Gigi Wong Suk-Yee 黃淑儀, 黃淑儀
Hong Kong audiences first met Gigi Wong when TVB was still learning how to make long-running series. In the 1970s she appeared in family melodramas and the channel's earliest adaptations of Jin Yong novels, and many years later, in Divas in Distress, she played a former TV star with a score to settle against an old rival. By then Wong was already hosting her own cooking shows. It all began when, as a little girl, she would go to the market with a neighbour and then watch her cook lunch.
Gigi Wong was born in Guangzhou. Judging by what she herself has said about her age, she was born on October 10, 1948. In August 2026, on a TVB broadcast, Wong said that she would turn 78 in October. The HKCinema catalogue gives a different date — October 10, 1949. A Sing Tao report about her 75th birthday in October 2024 is consistent with that. Her father was a chemical engineer and owned a factory. Gigi had an older sister and two younger brothers. In 1958 the family moved to Hong Kong, where they all had to squeeze together with their grandmother into a small flat. Her mother found work as a seamstress, and Gigi did the washing, cooked and looked after the younger children. Wong remembered how her father, who usually ate in silence whatever was put in front of him, gave her fifty cents for a well-fried fish.
At her Hong Kong school, Gigi struggled with English. After failing her exams, her mother sent her to study in Japan, but she soon came back — according to Gigi, because her guardian's son wanted to get engaged to her. In 1967 she went along with a friend to an audition for the school at the cable channel Rediffusion. She had good diction and a pleasant voice, and even before graduating she was given announcing duties and the job of reading the time on air, and was then taken on by the news department. In an interview with HK01 she recalled that she lost that job after a shoot on a military ship. The other girls turned up dressed up, while she had dressed as if for an ordinary outing and tried to keep away from the camera. Her superiors decided she was refusing to cooperate with the cameraman and fired her.
Wong got into TVB on the recommendation of a teacher from Rediffusion. At the audition, director Chung King-Fai asked her to read the same text twice, the second time quite differently. By December 1968, Gigi was already playing the lead in Love Story (1968), TVB's first long-running series. Programme listings give 197 episodes, while the Baidu encyclopedia cites a different figure — 21. Her co-star was Stanley Fung, with whom she would appear again more than once. In 1972 she starred in two melodramas in a row. In Dau Sat (1972) she played a nurse caring for a young man who has gone blind, and Seng Ho (1972) became the first in a series of TVB adaptations of novels by the Taiwanese writer Qiong Yao. Wong also worked again at Rediffusion, where she appeared in the series Sun, Moon and Star (1974), and in 1975 she returned to TVB.
At nineteen, Gigi married director Liu Fang-Gang, who was roughly twenty years her senior. Her mother objected most of all — the groom was almost her own age. As Wong told it, her family's objections only strengthened her determination to marry him. They had a daughter and a son, and for a time Gigi stepped back from acting. Many years later, Wong said in an interview with HK01 that the marriage lasted about eight years. The Hong Kong Economic Journal put it at seven. Wong explained that the rift began with things that seemed trivial in isolation. Her husband, for instance, did not understand why she needed to go for coffee with her girlfriends when there was coffee at home. In an interview with the Hong Kong Economic Journal, Wong spoke of him with respect and recalled that they both tried not to say anything bad about each other in front of the children.
In The Legend of the Book and Sword (1976), TVB's first series based on a novel by Jin Yong, Wong played Li Yuanzhi, a general's daughter who disguises herself as a man and goes looking for adventure on her own. During the filming of a duel, the prop sword of Lisa Wong, who played Huo Qingtong, broke, and a fragment injured Gigi between the eyebrows. Action director Lee Ka-Ting took her to hospital, where she was given stitches. The story grew into rumours of a rivalry. In 2012 the newspaper Southern Metropolis Daily repeated the Hong Kong press's version of events, according to which both actresses had been vying for the role of Huo Qingtong. In 2019, Gigi said in a radio interview that she regarded the injury as an accident and that there had been no feud between them, though she remembered that her colleague had not even called at the time. Lisa told journalists that she had apologised whenever the incident came up, and she too denied any quarrel.
