Victor Sen Yung is not a name likely to ring a bell with most moviegoers, but ironically enough during his acting career, he portrayed not one, but two, famous characters. Young Victor’s life got off to a very rough start, born in San Francisco in 1915. When Victor was four, his mother died in the influenza epidemic. His father placed Victor and a younger sibling in an orphanage and returned to China. It was several years before Victor’s father returned to the States, having remarried and returned Victor to a real home.
Mr. Sen Yung managed to play an extra in a couple of films in 1937, but was working full time as a chemical salesman. In 1938, when he was trying to interest a studio executive in a new brand of fire retardant to be used on movie sets, when the executive advised him to get over to central casting immediately. By an extraordinary stroke of luck, the actor who had played Charlie Chan had died, and the studio was replacing him with another thespian, Sidney Toler. The casting director also called for an actor to play Charlie Chan’s “number two son”, originally named Jimmy, later to be named Tommy. And so, a minor star was born. Over the next ten years, Mr. Sen Yung played number two son in Charlie Chan in Honolulu, Charlie Chan in Reno, Charlie Chan on Treasure Island, Charlie Chan in Panama, Charlie Chan in Rio, the Docks of New Orleans, Shanghai Chest and Charlie Chan in the Wax Museum (editorial comment: that Charlie Chan sure did get around). In 1957 Mr. Sen Yung got a role in a short-lived TV series entitled The New Adventures of Charlie Chan.
Some critics regarded Charlie Chan as depicting Chinese in a negative way; I respectfully dissent. Granted the elder Mr. Chan spoke English with an accent, but then so did Sherlock Holmes. Charlie Chan was *always* the smartest person in the film: smarter than any bystander, smarter than the police and smarter than the killers that he always exposed and had arrested before the final credits rolled.
It was not until the next year that Mr. Sen Yung got another huge break. He was selected to play Hop Sing on the TV western Bonanza, which provided him with steady work for the next fourteen years. We never learn much about Hop Sing except that he’s the chef of the richest rancher in the State of Nevada. His pre-American life is a mystery except for one episode “Mark of Guilt”, which aired in December of 1968. In that segment, Hop Sing has just arrived back in Virginia City, after visiting with a cousin. When he tries to hire a horse to get back to the Ponderosa, he is set upon by a local thug, who cuts off his pigtail with a bowie knife (old students of the Orient will know that all Chinese men wore a pigtail as a sign of loyalty to the Manchu Imperial Dynasty until 1911). When Little Joe Cartright learns of that outrage, he rides back into Virginia City vowing to exact retribution against that ill-mannered thug. Unfortunately the ill-mannered thug turns up dead and Little Joe is facing a murder charge. Older brother Hoss serves as defense counsel.
This is where the plot takes a dramatic twist. Hoss Cartright’s star witness is none other than Hop Sing, who it turns out is a fingerprint expert and who informs the court that Little Joe’s fingerprints (or “chop”) are not on the murder weapon. This plot device has some historical background, fingerprints were admissible as evidence in theft cases in China as far back as the Qin Dynasty in the third century BC. As late as 1886, the London metropolitan police rejected the use of fingerprint technology and NYPD did not start using them until 1906.
So apparently Hop Sing was not only a superb chef, but a first rate crime technician as well. Who’d a thunk it?
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KENT MITCHELL