Victor Sen Yung~The Cartwrights Never Order Mandarin Duck
TV Guide~October 14, 1971

     Still, Victor Sen Yung Is Thriving As The 'Bonanza' Cook

     "Missa Cartlight, you better come home tonight because Missa Hoss, he eat too much.  He not feel good.  He come in kitchen, I cut off his hand!"

     'Bonanza' viewers know who's talking--the Ponderosa's Chinese cook and "comedy relief", Hop Sing.  But they'd never recognize him on the street--and that's the way veteran character actor and dapper businessman Victor Sen Yung likes it.  "The satisfaction I get is performing in such a way that I can't be recognized."

     The elderly Hop Sing, with his Manchu queue, bears little resemblance to "Cousin Charlie" the fast-talking con artist who kept "Bachelor Father's" houseboy in hot water for five years ("You wanna make some fast money, Peter?  I got a horse running at Santa Anita").  Or to "Number Two Son" in 25 Charlie Chan movies ("Hey Pop I guess the butler did it!").

     The rather complex and introspective man beneath these sterotyped roles holds a degree in economics from the University of Berkeley, pursued graduate work at UCLA and the University of Southern California, and served as a USAF intelligence captain in World War II.  Now, 55, he lives alone in North Hollywood.  "It's a furnished apartment because I never know where I am going to be from one year to the next.  Some day I'll get to China."

     Born and raised in San Francisco's Chinatown, Victor Sen Yung has been trying to make it to China all his life.  His father, now 96, immigrated to "Gold Mountain" as America was known to work in the gold mines in the late 19th century.  His mother, who died in the influenza epidemic of 1919, was imported from Canton, China in a prearranged "matched marriage".  Victor was a member of Chinatown's Boy Scout Troop No. 3.  "After scout meetings on Friday nights, we'd walk up Grant Avenue talking about what we were going to do.  I always wanted to go to China."

     He enrolled in the College of Agriculture at Berkeley.  "I majored in animal husbandry because I wanted to go to China to do what I could to develop herds and livestock."  He switched to economics, and China lost an animal husbandryman.  In World War II, he repeatedly kept trying to get attached to units headed for China.  "I requested transfer to the 22nd Field Hospital Unit, composed of American-Chinese from the San Francisco bay area, staging to join Stilwell and go up the Burma Road.  I said if I am going to die, I'm going to die over there."  He missed being shipped out by two days and was assigned to the Air Force's "Winged Victory Unit".  "I had one line in the show: 'I thank you for China; I drink to America!'"

     At last he very nearly made it.  "I heard they were organizing an intelligent unit to join the 14th Air Force in China.  I applied and was sent to the Chinese Language School at Berkeley to learn the mandarin dialect.  At home we spoke Cantonese.  Finally, I got my orders to go to China, but V-J Day suddenly came along and the war was over."

     The closest Yung ever got to China was on Hollywood's movie sets.  In 1934, still a college undergraduate, he made $7.50 a day as an extra in "The Good Earth."  "I was one of the peasants who killed the locusts.  The prop men glued dead grasshoppers all over my body and I never did recognize myself in the picture."

     After graduation in 1938, while working for a chemical company, he took his sample cases to 20th Century Fox to try to peddle a new flame-proofing compound.  They weren't interested in his chemicals but handed him a test scene for Charlie Chan's "Number Two Son" and he got the part.  "There was nothing to it---a cocky Amercan kid.  I was like that anyway."  He made 11 Chan movies with Sidney Toler as Chan for Fox, eight more for Monogram, and another six with Roland Winters for Monogram.  He has appeared in more than 300 motion pictures and television roles.  He has played Chinese bankers, doctors, bartenders, and spies on 'Hawaiian Eye', 'The Islanders', 'I Spy', 'The FBI', and Hawaii Five-O'.  He has been in 14-18 'Bonanza' episodes a year over the last 12 years.

     As the longest-running cook on television (he was there before Julia Child), Hop Sing has never boiled a pot of tea.  If it's bacon and eggs, the Warner Bros studio prop man cooks it; if it's a barbcued side of beef, outside caterers are called in.  The Cartwrights have never ordered foo yung or mandarin duck.  Victor Sen Yung himself can cook Cantonese-style but prefers to eat out.  "I like certain places where I like the bartenders, but the food has to be good.  For Chinese food, I go to the Grand Star on North Broadway in Los Angeles."

     If he had to do it again, he'd stay far from show business."  It's too insecure."  He wouldn't advise a son to follow in his footsteps.  "It's too tough."  He does have a son, Brent, recently graduated from San Jose State College, who plans a career teaching ceramics.  Yung's marriage, however, was short-lived.

     All of the 'Bonanza' regulars, Yung excepted, have become wealthy working on the series.  "I haven't gotten wealth off anything, " he says, "except in experience and friends.  As my dad always said, 'All you need is a roof over your head and three meals a day.'"

     To supplement his 'Bonanza' residuals he has a side line as public relations man for a company marketing canned bean sprouts, water chestnuts, bamboo shoots and other Chinese foods.  He eschews fortune cookies, an occidental invention.  "I read the fortunes, but I don't eat the cookies."

     He brightens at the prospect of "ping-pong diplomacy" and improved Chinese-American relations.  "I still have the desire to see China, to see the people, to see how they live.  I'd like to get back to my roots, to the village near Canton where my father came from."  Chances are, the way 'Bonanza's' ratings are holding up, he has much more dialog to look forward to on the old Ponderosa: "Now, Missa Hoss, you chew your food.  You listen Hop Sing.  You not eat so fast."


     ~By Dick Hobson