Victor Sen Yung (揚森, pinyin: Yáng Sēn) (born October 18, 1915 in San Francisco, California – died November 9, 1980 in North Hollywood, California) was an American character actor. He was given billing under a variety of names, including Sen Yung, Sen Young, Victor Sen Young, and Victor Young.

Sen Yung first made his mark in the 1938 film Charlie Chan in Honolulu, as the Chinese detective's "number two son," Jimmy Chan. In this movie, Sidney Toler replaced the late Warner Oland as Charlie Chan and Sen Yung replaced Oland's "number one son" Lee, who had been played by Keye Luke. Sen Yung played Jimmy Chan in 11 Charlie Chan films between 1938 and 1942.

In common with other Chinese-American actors, Sen Yung was cast in Japanese parts during World War II, such as his role as the treacherous Japanese-American Joe Totsuito in the 1942 Humphrey Bogart film Across the Pacific. In the 1942 Chan film. Castle in the Desert, Jimmy Chan helps his father solve a mystery while on leave from the Army. Art mirrored life, as Sen Yung later joined the U.S. Army Air Forces. During his military service, he was replaced in the Charlie Chan series by Benson Fong, who played "number three son," Tommy Chan. Yung's military service included work in training films at the First Motion Picture Unit and a role in the Army Air Forces' play and film Winged Victory.

After the war, Sen Yung resumed his Hollywood career. The Charlie Chan series was now in the hands of Monogram Pictures, with Sidney Toler continuing in the leading role. Toler's health was failing by 1946, and Monogram, evidently wishing to conserve Toler's energy and shoot around him wherever possible, hired his original screen foil, Sen Yung (now billing himself as Victor Sen Young). Victor Sen Young and Mantan Moreland shared the spotlight in Toler's final two films, Shadows over Chinatown and The Trap. Following Toler's death in 1947, Sen Yung made five additional Chan films with Roland Winters playing Charlie Chan. Interestingly, in the Roland Winters films, Sen Yung played Tommy Chan, not Jimmy; Monogram probably thought that "Jimmy" was too closely associated with the late Sidney Toler and wanted to avoid comparisons.

The diminutive actor continued to work in motion pictures but moved into television, playing affable or earnest Asian characters. He is probably best remembered as Hop Sing, the cook on the long-running television series Bonanza. Sen Yung was in fact an excellent cook, and in 1974 authored The Great Wok Cookbook.

In 1972, a Pacific Southwest Airlines plane on which Yung was a passenger was hjiacked. The FBI assaulted the hijackers, and in the ensuing gunfire Sen Yung was shot in the back. He and another wounded passenger survived, but a third passenger and the two hijackers died.

In 1975 he appeared on Gary Moore's "To Tell The Truth" show and related the events of the hijack. Dressed in a sport coat and flanked by two dissimilar imposters, none of the four panelist were able to choose him as the character actor. Victor Sen Yung died mysteriously in his townhouse in 1980. Reportedly, the actor was creating clayware and curing the items via an oven, and died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

There is a memorial scholarship named after him, awarded each year by the Chinese Alumni Association of his alma mater, University of California, Berkeley, where he had majored in animal husbandry. The eulogy at his funeral was delivered by fellow Bonanza actor Pernell Roberts.

