linguistic:paraphrasing
Street fighting

Another major influence on Lee was Hong Kong's street fighting culture in the form of rooftop fights. In the mid-20th century, soaring crime in Hong Kong, combined with limited Hong Kong Police manpower, led to many young Hongkongers learning martial arts for self-defense. Around the 1960s, there were about 400 martial arts schools in Hong Kong, teaching their distinctive styles of martial arts. In Hong Kong's street fighting culture, there emerged a rooftop fight scene in the 1950s and 1960s, where gangs from rival martial arts schools challenged each other to bare-knuckle fights on Hong Kong's rooftops, to avoid crackdowns by British colonial authorities. Lee frequently participated in these Hong Kong rooftop fights. He combined different techniques from different martial arts schools into his own hybrid martial arts style.

When Lee returned to Hong Kong in the early 1970s, his reputation as "the fastest fist in the east" routinely led to locals challenging him to street fights. He sometimes accepted these challenges and engaged in street fights, which led to some criticism from the press portraying him as violent at the time.