Tzi Ma

Ma was born in Hong Kong, the youngest of seven children. In 1949, Ma's father moved to Hong Kong following the Chinese Communist Revolution, and then to the United States when Ma was five years old, following political turmoil in Hong Kong. Ma grew up in New York, where his parents ran an American Chinese restaurant, Ho Wah, in Staten Island. According to Ma, immigration activist Lau Sing Kee previously operated the restaurant. Ma found his love for acting when he played Buffalo Bill in an elementary school production of Annie Get Your Gun.Ma has deep ties to theatre. He cites Mako's performance in Pacific Overtures in 1976 as a major influence on his acting career. He is close friends with playwright David Henry Hwang, having collaborated with him on several plays, such as FOB, Yellow Face, Flower Drum Song, and The Dance and the Railroad, throughout the years and starring in the film, Golden Gate (1993), which was written by Hwang. Ma started professionally acting in 1973 through experimental theater. At that time, he was in a residency at Nassau Community College studying acting and teaching movement. His first theatre performance was in 1975 at an outdoor theater in Roosevelt State Park as the Monkey King in a stage adaptation of a Beijing opera titled, Monkey King in the Yellow Stone King. He estimated that there were about 5 to 10 thousand audience members in attendance.

Ma also practiced martial arts prior to doing film work. He leveraged those skills in his film debut as Jimmy Lee in Cocaine Cowboys (1979).

During the 1988 Writers Guild of America strike, Ma found work at South Coast Repertory in Orange County playing various characters in the play, In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe. The play closed the weekend the strike ended, and by the following week, he had secured a role in the L.A. Law television series. In 1994, he was the assistant director on a stage production of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior by the Berkeley Repertory Theatre.

His major film roles include credits in The Quiet American, the remake of The Ladykillers, Dante's Peak, and Tigertail. Additionally, he has appeared as Consul Han in the Rush Hour series, General Shang, the commander of the Chinese military in Denis Villeneuve's Arrival (2016), and Hua Zhou in Niki Caro's Disney live-action adaptation of Mulan (2020).

Ma has appeared in numerous Asian American-produced independent films, such as Red Doors, Catfish in Black Bean Sauce (1999), Baby (2007), The Sensei (2008), and The Farewell (2019).

Ma was interviewed for The Slanted Screen (2006), a documentary directed by Jeff Adachi about the representation of Asian, primarily East Asian, men in Hollywood.