The Story Behind the Film

My connection to this story begins with fear.

I grew up between San Francisco's Chinatown and the broader Bay Area during the years marked by gang violence and the lasting shadow of the Golden Dragon massacre. Chinatown's martial arts world was always physically close — the schools, the lion dance teams, the association buildings were part of the landscape of my childhood. I watched martial arts demonstrations during community celebrations and felt the pull of a world that seemed both deeply familiar and deliberately out of reach. My family eventually left San Francisco partly because of the fears that surrounded the neighborhood during those years. For a long time the martial arts world here felt like something I had inherited from a distance — connected to my community but never fully accessible to me.

Years later, after beginning my own training in Ralph Castro Shaolin Kenpo — a lineage with direct connections to the early Chinese American Gung Fu pioneers this film documents — I started tracing unexpected threads between my own practice and the history of Chinatown's martial arts community. Those threads pulled me back to the neighborhood and into relationships with teachers, practitioners, and community elders that I had spent years on the outside of.

What I found there was nothing like what I had been taught to fear.

I am a Chinese American filmmaker, photographer, and martial artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. My work focuses on communities whose knowledge survives through lived practice rather than institutional record — through repetition, mentorship, and the ordinary rhythms of showing up. The Mo Lum of San Francisco Chinatown is the deepest expression of that practice to date: a film made possible not by institutional access or a research grant, but by years of presence, trust, and genuine belonging within the community it documents.

This film is also a personal reckoning — with inherited fear, with cultural distance, and with what it means to finally step inside a world you were raised to stay outside of.

The Mo Lum of San Francisco Chinatown is currently in post-production. 

For updates and community content follow @sfmolum 

Walking tour: wandertastestories.com