Bruce Lee is portrayed only briefly in Quentin Tarantinos film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Hes relegated to a punchline, really a surprise, given that Tarantino is an unabashed Lee fan.

But at the showing I saw at a Regal Edwards theater in Alhambra a Southern California city with a considerable Asian population he might as well have been the star: The second that actor Mike Moh popped up onscreen in his best Lee drag, a good chunk of the theater erupted in claps.

It wasnt surprising. Fifty-one years after Lees sudden death at the age of 32 from a cerebral edema, the martial artist maintains a godlike status in the hearts and minds of Asian Americans.

Moh, a martial artist himself, nails Lees bravado. As a self-proclaimed Bruce Lee fanboy, the 35-year-old actor and martial artist knew he couldnt screw it up.

As a kid growing up in suburban Minnesota, I was one of the only Asian kids, so I was the class clown and a big part of that was me wanting to fit in, Moh told The Hollywood Reporter recently . Then I saw Bruce Lee and I was like, Wow, this guy can kick ass, the girls want him, he is super-strong and confident. I hadnt seen someone like that before.

For Asian American men like Moh who are starved for representation, Lee was the Asian American hero the only one. Here, by the grace of the film gods, was a cocksure, ass-kicking, philosophy-spouting action star who actually looked like them.

My earliest memories of Bruce Lee were the dubbed, pan-and-scan VHS tapes from the 80s, said Jeremy Arambulo , an artist whose graphic novel A Challenge was inspired by Bruce Lees 1964 duel with Wong Jack Man .

As a child growing up in that era, he seemed as iconic and ubiquitous as Jesus, the 40-year-old said.

Dan Kwong , a performance artist and writer, had his big Bruce moment in 1972, when he saw Fist Of Fury at Chicagos Biograph Theater. The audience alongside him was mostly white. As he watched the muscular, sprightly Lee run circles around men twice his size, he was filled with a new kind of glee.

I was in my 20s at the time. Never had there been an Asian man that was as respected and admired by everyone in this country, Kwong, 64, told HuffPost. What made Bruce especially impactful was his timing. There simply was no one like him ever before.

Lee remains the preeminent model of Asian manhood: A few years back, the The Asian American Man Study asked, Who is the Asian American man you most admire and why? Bruce Lee was the person the 497 respondents mentioned most often . (Depressingly, the actual most common response was, I dont know, a sad commentary on the invisibility of Asians in film and any other highly public fields.)

Lee pioneered a model that promised Asian men they could take on any enemy and come out on top, said Chris Berry , a professor of film studies at Kings College in London.

In his early films, before he was trying to pander to the wider U.S. audience, there was always a racial hierarchy of opponents, starting with other East Asian men, and ending up with Caucasian men, he said. It made his films wildly popular throughout in Third World countries and also with African American audiences.

Lee was the rare nonwhite leading man and his films leaned into revenge fantasies and sticking up for yourself, much like the Blaxploitation movies of the era.

How Lee Changed Hollywood

Surprisingly, though, the actor only completed five feature films before he died in 1973. But in that short time span, he singlehandedly flipped the script on how we perceive Asian masculinity.

He was fighting against a lot: In films prior to the 1970s, Asian male characters were characterized in two ways: As cultural studies professor Chiung Hwang Chen wrote in a 1996 academic paper, Asians were portrayed as the threatening masculine yellow peril who fought to kill the white man and take his women. (That last line is exactly what the title character orders his army to do in 1932s The Mask of Fu Manchu.)

In other movies, they were feminized and emasculated, the professor said. Often, these characters were portrayed by white actors in yellowface . (There were blips of positive representation, but they were few and far between: Brooding Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa was a silent era heartthrob, and James Shigeta lent his leading man good looks to films in the 1960s.)