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No Chinese in Star Trek

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S'Kai: This is the beauty of TrekBBS, The Trek Writers' Guild & every other fan fiction website. Submit your work to Paramount-Viacom or just set-up your own angelfire / geocities account & have the time of your life creating your ideal bridge crew & its own series bible. I'd love to see you create something wonderful that would be quite well-received, especially here in Vancouver B.C. where Chinese (both Mandarin & Cantonese,) are the fastest-growing languages spoken, read & written here in 2008.
 
Harry Kim was born in North Carolina, so if nationalities still meant something in the 24th century (and I would think they do a little, like being from a certain city or another today), he's American. As Sulu is, being from S. Francisco. Of course, he may have been born there and then grew up in Sweden, for all we know, and if that were the case I would consider him Swedish with my 21st century outlook. In his century, he's Human and that's it. Kim is a Korean sounding name, he quotes a chinese proverb in one episode and his parents speak with a slight accent. That's the extent of any ethnicity attached to Kim, which is as it should be I think. Picard's frenchness isn't brought up every damn second on TNG, and he's the captain and definitely French (though he "feels" British most of the time, true, what with the accent and the tea and Shakespeare. Just like mostly every character on Voyager "feels" American to me.).

Anyway, on the subject I share the sentiments of Ensign Ricky. And lots of nationalities were never represented by a major character, it's only natural.
 
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I kinda think that the Voy writers intended for Harry to be chinese and just took an "asian sounding name", they probably picked between Kim and Lee and were ignorant about the fact that it's a very common Korean name
 
It was pointed out in David Gerrold's 1973 book The World of Star Trek that there were no Chinese crew on the Enterprise. This seems to be something that has carried through five series and a bunch of movies now. Can anybody recall a Chinese character? Several Japanese and Harry Kim, presumably Korean.

Why? Did Gene Roddenberry or Bob Justman or somebody else have something against the Chinese?
The issue - this was only for TOS - was that the powers that be wanted to be able to sell the show to Indonesia.
 
Reviving a dormant thread from 16 (!) years ago has got to be some kind of record. The thread starter you’re replying to hasn’t posted in six years. :eek:
The issue - this was only for TOS - was that the powers that be wanted to be able to sell the show to Indonesia.
Do you have any source for that information? That’s the first time I’m hearing them being concerned with selling the show internationally in the 1960s at all.
 
Keye Luke, who played Dr. Cory in "Whom Gods Destroy," was born in China into a family with Chinese heritage. It's entirely plausible that Dr. Cory was from a family with Chinese heritage.
 
The issue - this was only for TOS - was that the powers that be wanted to be able to sell the show to Indonesia.

Welcome to the board.

Please take some time to review the rules for posting here, pinned at the top of this forum, specifically the one regarding old threads.

This one has been dead for over 16 years. Let's let it rest in peace.

Thanks.
 
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