| Bo Ching | |
| Other Names: | Winnie Park |
| Birth Name: | Bo Ching Park |
| Birth Date: | April 21, 1911 |
| Birth Place: | Alameda County, California, USA |
| Death Date: | July 13, 1999 (aged 88) |
| Death Place: | Los Angeles County, California, USA |
| Alma Mater: | Berkeley High School University of California, Berkeley |
| Spouse: | William Tong (m. 1945) |
| Family: | Bo Ling (sister) |
Bo Ching "Winnie" Park was an American actor active in Hollywood from the 1920s to the 1940s.[1] [2]
Bo Ching was born in Alameda County, California, to Edward "E.L." Park and Oie "Florence" Chan. Her parents — born in the United States to Chinese immigrants — were actors; E.L. appeared as Charlie Chan in the 1924 film Behind the Curtain and later served as an interpreter for the county of Los Angeles, while Florence appeared in a number of films in the 1930s and 1940s. When the family relocated to Los Angeles in the late 1920s, E.L. and Florence opened a Chinese restaurant on Alameda Street and owned their own Chinese costume store.[3]
After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley,[4] Bo Ching and her older sister, Bo Ling, performed in Las Vegas and around the country as a vaudeville act before settling in Hollywood and getting work as actors in the film industry.[5] [6] [7] Their contemporaneous publicity materials often claimed the pair were born in China and that they were twins, despite being born several years apart.[8] [9]
Bo Ching married William Tong — a Seabee with the U.S. Navy — in Los Angeles in 1945.[10] The pair met at the Hollywood Guild Canteen a year earlier. Later on in Tong's life, she more or less retired from acting but worked as a tap-dancing teacher.[11] She briefly came out of retirement for one role in the 1980s, appearing as Keiko's grandmother in an episode of .