How Hop-a-long Cassidy Led Me to Discover Willie Fung

Hop-a-long Cassidy was not one of my favorite grade B cowboy movie stars, but I saw a link to one of his movies the other day. In a moment of nostalgic longing for my boyhood days when I was a devoted cowboy movie fan, I could not resist watching, at least part of it. 
As the opening credits rolled by, I noticed that a "Willie Fung" was in the movie and wondered if he might be Chinese.  And my hunch was right.  He only had a few scenes and his lines were in spoken in stereotypical pidgin English. After all, he was only the ranch cook.
Still, I was curious to learn more about Willie Fung so I "googled" him, and much to my surprise, he had his own Wikiwand page. I learned Willie Fung, born in 1896 in Canton, played supporting roles in 125 American films between 1922 and 1944 even though he died in Los Angeles at the young age of 49 in 1945. The majority of his roles were in Westerns and dramas, and his filmography shows that he was most often was cast as a cook, servant, houseboy, and once a laundryman

Willie Fung was a pioneer Chinese American actor but not the first Asian American actor. George Kuwa (7 April 1885 – 13 October 1931) was a Japanese and American Issei (Japanese immigrant) film actor of the silent era. He appeared in 58 films between 1916 and 1931. He was the first actor to portray Charlie Chan on-screen, in the 1926 film serial The House Without a Key. Unlike Fung who had very small roles, Kuwa had the key role in the first Charlie Chan movie, a silent film. 

By 1931, Hollywood no longer used Japanese actors to play Charlie Chan, preferring a Swedish American actor, Warner Orland for all subsequent Charlie Chan movies.