Actor Spends Decades Looking for Father. Discovers Dad Had Secret Family in Another Country
We all know that fame isn’t the panacea that people make it out to be, the magic salve that soothes all of our hurts. One merely has to look at the personal histories of various Hollywood stars to understand that they face many of the same lingering woes we do.
Just consider the case of Anthony Wong, an actor who made his mark in China rather than the Los Angeles hills. Now 56 years old, the Hong Kong native has starred in over 150 films, including titles such as “Internal Affairs” and “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.”
Thanks to his popularity, Wong has great influence all over Asia, but the renown hasn’t healed a hurt central to his life. See, at age four, his father — a British official named Frederick William Perry — divorced his mother and moved to Australia.
The abandonment left its mark on his childhood, as did his mixed ethnicity. He told BBC Chinese that he felt trapped in the middle, not a proper part of either Chinese or English society.
Wong links his desire to escape his unhappiness by disappearing into childhood fantasy with his success as an actor. Yet even as his cinematic career flourished, he couldn’t shake the lingering feeling of displacement and even traveled to the United Kingdom in 1997 when Britain returned control of Hong Kong to China, trying to get a feel for his roots.
“I realized I had got over it,” he told the BBC. “What am I? I’m me: a halfer.”
While Wong would probably be the first to say that his father hunger still lingered, telling the BBC that “it’s like a physical scar. It’s always there.”
Perhaps that’s why he recently posted a request on Facebook looking for any information about his father — a post that would end unimaginably for the actor. The post exploded in popularity, and mainstream news sites even picked it up.
That was when twin Australian brothers John and David Perry, both 76 years old, got an email from an English cousin about “a sensitive matter” they should address. That matter was Wong himself.
Unbeknownst to either Perry, their father had kept his Hong Kong romance with Wong’s mother a secret, hiding the existence of each family from the other.
“We know sad things happen in life to a lot of people,” David Perry said. “The main thing was to come over and meet Anthony, and get into some background of what happened.”
For Wong, he sees it as the restoring of some long-missing order, stating, “Dad used to say in his letters that if I was a good boy, he would take care of everything for me. I think he knows I’ve become a good boy since then, and he’s sent two brothers to me.”
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