Born in Minneapolis, James Hong spent his early childhood in Hong Kong, later returning to Minneapolis at the age of ten, starting elementary school without speaking a word of English. James studied civil engineering at the University of Minnesota and graduated from the University of Southern California. After graduation, James worked as a road engineer with the County of LA, using his vacation days to pursue acting.
In the early 1950s, James teamed up with Donald Parker and established “Hong and Parker,” a stand-up comedy duo. His day job ended when he was cast in his first movie, Soldier of Fortune, with Clark Gable. Two films soon followed: Blood Alley with John Wayne and Love Is a Many Splendored Thing with William Holden and Jennifer Jones.
Active in his pursuit to end discrimination in the entertainment industry, James co-founded the East West Players, the first Asian-American theatre company in LA. Known for his many small roles, James hopes he has laid the groundwork for other Asian Americans to be cast in major roles.
Some of James’ best-known film credits include Big Trouble in Little China, Blade Runner, Chinatown, and the voice of Chi Fu in Mulan. James’ television credits include Days of Our Lives, Switch, Marco Polo, The West Wing, The X-Files, and Seinfeld, although to list even a few of his several hundred roles seems insufficient. James coaches actors in LA when not on the set himself. More information is at https://jameshong.com.
I think it’s one of those things like most actors have known, ever since they were small, that they wanted to be actors. You don’t know it, but you do it. You’re hamming it up. I guess it was back in Minneapolis, Minnesota, when I was a child. I don’t know exactly how old I was, but it was during the Japanese-American war—World War II—or even earlier, when China was in battle with Japan, and my father was the head of a family association. He would take me as a small child and prop me up on a little soapbox or crate and say, “James, make a speech! We need some more money for the war effort.” I would say, “Fight the Japanese!” and so forth.
My parents were purely farmers and such from Taison. It’s a village not too far from Canton, the big city north of Hong Kong. That’s where—during the early days, the first immigration from China to America—at least fifty percent of the people came from, I would venture to say. So, why Minnesota where all the Swedes are, yah? Yah, I thought I was Svedish! Really! When you grow up, you don’t know what you are. I think the story goes that my father came across the Canadian border in those old days and they went to Chicago, but there were too many Chinese at the time, so they went to Minnesota and said, “We hear you need some laundrymen and some cooks.”
Was your family supportive?
By the time acting started to get a little serious for me, I was out here in LA already. I had hid acting from my parents all the time I was going to college because I was majoring in Civil Engineering at the University of Minnesota. They never knew that I took a sideline of entertainment and appeared in the University of Minnesota homecoming show and started doing stand-up comedy.
My mother died without ever really knowing anything about me being in show business at all. When I got on the Charlie Chan series in 1958—I was going to Europe to make that series, The New Adventures of Charlie Chan, starring J. Carrol Naish as Charlie—my father said, “Gee! You can make money with this.” Then he approved. Prior to that, I think he was of the old-school thinking that being an actor was the last, bottom rung of any profession. His thinking would’ve been: “Why would you want to give up five years of engineering for the bottom rung?” The reason show business was considered the bottom rung was because it’s considered very shameful and disrespectful to show your emotions in public, to display yourself and your expressions. I think my father adapted to American society’s sense that this is a profession and you can make money at it.
How did you start off with stand-up comedy?
Well, being Chinese in Minnesota, what role could I play on stage? There was no such thing as the movie business or on-camera things for me there. The only thing left was stand-up comedy, but there were hardly any clubs. I was also too busy with civil engineering to really pursue this career. I did, however, appear in a couple of local radio shows. I teamed up with a fellow named Don Parker. He was a mixture of Caucasian and Native American Indian. We called ourselves the Hong and Parker Comedy Team. One summer, in 1953, we decided to come out to California and scout around—maybe knock on a few doors—with our comedy routine.
We started out in San Francisco. My family was going to come and move out to the West Coast. I had just come out for the summer and then I was going to go back to Minnesota and finish my senior year of college. I just wanted to be faithful to my university. The main thing that happened in San Francisco was that a comedy writer saw us in something and asked me to come down and appear on the Groucho Marx show You Bet Your Life. The writer pushed us as a team, but Groucho Marx said, “We want that Chinese kid who can do impersonations.” I would practice and practice. I would talk like them day and night, all of the famous people of the day. I could do Groucho Marx. So, they put me on the show and Groucho gave me a cigar and I did my best Groucho. Everybody laughed and applauded. Then I did my best Marty Feldman, Jimmy Stewart, James Cagney, all of them! That appearance received the second most fan mail ever for the show.
