Michael Tong Man-Lung 唐文龍
Michael Tong studied design in California and New York, and in Hong Kong he first tried to become a singer. After working in film and at TVB, he moved to the mainland and lived for a long time without a steady income. In Beijing during those years, Tong would go to the park to work out, and when he returned to the screen, he appeared in productions both on the mainland and in Hong Kong.
Michael Tong was born in Hong Kong in 1969. He was about ten years old when his family moved to California, to the San Francisco area. At the University of California, Davis he studied environmental design, and later, at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, womenswear design. He returned to Hong Kong hoping to find work in his field, tried pitching concert costumes and taught English to children. In 1994 Tong made it through the selection for a singing competition, though he did not perform in the final. In the mid-1990s he recorded songs for Capital Artists. He later said that his music career never took off because of reshuffles at the company.
Around the same time Tong began acting. Among his early films were The Quick Step of Passion (1994), Mother of a Different Kind (1995) and Sexy and Dangerous (1996). After working with China Star he began appearing on TVB, while in film he worked with directors of very different stripes and across different genres — from the action film Purple Storm (1999) to Sylvia Chang's melodrama Tempting Heart (1999). On television he was usually given supporting or minor roles, including in Family Man (2002). Tong worked at the channel for several years, then tried to find work in film on the mainland.
He spoke in detail about what came after the move to Ming Pao Weekly. When there was no work and Tong could not keep up with his mortgage, his parents supported him for more than half a year. At another point, by his own account, he went two years without income and for nine months lived mainly on bread and oatmeal. Seeing friends was awkward for him then. In Beijing, even in winter, he would go to the park to practise wing chun and hung gar. Recalling those training sessions, Tong described how he made new acquaintances and waited for offers of work. Things gradually improved. In 2013 he appeared in Firestorm. He later recalled watching the film with his parents. By then he had already been able to pay them back the money they had given him for the mortgage.
His parents continued to come from the US to Hong Kong for the winter. When his father began to feel worse, Tong says he flew to see him six times in a year. His father died in 2019. Tong spoke about this in an interview, saying that as he grew older he came to understand better how much his parents had done for him. By then he was acting in Hong Kong again. In 2017 he returned to TVB in the series Heart and Greed 3, and later continued to act on the mainland as well. Among these works are Suspect (2024) and The Old Way (2025).
Hong Kong newspapers at one time discussed Tong's relationship with Sammy Lau, a friend and co-owner of a restaurant. In an interview Tong said that after those publications they stopped appearing together. He himself denied the romance. In 2022, on the programme Chi Chat, hosted by his friend Sharon Chan, he said that he was seeing a woman unconnected to film or television and was thinking about starting a family and having a child. He did not name her on the show — he did not want her to have to become a public figure too.