Wong recalled that after the divorce she left for Fort McMurray in Canada with six thousand Hong Kong dollars. The children stayed with their father, while she enrolled in a business English course and took a part-time job at a Chinese restaurant, where she checked coats for the patrons. One day someone told her she looked a great deal like a Hong Kong actress, but then added that the actress would hardly have ended up in a place like that. After about a year Wong returned. In Dai Saam Leui Fong Haak (1978) she and Stanley Fung Sui-Fan played a couple again, this time newlyweds who move into a haunted house. That same year, in the series Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre, she was cast as Yin Susu, the mother of the protagonist, and in The Passenger (1979) she played Guo Ruoshan, whose marriage falls apart before the audience's eyes. In 1979 and 1980 Wong ranked among the top ten television stars in a poll of readers of the evening newspaper Wah Kiu Yat Po.
In December 1981 Gigi married the doctor Tsui King-Chin. She wrote herself, for Ming Pao Weekly, about how they set up their home together. The wedding took place in Los Angeles. In 1983 the couple settled in Vancouver, where her husband was offered a teaching post at the University of British Columbia and a practice to go with it. They had two sons. Wong had always appeared on the big screen less often than on television, but it was precisely in those years that she had several notable roles. In The Brave Archer and His Mate (1982) Chang Cheh cast her as Huang Rong, another of Jin Yong's heroines. In The Autumn's Tale (1987) by Mabel Cheung Yuen-Ting, Wong had a small role as Mrs. Sherwood, the woman whose nanny the heroine becomes after arriving in New York. The film won a Hong Kong Film Award for Best Film.
In Canada Wong worked in Chinese radio and television. In the mid-1990s she began acting in Hong Kong again. In The Little Vagrant Lady (1996) on ATV she played the grandmother of an orphaned girl, and that same year she appeared as Lu Shiping in Thunderstorm, an adaptation of Cao Yu's play. TVB brought her back with Street Fighters (2000) — a producer saw Wong on stage in Canada and offered her the part of the mother of two brothers raised apart. From then on Wong often played mothers, but her characters rarely resembled one another. In Divas in Distress (2012) she and Lisa Wong were once again together on screen. Both played former actresses whose old scores now complicate their children's lives. And in The Fixer (2015) Gigi played Zhu Fengyi, who, because of her illness, forgets the son who stayed by her side all those years and remembers the one she once threw out of the house.
Cooking became her second profession. According to Wong, one of the TVB staff attended a dinner at her home in Vancouver and praised her cooking so warmly to a producer that in 2005 she was given her own show about soups on the channel. By that time Wong was already publishing cookbooks. While shooting for the first book, Gigi prepared a whole table of food and was astonished to see that the crew had ordered lunch by delivery. The photographers were used to dishes being cooked on set merely for appearance's sake. The next day Wong left only a portion of each dish for the shoot and gave the rest away for lunch. In 2019 she started her own YouTube channel. On television, editing sometimes cut what she considered essential to a recipe, whereas at home she could show everything exactly as it was. Even before the launch she had tried filming at home together with her daughter and son-in-law.
That same year, 2019, Wong parted ways with TVB and made a cooking show for ViuTV. On leaving the channel, she said that every boss there looks after their own people and that there was no place for her in that system. She also spoke up for her younger son, who, by her account, refused to sign a six-year contract and was told in response that the channel would no longer hire him. He later appeared on TVB again. Gigi herself still turned up on air at her former channel. After knee surgery she began working less often. In 2026 Wong said she would return to a series if a suitable role came along, but little is written for actresses her age. She still lives mainly in Vancouver, now together with her son and grandchildren, and comes to Hong Kong to see friends or to work.