From that fan mail, I got an offer from the club Forbidden City in San Francisco, where we had just tried out, previous to my appearance on the Groucho Marx show. Charlie Low of the famous Forbidden City said, “I like that Chinese young man—the one who could impersonate all of those people. Tell him that we will book him anytime.” I still have that telegram. I didn’t take him up on that offer because it was back up in San Francisco and I didn’t know what to do about going there. I had transferred my credits from the University of Minnesota to USC and finished my Engineering degree because my parents did want me to graduate and I did obey their wishes. I got my Bachelor of Engineering in Civil Engineering from USC and I worked for the LA County Road Department. After a year and a half, I got so many offers, I had to go to my supervisor Mr. Thompson and say, “Sir, I would like to request a leave of absence.” He asked, “What for?” I told him it was show business. He said, “James, sit down. This is ridiculous. You’re giving up education and a civil engineering career. You could be a good engineer. Why would you want to throw that away for Hollywood? Believe me, Hollywood is no good for anybody!” He was very obviously old-school. I said, “Well, I have to give it a try, sir. If, after a one year leave of absence, I don’t make it, sir, would you please allow me to come back?” He said, “All right, all right, all right. I’ll do it, but I don’t like it.” So he let me go and I never looked back.
I only went back to visit that office once in my lifetime. I was very glad I left. I saw my buddies there with the same calendar, crossing out the dates, counting how many days until sick leave or vacation time. It reminded me of a prison and how they cross out each day they’re there. I don’t see how I could’ve lasted as an engineer. James Hong’s nature was not meant to be technical. Although, technicality and education has paid off in the sense that, during the slower years of acting, I distributed films for Roger Corman and produced a couple of films. I was able to organize certain things and stay above water. I was schooled to be very disciplined and reasonable and respectful. I never forgot that. That, together with my Chinese upbringing, has kept me above water. And staying above water is a great force of life, surviving through the bad times. I learned from my acting teachers Joe Sargent and Jeff Corey that, if you keep pursuing your goals—not only in acting but I think, in life—you will make it.
How did East West Players get started?
I literally sat Mako down at my little, crummy apartment and said to him, “There is no work here for the Asian Americans. Not enough.” The roles we were getting were all the Chinamen being rescued by the White guys—not that we’re not still doing that in films, but in those days especially—in all subservient roles. I said, “Mako, we have to do something.” So, we got a couple of other people together and started to work. Mako loved the Japanese theatre, so he chose Rashomon as the play. He got his father—who was a great, recognized artist—to design the set. His aunt did the costumes. My sister did the artwork for the brochures. Everybody chipped in. We got that group started at a church basement. That was the start of East West Players. We banded together and that was the first Asian-American theatre group of any size to start. Now it’s thousands of members and they’ve got their own theatre and people are doing a great job.
What is the overall impact of having worked on so very many projects?
You can only look at your memory—if you can look at it objectively—and know that the things that stay in your mind become the things you have learned. The things that weren’t so important to you—maybe they were important to somebody else—have dropped out of your memory. Whatever you have retained has made you the person and actor you are today. It’s intelligence and also a combination of emotions and subconscious. Whatever you have retained will come out in your acting.
I think I learned from Ridley Scott and Roman Polanski that you must explore every little small cell in your brain and emotions and the truth will come out. It’s like that costume I wore in Blade Runner. It was a stiff coat that they had on me and they ripped it off in the middle of the scene. When I was first called for wardrobe, I tried on this stiff piece of what must’ve been deer hide. I said, “This is ugly. I can’t even move around. Why would Ridley want to choose this?” I learned that when he planned that costume, he had something that was stirring in his mind. When you see it, then you say, “Yes. He explored some little minute cell that blossomed into this costume.” It was just the right costume for that Chew character. It was a brilliant costume! But it’s that attention to detail that went into every shot, every element of that film.
