Hong Chau

Before Hong Chau was born, her parents and her two brothers lived in Vietnam. In 1979, the family was among the Vietnamese boat people who fled their country, and Chau's mother was six months pregnant with her. During their escape, Chau's father was shot and nearly bled to death. Chau was born in a refugee camp in Thailand on June 25 that year. A Vietnamese Catholic church in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the United States arranged for a local Vietnamese family to sponsor her family. Chau grew up speaking Vietnamese as her first language, and later learned English in school. Her family lived in government housing and used subsidized lunch programs. Chau was raised in New Orleans East and attended Eleanor McMain Secondary School, Benjamin Franklin High School, and then Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts; the first two are in New Orleans and the latter, from which Chau graduated, is in Natchitoches, Louisiana. Her parents worked as dishwashers then ran a convenience store, working to ensure that the children could attend college. Chau said her parents, who speak English with heavy Vietnamese accents, were shunned as Asian migrants. She said, "My whole life, I've always felt like I was the more acceptable of my parents, and they were always the people who had to stay in the background, or hide in the broom closet." Receiving Pell Grants, Chau attended Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts, where she initially studied creative writing. She changed her major to film studies when her parents requested that she study something more practical. She explored acting to challenge her introversion; she acted in other students' short films and was encouraged to pursue acting. She graduated from Boston University College of Communication with her film-studies major in 2001. After college, Chau got a job with PBS and anticipated a career in documentaries. Chau started taking public speaking classes to overcome being introverted, which led to improv classes. When Chau met a sitcom TV director, he encouraged her to move to Los Angeles and to get in contact with him. Chau decided to move to LA and began seeking acting opportunities there. As of May 2020, she has a dog, a Rottweiler-Australian Shepherd mix. In November of the same year, Chau gave birth to a daughter.