Soo Yong

Soo Yong, (Mandarin: Yang Siu; 31 October 1903 in Wailuku, Maui – October 1984 in Honolulu). She acted in twenty-three Hollywood films and numerous television shows, mostly in supporting roles. Among them were The Good Earth (1937), Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955), and Sayonara (1957). In 1941 she married to C.K. Huang.

Soo Yong was born into a family which had come from Zhongshan, Guangdong, where the Young clan was one of the largest family organizations. She was known as Young Hee, or Ahee as a child. Her father was a contract laborer in the Waikiki sugarcane plantations, then became a taxi driver important enough in the community to be a friend and frequent host to Sun Yat-sen. She attended Christian Sunday school even though the family worshiped Buddha at home. She lost both parents by the time she was 15, and moved to Honolulu, where her earnings from working for white families paid her school tuition. At some point she picked up Mandarin.

After graduation from Mid-Pacific Institute and then the University of Hawai'i in 1925, her aim was to go into teaching. She made the trip to the mainland to enroll at Teachers College, Columbia University, making her one of only fifty women of Chinese descent enrolled in an American college. Her M.A. in Education was granted in June 1927, at which point she changed her name from "Ah Hee" to Soo Yong.

Over the next few years she had roles in several Broadway plays, the first one starring Katherine Cornell, whose "techniques, certain postures, and gestures" she said she emulated. In 1929, she married fellow actor Goo Chang (Peter Chong). The first major advancement of her career was the opportunity to use her fluency in Mandarin and native English as onstage translator for Mei Lanfang's Peking Opera, first in New York and then a tour of North America in 1930. She freely interpreted the stories and explained the action in terms which American audiences could understand. The New York Times praised her by name, saying "Miss Yong speaks English with a clarity of diction rarely encountered among native American speakers," apparently not realizing that she was in fact a native American speaker. After the finish of the tour, she and her husband performed on Broadway together. They went back on the road, where, however, the marriage ended. After the divorce was complete in June 1933, she returned to Hawai'i, then later that year to Los Angeles.

...
Wikipedia