It has been a privilege to be in a few classics like Blade Runner and Chinatown. I loved Big Trouble in Little China. Each one of those films had some greatness in it. Chinatown is one of the most-studied film in colleges. Working with Jack Nicholson and John Huston, how can you not learn, unless you’re just completely shut off? You can’t be too egotistical in this world, and show business sometimes makes you think of yourself only, because you’re pushing yourself so hard. You become so egotistic that you only see your career and you forget to listen and observe. That is a trap. You cannot think you’re better than anybody else.
Do you feel a sense of cultural responsibility as an actor?
Definitely. When you eat rice every day, there’s something else anchored to that life. The porridge your mother fed you was watered-down rice. That’s what they feed babies in China instead of milk. Not that I was born in China, but my mother was from there, so that rice porridge was my main thing. That kind of stays with you the rest of your life. We changed the complexion of the business for the Asian Americans in certain ways. I was the president of the Association of Asian Pacific American Artists. We’d advocate for our rights as actors. We met with the Casting Society of America and tried to get casting people to have more equality in casting. We’d try to meet with producers and directors. In a way, we established that routine and it’s still being done today, obviously by the wonderful young people with energy that push this issue at SAG and East West Players and all kinds of groups that are advocating for equal opportunity. I like to think that we were the first people to have done it. Certainly, we were the first to mount a protest to the so-called bad image of the Chinese in a film called Confessions of an Opium Eater directed by Albert Zugsmith. When I formulated that protest, it was because I looked at that script and said, “We can’t do this. We can’t even allow this.” Practically all of the images were bad images of the Chinese. I said, “Somewhere, somehow, this has got to stop. We can’t keep on, for generations, doing this. How can I be at peace if this happens?” So, I got together a bunch of people down in Chinatown and we had a meeting. Everybody was very fearful because, in those days, people didn’t speak up at all. But, being from Minnesota, I was more liberal-minded than most. I didn’t know real prejudice because I grew up playing with Norwegians and Swedes every day. There was prejudice in Hollywood. We couldn’t move in certain areas yet. We couldn’t buy on Beverly Boulevard, for example. I said, “We have to go see the director!” We called the director, Zugsmith, and he listened to us. He said, “I’m not going to stop making this film because of you. I’m just going to make this film the way I feel like it.” And he did, but I know it gave us power to speak up in that way at that time.
I have to say, after all these years of being in the business, the opportunities for the Asian-American actors have not really increased that much. The SAG records show that the number of Asian Americans being hired as actors is really small. The problem is this: When the writers and the producers—even before the directors come on the scene—think of a series, they don’t know what to do with an Asian-American character, if they even think of one! If they think of one, they say, “Let’s make him a restaurant owner. Let’s make him a butler.” Of course, things like Sideways have shown us that you don’t have to be an Asian character in order to be portrayed by an Asian actor! Sandra Oh, in a way, probably has done more for the issue of equality than that protest all those years ago.
I talked to black actors earlier in my career when they we were in the same situation and hardly any of them got recognized. We talked about the lack of opportunities for minorities in the business. Over time, they have freed themselves from that bond and increased their numbers on TV and features like crazy. It’s great! For some reason, the Asian Americans are still left behind. I don’t exactly know why, other than the black actors knowing how to assert themselves to climb higher. After fifty-one years, I should see more improvement in our situation. I shouldn’t even have to talk about it, but the issue is still there. It may take another twenty-five years to blow over, maybe.
Look at Better Luck Tomorrow, which was a feature picked up by MTV Films. Those actors have that film and they still, every day, are confronted with the same situation of not being able to get a lot of roles. There are no roles out there being offered. Why can’t they cast them into any role in a TV series? They’re very appealing, talented actors who proved their talent in that film and yet they still can’t get jobs being “just American,” only “American Asians.”
We have to start from the root. The ones who are creating the projects have to be Asian American for it to start happening more. Certainly the Asian actors Jackie Chan and Jet Li and Chow Yun-Fat have more-or-less created more work in this industry for the American Asians, but these people were stars in Asia first. I don’t know whether they are using their star power to get more Asian Americans hired. It’s not the nature of the Asian people—especially the ones that are from Asia—to speak out for themselves or for their own race. We revere our employer as the top dog. That is the respect given in Asia.
Are you ever asked to audition at this point in your career?
