Helen Wong grew up with her siblings near Chinese Playground, and received her first tennis racket as a donation from the local playground director. One of her siblings, Willie, nicknamed "Woo Woo", would go on to earn fame as a basketball player in the 1940s.[1] Like her brother, Wong attended St. Mary's Chinese Catholic School and played basketball for the Chinese Saints; her teams won the Catholic youth league championships in 1947 and 1949.[2] In an exhibition game in 1947, the Saints lost to a team from Letterman Hospital, but Wong scored 19 of the team's 34 points.[3] In 1949, Wong scored 13 in a 17–16 victory over St. Monica's.[4]
Wong was also an avid tennis player, winning a local junior tournament in 1949.[5] She pursued her passion for tennis with the help of Charles Harney, who paid for her lessons for approximately a year, and Father Donal Forrester, who drove her to tournaments.[2] In 1965, Wong was billed as the national Chinese tennis champion and won a tournament in Santa Cruz.[6][7] She stopped playing tennis in her 40s after being diagnosed with lupus, but resumed playing a decade later once the disease was managed; she would go on to be ranked first nationally in the 50s, 55s, and 60s women's divisions, and won seven national senior tennis titles,[2] including the Women's 55 Singles title in 1988.[8]
Wong went on to earn a master's degree in counseling from the University of San Francisco and worked as an advisor and counselor at City College of San Francisco and as a physical education instructor at Galileo High School.[1]
Wong was inducted into the San Francisco Prep Hall of Fame (for basketball, tennis, and volleyball) in 1988,[9] and the Northern California United States Tennis Association Hall of Fame in 1996.[2][10] Kathleen Yep, a professor of Asian American Studies at Pitzer College, compared her feats to those of Babe Didriksen.[11]