Achieving both film and TV notice during his lengthy career, this diminutive Asian-American character was born Sen Yew Cheung on October 18, 1915 in San Francisco of humble Chinese émigrés. When his mother died during the flu epidemic of 1919, his father placed Victor and his sister in a children's shelter and returned to his homeland. He arrived back in America in the mid-20s having remarried, and the children were released back to his guardianship where they began learning Chinese. To contribute to the family income, young Sen Yung was employed as a houseboy at age 11 and managed to earn his way through college at the University of California at Berkeley with an interest in animal husbandry and receiving a degree in economics. Following a move to Hollywood for some post graduate work at UCLA and USC, Victor gained an entrance into films via extra work, where he was in such roles as a peasant boy in _Good Earth, The (1937), and a soldier in Mr. Moto Takes a Chance (1938), among others. During this early period he also worked as a salesman for a chemical firm. In one of Hollywood's more interesting tales of being "discovered", the story goes that Victor was on the Twentieth Century-Fox studio lot at the time trying to pitch one of his company's flame retardant compounds to industry techies when one of them suggested he check out casting. The original Charlie Chan, Warner Oland, had passed away and the series was undergoing a major casting overhaul. In the end, Sidney Toler, who was replacing the late Mr. Oland and received cast approval, chose the fledgling actor following a screen test to play his #2 son, Jimmy Chan, for the film Charlie Chan in Honolulu (1938). Victor went on to play the role for seventeen other "Charlie Chan" features. Needless, to say he quit the sales business for good. Victor enjoyed playing Jimmy, the earnest rookie detective who, to his chagrin, was always under the watchful eye of his famous father while trying to help solve murder cases. Outside the role, however, Victor (billed as Sen Yung, Victor Yung and Victor Sen Yung at different times) found the atmosphere oppressive. Usually cast in nothing-special Asian stereotypes, sometimes villainous, in war-era films, parts in such movies as Letter, The (1940) starring Bette Davis, _Secret Agent of Japan (1942), Little Tokyo, U.S.A. (1942), Moontide (1942), Across the Pacific (1942), Manila Calling (1942), China (1943) and Night Plane from Chungking (1943), did little to advance his stature in Hollywood. His career was interrupted for U.S. Air Force duty as a Captain of Intelligence during WWII. His part in the Chan pictures was taken over by actor Benson Fong. Victor was able to pick up where he left off in Hollywood following the war and returned to his famous role as #2 son. The character's name, however, was eventually changed from "Jimmy" to "Tommy" after a third installment of Charlie Chan pictures were filmed with Roland Winters now the title sleuth after the passing of Mr. Toler in 1947. While Victor's workload was fairly steady, again the roles themselves were meager and hardly inspiring. Most were in "B" level crime mysteries and war pictures and many were accepted with no screen credit at all. Reduced often to playing middle-age servile roles (houseboys, laundrymen, valets, clerks, dock workers and waiters), some of his slightly more prominent roles include those in Woman on the Run (1950), Forbidden (1953), Target Hong Kong (1953), and Trader Tom of the China Seas (1954). His last film appearance was in Man with Bogart's Face, The (1980). On TV, Victor appeared in two familiar recurring roles. On the John Forsythe (I) series "Bachelor Father" (1957), he showed up as "Peter Fong" on the final season of the sitcom. He played the cousin to houseboy Sammee Tong's regular character. Victor is better remembered, however, for the part of Hop Sing, the earnest, volatile cook to the Cartwright clan, provided sporadic comic relief on the long-running "Bonanza" (1959) western series. He also appeared in the TV pilot and in several episodes of the popular philosophical western series "Kung Fu" (1972), as well as popping up in dramatic episodes of "Hawaiian Eye", "The F.B.I. and "Hawaii 5-0". Sitcoms gave a hint of his gentle, humorous side in "Here's Lucy", "Get Smart" and "Mister Ed", but there was not a single role that truly improved his standing in Hollywood. Married and divorced with one child, Victor was looking for work outside of acting by the mid-1970s. At one point he was giving cooking demonstrations in department stores. An accomplished chef who specialized in Cantonese-style cooking, he wrote the 1974 Great Wok Cookbook and dedicated the book to his father, Sen Gam Yung. Victor was working on a second cookbook when he was suddenly found dead in November of 1980 under initially "mysterious circumstances" in his modest San Fernando Valley bungalow. Following an investigation it was determined that Victor was accidentally asphyxiated in his sleep after turning on a faulty kitchen stove for heat. He was survived by his son and two grandchildren.