The jobs I have gotten recently are mostly through acquaintances and offers. However, I still have to go out for auditions a lot. I can understand a producer and a director—especially in a series, and especially if they’re too young to remember my more important works—saying, “Yeah, let’s see what James can do.” Also, I’m growing older so I imagine they want to see if I can still walk. Walk? I can still break-dance! But I can understand that.
Auditioning can be important, I know. And to audition well, I would definitely encourage everybody to do as many aspects of drama and comedy as possible. In comedy—especially stand-up comedy—you learn how to play the room. That applies to camera too. It’s not that much different because the camera is a member of the audience. To know how to, somehow, play to that person—the camera—is very meaningful. I prefer comedy because it gives me more freedom. Drama, of course, I love it also.
How do you prepare for a role?
I think it’s almost second nature by now, having done four hundred and fifty roles in my life—possibly the most any actor has ever done. Some of them are very small, one-day jobs, but they are all different characters, different roles. I think every role I’ve had has been training for future roles. I used all my training from Joe Sargent and Jeff Corey and got into those earliest persecute-the-Chinamen roles using emotional memory. Even bad memories are the well of your talent. As an actor, you draw from that to create. You’ll notice, most of the comedy I do has a little sadistic tone to it. I never do any villain without a sense of humor. Lo Pan is evil but what a sense of humor: “Now this really pisses me off to no end!” You are what you are. All those past experiences make you what you are. If you are a good actor, you learn how to draw all that back up and recreate it in the role.
I never accepted a role without putting my best foot forward. That’s what you see on TV and in movies. I would like to have had more opportunities to play bigger roles. There will be no awards for such small roles, even so many of them. I take a look at my contemporaries, like Morgan Freeman, who has been given the chance to play big roles in American films. I have a life of only being able to play Asian roles, little roles. I have to wonder: “If I had been given some bigger roles, where would I be?” I’ve had to stay a “smaller” actor with many, many roles. That will probably be my legacy.
If look to roles I would like to play, I should be the head of a corporation. I should be a very important lawyer. I should be a politician. I should own a high-tech company. I should be a doctor or the head of the hospital on ER. These people in everyday situations are Asians, but the roles don’t reflect that. Where are they in the portrayal of this society? It’s a big quandary in the sense that you don’t see actors on screen portraying accurately what it is that most Asian Americans do for a living. Of course, when they start casting like that, the rest of the producers will say, “Why didn’t we think of that?” There just needs to be a start and then everyone will join in.
What is your favorite thing about being an actor?
Of course, being in a profession that you love. That’s the main thing. I think that every actor loves the profession. Otherwise, they wouldn’t go through all the hardships of being an actor—and there’s a lot of that. I like that you take your feelings and you paint with your feelings and it’s there forever. It stays in the vault and it’s your legacy. Whoever you believe in—God or Allah or Buddha—gave you some talent. It has to be given that way. My mother was known as a sampan girl. She’d paddle her sampan and deliver things. How else, from that, comes an offspring that somehow has talent and the ability to express it? I’m very happy that I have a venue to do so. That’s the best thing about being an actor.
When I was in communist China doing Marco Polo, some of the actors came to me and they said they could not be an actor because they didn’t pass the test. I said, “What test?!?” When they start to go to university or college, they have to take this exam and only so many hundreds or thousands out of these millions of other guys that are applying go on to be in acting school. If you qualify, then you can study acting there. Otherwise, you have to study accounting or something. You don’t have the freedom to choose your own occupation. Whereas, in this country, if you want to be an actor, try it!
What advice would you give to an actor starting out?
If I think back to my original drama class that I was a student in, I’d say, if not everyone, at least eighty percent of those students had a chance to make it. They got interviews, they got small roles, they had the opportunity. It depends on their talent and perseverance how far they got. The main thing is: “Are you ready? Did you prepare? Are you serious?” If you’re not, then drop out—now—before you waste so much time. Once you get to this town, get yourself a professional teacher and begin to learn—no matter what you learned somewhere else—what acting is really about. I believe—if you set your goals high and you keep pursuing it—sooner or later you’ll make it.
This interview was conducted on March 10, 2005, and it originally appeared in Acting Qs: Conversations with Working Actors by Bonnie Gillespie and Blake Robbins, available at Amazon.