Hop Chow’s not his real name. Sad truth is he don’t know what it is. Hop’s parents had run afoul of some shady types on their home planet of Persephone. These wei shian dohn woo had killed his parents, poked out his eyes and left him for dead in an alley behind an inn. At only 9 months old, Hop didn’t have much hope of livin’. Lucky for him the inn keeper found him and took him in to raise as her own, or at least to the point of raisin’ some cheap labor to help work the place.

He went years without a name, but eventually the locals started callin’ him Hop Chow as a joke for how the innkeeper kept pushin’ him around workin’ in the restaurant at the inn.

Life was pretty tough for Hop as you might imagine. He learned to deal with his blindness well, but that didn’t keep the locals from tryin’ to take advantage. He learned to defend himself as a youngin’ but was able to eek out a more formal training in his teen years. His years of blindness had attuned his hearing, which in many cases gave him a natural advantage against an opponent. You’d have to be chwen to try to take him on in a dark alley.

Later he would fall in with Captain Mozart as a permanent member of the crew of the Betty. The Captain was looking for a cook, and Chow was lookin’ for a way out of that goram inn.