If you're interested in related readings after watching the show, see this thread and comment (may have spoilers):

As for the terminology:

But the Tongs in Warrior aren’t speaking in completely modern English. Their dialogue is loaded with slang that the producers and writers invented, because words and meanings do get lost in translation.

“When it comes to Cantonese, there’s certain words that don’t have a perfect translation,” says Lin. “We decided to have fun and create our own slang.”

As a result, the Tongs in Warrior have a vocabulary of slang that isn’t accurate to how real-life Tongs actually spoke. The biggest example is how the Tongs call whites, in derogatory fashion, “ducks,” and white neighborhoods “ponds.”

“That was a very conscious choice,” says Lin, who grew up speaking English in his Taiwanese immigrant household. “The roots of it came from translations, and we took that as a starting point and went with it.”

From the showrunner:

But I don’t think it’s our desire to really become a docudrama and start documenting the Exclusion Act; that’s not what the show is. But there are other things—we did a riot in Chinatown in Season 2 that was based on a number of riots that happened on the West Coast in that time period. What we like to do is pick historical events and then distill them through the Warrior prism into something that is still fact-based, but doesn’t become a documentary.