Born in a frosty February in 1958, Tsang Hao-Tung was raised in a cramped, two-family flat in downtown Kowloon. The only son of an elderly, respected member of the Royal Hong Kong Police, Tsang Sau Yin, he lived under the expectation that he would follow in his father's footsteps — and at first, that's just what he set out to do. Enrollment in the HKPC immediately followed secondary school, and he graduated into the force with his father's blessing.
A capable young man, Hao-Tung had a leg up into what looked like a promising career, and his first few months as a constable passed without much incident. But he quickly found his hands full, especially when he was transferred into the Organized Crime and Triad Bureau: not only was there the continuation of a messy upsurge in reported crime from the mid-60's and 70s to deal with, the result of the establishment of the Independent Commission Against Corruption to weed out those secretly affiliated with the region's triads, many suspected the department's reach to be severely hindered by an alliance between triad representatives and various levels of Chinese officials. Once, triads had been forced to flee southwards in the tightened law enforcement following the Communist takeover, but now - now, there were reports of collaborations ranging from the sharing of brothels and other venues, eyes paid to be blind to racketeering, to a lively cooperation in cross-border trafficking. In one public speech, Deng Xiaoping glowingly spoke of the "good guys" among "patriotic" triads.
Under such conditions, and with the undependability of such nominal allies, Hao-Tung and his peers often had an absolutely terrible time pursuing leads against triads. For instance, to order a PLA officer to submit to a search was an impossibility; senior triad office-bearers in particular were arrogantly untouchable, if not invisible. Despite the creation of ICAC, too, there were still numbers of policemen who lived beneath the thumbs of and discreetly held memberships within local triads. When at the age of twenty-seven, Hao-Tung turned his back on a job filled with frustrations to be initiated into a triad himself (in his case, one of the many subsidiaries of the Wo Group), he was hardly the first to do so. Nor would he be the last.
Sau Yin was extraordinarily unhappy with him, and though the ailing man never actually went through with his threat of disownment, relations between father and son became severely strained. Unmoved, Hao-Tung ignored as much of his past life as was possible and poured energy into his lucrative new line of work. His paramilitary training combined with his callous nature into a favorable trait, witnessed the first time he resolved an inter-triad gambling dispute the time-honored way of handling all such disputes— by severing the offending "brother's" forearm with a chopper, or meat cleaver — and attracted the attention of the Red Pole in charge of that collection of neighborhoods. Within two years, he was promoted from an ordinary member into a Red Pole himself, responsible not only for meting out physical punishments to aberrant members but for helping to coordinate the more violent aspects of turf warfare.
It was a capacity he would serve in for close to the next two decades. He embraced the loose-and-fast lifestyle of extortion, illegal dealmaking, and terrorizing non-triad areas, building a reputation for himself from the ground up. Though women came and went on a mostly uncaring basis, at one point he was introduced to a local businessman's daughter, a delicate, rather blandly pleasant girl named Sheh Chi-Ang, through one of his triad colleagues. Her father wasn't a member of any triad himself, but he consistently had dealings with those who were. There wasn't really any love in the relationship that ensued, but it was a suitable match on several levels, and Hao-Tung tolerated Chi-Ang mostly on account of her well-connected family. Eventually, he tied the knot with her.
Sometime in his early thirties, he was transferred to a nascent branch of his triad in New York City's Chinatown. By then, Chi-Ang had given birth to a son to whom they gave the Western name Anthony; Hao-Tung now had to learn to juggle the responsibilities of parenthood in addition to everything else. He favored Anthony when he could (paying a lopsided amount of attention to his son, in fact, and almost completely ignoring his poor wife by comparison), but his mind was frequently elsewhere even when he could be around. He had enough pressing, regular duties to keep him on his feet at all times, and Chi-Ang was often left by herself to do the raising of their child alone.
