programs, including food assistance and Medicaid. In signing the bill, President Donald Trump said the changes were delivering on his campaign promises of “America first.”

Officials estimate 23,000 people in Los Angeles County will be affected. The state estimates about 72,000 immigrants with lawful presence will be affected across California.

CalFresh is the state’s version of the federally funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Undocumented immigrants have not been eligible to receive CalFresh benefits.

State officials say noncitizens who are currently receiving benefits will continue to get them until it’s time to renew their benefits — adding that people might be able to receive benefits again if their legal status changes to lawful permanent residents.

Who the changes apply to:

• Asylees
• Refugees
• Parolees (unless they are Cuban and Haitian entrants)
• Individuals with deportation or removal withheld
• Conditional entrants
• Victims of trafficking
• Battered noncitizens
• Iraqi or Afghan with special immigrant visas (SIV) who are not lawful permanent residents (LPR)
• Certain Afghan Nationals granted parole between July 31, 2021, and Sept. 30, 2023
• Certain Ukrainian Nationals granted parole between Feb. 24, 2022, and Sep. 30, 2024

Nearly every student in the California State University system has used artificial intelligence tools, but most don’t trust the results, are worried about how AI will affect their future job security and want more say in systemwide AI policy.

That’s according to results of a 2025 survey of more than 80,000 students enrolled at CSU’s 22 campuses, plus faculty and staff — the largest and most comprehensive study of how higher education students and instructors perceive artificial intelligence.

Nationwide, university faculty struggle to reconcile the learning benefits of AI — hailed as a “transformative tool” for providing tutoring and personalized support to students — and the risks that students will depend on AI agents to do their thinking for them and, very possibly, get the wrong information. Educators want a say in how and which AI tools are used. Students across the CSU system want to be included in those discussions.

Some professors teach students how to use AI and encourage students to use it, while others forbid its use in the classroom, said Katie Karroum, vice president of systemwide affairs for the Cal State Student Association, representing more than 470,000 students.

“Both of these things are allowed to coexist right now without a policy,” she said.

Karroum said that faculty practices are too varied and that what students need are consistent and transparent rules developed in collaboration with students. “There are going to be students who are graduating with AI literacy and some that graduate without AI literacy.”

In February 2025, the CSU system announced an initiative to adopt AI technologies and an agreement with OpenAI to make ChatGPT available throughout the system. The system-wide survey released Wednesday confirms that ChatGPT is the most used AI tool across CSUs. The system will also work with Adobe, Google, IBM, Intel, LinkedIn, Microsoft and NVIDIA.

Campus leaders say the survey and accompanying dashboard provide much needed data on how the system continues to integrate AI into instruction and assessment.

“We need to have data to make data-informed decisions instead of just going by anecdote,” said Elisa Sobo, a professor of anthropology at San Diego State who was involved in interpreting the survey’s findings. “We have data that show high use, but we also have high levels of concern, very valid concern, to help people be responsible when they use it.”

Faculty at San Diego State designed the survey, which received more than 94,000 responses from students, faculty and staff. Among all responding CSU students, 95% reported using an AI tool; 84% said they used ChatGPT and 82% worry that AI will negatively impact their future job security. Others worry that they won’t be competitive if they don’t understand AI well enough.

“Even though I don’t want to use it, I HAVE TO!” wrote a computer science major. “Because if I don’t, then I’ll be left behind, and that is the last thing someone would want in this stupid job market.”

Faculty are divided about the impact of AI on teaching and research. Just over 55% reported a positive benefit, while 52% said AI has had a negative impact so far.

San Diego State conducted its first campuswide survey in 2023 in response to complaints from students about inconsistent rules about AI use in courses, said James Frazee, vice president for information technology at the campus.

“Students are facing this patchwork of expectations even within the same course taught by different instructors,” Frazee said. In one introductory course, the professor might encourage students to use AI, but another professor teaching the same course might forbid it, he said. “It was a hot mess.”

In that 2023 survey, one student made this request: “Please just tell us what to do and be clear about it.”

Following that survey, the San Diego State Academic Senate approved guidelines for the use of generative AI in instruction and assessments. In 2025, the Senate made it mandatory that faculty include language about AI use in course syllabi.

“It doesn’t say what your disposition has to be, whether it’s pro or con,” Frazee said. “It just says you have to be clear about your expectations. Without the 2023 survey data, that never would have happened.”

According to the 2025 systemwide survey, only 68% of teaching faculty include language about AI use in their syllabi.

Sobo and other faculty who helped develop the 2025 survey hope other CSU campuses will find the data helpful in informing policies about AI use. The dashboard allows users to search for specific campus and discipline data and view student responses by demographic group.

The 2025 survey shows that first-generation students are more interested in formal AI training and that Black, Hispanic and Latino students are more interested than white students. At San Diego State, students are required to earn a micro-credential in AI use during their first year — another change that was made after the 2023 survey.

Students in this year’s survey said they want training that will be relevant to their careers. “I want to learn AI tools that are actually used in my industry, not just generic chatbots,” a mechanical engineering student responded. “Show me what engineers are actually doing with AI on the job.”

The California Faculty Association, which represents about 29,000 educators in the CSU system, said in a February statement that faculty should be included in future systemwide decisions about AI, including whether the contract with OpenAI should be renewed in July.

“CFA members continue to advocate for ethical and enforceable safeguards governing the use of artificial intelligence,” the CFA said in the statement, asking for “protections for using or refusing to use the technology, professional development resources to adapt pedagogy to incorporate the technology, and further protections for faculty intellectual property.”