Walter Ho

Walter Ho (1923 – March 27, 2020), known in Chinese as Hua Da (when he was in China) and Hsia Hua-ta (when he was in Taiwan), was an American Peking opera actor. He was a pupil of Wang Yaoqing and specialized in ''dan'', or female roles. He was mixed with a quarter Chinese ancestry.

Born in New York, he traveled to China with his father at age 8 but couldn't return when Japan started bombing Shanghai. In China he became obsessed with Peking opera, so much that he traveled to Beijing alone to learn from Wang Yaoqing. He established himself in Shanghai in the 1940s with the support of Soong Mei-ling and Zhang Lingfu. During the Cultural Revolution, he was accused of being an American spy and imprisoned for six years until his release on the eve of Richard Nixon's 1972 visit. In 1982, at the personal invitation of President Chiang Ching-kuo he went to Taiwan, where he remained until his death in 2020. Provided by Wikipedia