Wong was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His father, Frank W. Hong, immigrated from Hong Kong to Chicago through Canada and was a restaurant owner. For his early education, Wong moved to Hong Kong, and returned to the United States at age ten. He studied civil engineering at the University of Southern California, but later became interested in acting and trained with Jeff Corey.

In the 1950's, he started in the dubbing buissness, wich includes the dubbing of Ogata and Dr. Serizawa in Godzilla, Kingof the Monsters!.Wong was one of the original founding members, in 1965, of East West Players, one of the first Asian American theatre organizations. He has appeared in myriad supporting character roles in films and television—with his Internet Movie Database filmography containing 300 credits as of October 2006. He was a frequent guest star in the 1972-1975 television series, Kung Fu. He was perhaps most-widely known as the immortal ghost sorcerer Lo Pan in John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China (1986) and the obtuse maître d’ at the Chinese restaurant in the famous Seinfeld episode “The Chinese Restaurant”.

Wong was the voice of Daolon Wong, an evil wizard in the Jackie Chan Adventures TV series. He was the voice of Chi Fu in Disney’s Mulan, Mandarin in Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go!, and Professor Chang in Teen Titans. He made a cameo appearance in the TV series Las Vegas as a cheating holy Monk. He played an Asian adversary in the popular TV show 24 (2006-2007).

Hong also voiced Colonel Zhou Peng in the video game Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, Dr Chan in 2007's Def Jam Icon, Ancient Wu in True Crime: Streets of LA and the video game of Blade Runner.