“Everybody seems to recognise Mr Ping,” says Hong, referring to the adoptive father of Kung Fu Panda’s protagonist, Po.

In July, Netflix released a new Kung Fu Panda series called The Dragon Knight, in which Hong reprises his role as the happy-go-lucky goose. It is a character he cherishes and is happy to be playing “all the way through, from the beginning to what it is now and to the future”.

He is known among his peers as “the hardest working man in Hollywood” and has been a trailblazer for Asian-Americans in cinema.

While Hollywood is still called out for its lack of representation of actors from ethnic minorities, and of women, in his seven-decade career Hong has seen the advances Asian-Americans have made as show business evolved.

When Hong started working in Hollywood, Asian-Americans were at “ground zero” – heavily typecast, and their roles often demeaning. The only parts Hong was offered were ones that played on his ethnicity.

“It was all those minor roles and cliché roles,” Hong recalls. “Gimmick roles thrown in there to make people laugh.”

These bit parts were meant to provide comic relief for cinema-goers and relied heavily on the stereotype of Asian-Americans as working- class immigrants who spoke heavily accented or broken English.

Looking back, Hong believes things have improved but that there is still work to be done. For one thing, there are still too few roles written for or offered to Asian-Americans.

“A lot of my good friends, who are very good actors, had to quit because right now there are not enough roles to sustain the Asian-American actors as far as livelihood goes.”

“It’s going to blossom,” he says.

Hong was born in the US state of Minnesota. His family moved to Hong Kong in the 1930s, and growing up in the city underscored the cultural differences between East and West when he returned to the US five years later.

“I vaguely remember being in Kowloon,” says Hong. He recalls playing soccer at primary school and scuffing his knees in the dirt. “It’s very memorable in a sense that I didn’t get into any violent situations or fights,” he says. It was a different story once he was back in America.

Hong’s Chinese school experience abroad opened him up to persecution by his American classmates. “I had to get used to the violence,” Hong recalls, “because I didn’t speak English right away at the age of nine.

“I was picked upon and they beat me up.”

He went on to study civil engineering at the University of Minnesota, and took up comedy after successful performances while in military service during the Korean war (1950-1953). But still he could not escape discrimination in its various forms.

Hong said there was a lingering feeling “that the Chinese were still second grade citizens”.

In 1965, he was one of the nine co-founders of the Asian-American theatre company East West Players, which was committed to raising the visibility of Asian-American actors. That prompted the industry to “notice that we are principal actors”, he says.

The company still operates today, with most, if not all, the roles in its productions filled by Asians.

The page went viral and, with donations from more than 1,700 fans, and reached the target of raising US$55,000 in a few days. This covered the creation, installation and maintenance of the star.

Asked if retirement is on the cards, Hong says he is eager to carry on. “I’m 93 now, and I’m not going to stop. There are so many projects to do and so many more movies. Everything is so exciting around me.”

He adds: “I think I better keep living and take advantage of some of those things I had the chance to create.”