As time wore on and he became more experienced in a range of tactical matters, Hao-Tung found his ideas about his allegiances tentatively shifting. Since the mid-90's he had entered into a cautious friendship with a high-ranking member of the Flying Dragons, a gang that his Wo Group offshoot had worked together with in the past despite at other times being rivals. Though siblings might fight among themselves, to join any triad was to be united beneath the umbrella of a worldwide family — or so the relationship stood when there was mutual profit to be made, anyway. Though respectable, his own position within the Wo was static, more or less, with circumstances that dictated stale hopes of further advancement. A shift sideways, however, had the potential of telling a different story. Shortly after the turn of the century he made his switch to the Flying Dragons official, paying the requisite joining fees, re-undergoing the proper ceremonies, and meeting Kim Yeoh in a personal introduction from his new 'big brother'. Neither his planning nor his timing went unrewarded. Pleased by his newest acquisition, Yeoh subjected Hao-Tung to a trial period to test for loyalty and then elevated him to the status of vanguard, one of the three closest advisors to Yeoh himself alongside the deputy leader and Incense Master.
Now the administrator in charge of recruitment and daily operations, Hao-Tung had only a small window of time in which to enjoy his newfound sphere of influence before the bomb went off in Kirby Plaza. He had been right on the outskirts of the city at the time, safe, but Chi-Ang died at the heart of the blast; Anthony became a name on a massive list of missing persons, presumed dead. The explosion continued producing wave upon wave of far-reaching effects long after the fact, many stemming from Nathan Petrelli's announcement in 2007. Revelation of the Evolved did its part in fouling up the playing field of the city's triads, as there was unexpectedly a whole new aspect to factor into the already volatile, routine territorial disputes between the miscellaneous gangs, tongs, and triads that crawled Chinatown's underbelly. Hao-Tung found this out firsthand in a shootout between the Flying Dragons and one of their longtime enemies, the Ghost Shadows, involving an Evolved Ghost Shadow with the ability to ignite localized thermochemical explosions. He wound up hospitalized with a leg requiring a number of agonizing surgeries to fix, and even years later, it still occasionally causes him pain.
One person in whom he found some solace was Ellen Fung, a native of New York City with roots reaching back to Hong Kong. She was then the girlfriend of Chen Yi, a mid-ranking official of the Flying Dragons with a reputation of attracting trouble deeper than he could handle. When Yi found himself farther over his head than usual, he personally approached Hao-Tung with a request to honor the eleventh of the thirty-six traditional triad oaths, the call to assist the companions and children of brothers in need. Though not particularly afraid of the ancient threat of being nailed by five thunderbolts if he broke the oath, Hao-Tung grudgingly accepted Ellen into his care while Yi tried to sort himself out. At least Yi hadn't had children, or indeed, much of a known family to speak of. Only Miss Fung.
Yi managed to get himself killed not even a year later, but Ellen stayed on in Hao-Tung's life. Despite his continuing overall bad-temperedness, he found himself developing a strange, gradual fondness for the woman, finding her an interesting and bright-minded change from his now-dead wife. It didn't take much for him to deduce the extent of the risky little charades and games of manipulation she was so fond of playing, and more vexed than intrigued, he soundly warned her to stop it. He's warmed up to her and her relations since, even feeding funds into her family-owned store to keep it from going under.
It's a good thing he has Ellie, and it's a very good thing he has no clue she's Evolved, because recent events haven't done much to improve his mood. When Yeoh passed away from radiation poisoning in 2008, he had little complaint regarding the man chosen to replace him; Chang Ye was an elderly man whom he greatly respected as both a long-time associate and leader. It was Chang's death, and the subsequent ascension of his two children into his position, that's twisted his displeasure into something awful. Hao-Tung doesn't make it a secret that he bears zero liking for the Evolved, and he isn't happy about Liu and Song's increasing departure from triad conventions, either. So far, he has continued to operate with the best interests of the collective Flying Dragons at heart, but his patience with the two is rapidly wearing thin.
