Soo Yong

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 Hawaiʻi 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. ==Career==

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 in 1933. Yet she maintained her poise. A 1937 Los Angeles Times story described her as "alarmingly intellectual, sinfully humorous and highly personable." ==Marriage, the death of both spouses, and their legacy estate==

In 1941, Soo Yong married C.K. Huang (Huang Chun Ku; ), Their estate was used to establish the Chun Ku and Soo Yong Huang Foundation, whose direction was transferred in September 1991 to the University of Hawai'i Foundation to be used for grants and graduate scholarships in Chinese culture, theater and drama. The Foundation supported a variety of Chinese theatrical and cultural activities at the University of Hawai'i ==Legacy==

A recent historian concluded that in Soo Yong's career onstage and in film she set out to combine Chinese and western values without becoming the type of westernized "Modern Girl" represented by Anna May Wong. Her roles present a softer Orientalism that allowed ethnic dignity and did not offend her Chinese-American audiences or her Nationalist friends in China. In contrast to Anna May Wong, who was two years younger and appeared more militant, Soo Yong, but she had spent almost no time in China, was able to balance several worlds and to sustain a position as an off-screen, cultural translator. == Filmography ==