There are surprisingly few images available online of Tang Wu, the Chinese businessman who buys Herbie in The Love Bug, setting off the events of the third act. That’s a shame, because he’s one of the most nuanced Asian characters from movies of that era. Yes, there are a few Chinese stereotypes involved in the character, but he’s surprisingly three-dimensional. He doesn’t speak with an impenetrable accent, and he’s a businessman who loves auto racing. He knew Herbie before the little car went on a rampage, and his acquisition of the car was as much out of love as anything else. His cheating is also a lot more subtle than Thorndyke’s.
Benson Fong, as Wikipedia so delightfully put it, “from a mercantile family of Chinese extraction.” Translated, he was born in the US, though his parents or grandparents weren’t, and they probably owned a store. He grew up in Sacramento. In 1943, he was having dinner out with some friends and was approached by a talent scout. He was put under contract at Paramount Pictures for $250 a week for ten weeks; since that works out to over four grand a week today, I’d have jumped at the opportunity, too. That’s a year’s wages for many of my friends in ten weeks.
The simple fact is, and he would’ve been the first to have told you, he got the role because Asian faces were in demand at the time. Japanese actors were interned, and there were a lot of Japanese roles. Villain, sure, but still. There were also a few roles showing the Chinese as allies and so forth. He played a Chinese guerilla, a Japanese sonar man, and similar. He was Number Three Son for six Charlie Chan movies, because while Charlie Chan was never played by a Chinese actor, his sons always were.
After the war, roles were less plentiful. The Japanese actors were let out of the internment camps or returned from the war—and the roles themselves were fewer. He did a fair amount of TV—though finding out exactly what TV he did is difficult to tell, given the current IMDb layout and how they’ve “improved” things. He did the same episode of Perry Mason as George Takei, wherein he played an elderly Japanese expert on pearls despite being none of those three things. (One assumes, anyway; maybe he actually knew a ton about pearls.) He seems to have primarily played Chinese characters, though he also played “Dr. Schneider” in Our Man Flint, who is unlikely to have been Chinese.
It tells you something about acting that he and his wife, herself an actress under the name Maylia Fong, started a restaurant to have more steady income than acting provided. If you know anything about restaurants, you know how surprising that is. It did end up working out for them, though those restaurants have since closed. Apparently, Gregory Peck had suggested starting a restaurant together while on the set of The Keys of the Kingdom, and while Gregory Peck wasn’t in on the Ah Fong chain, he did still inspire it. Which is not the weirdest story in Hollywood, I guess, but is still up there.
I still don’t earn $250 a week, but you can get me there by supporting my Patreon or Ko-fi!
