Star Trek has become a integral piece of American popular culture, especially in regards to science fiction. Because it’s such a long running television show with multiple spin-offs, movies, and remakes, it has a well-established place in the cannon of science fiction. It’s fascinating to examine the portrayal of race in world of Star Trek. Despite a mostly white cast, the show is well-known for engaging with social issues, including issues of racism. The show is notable for airing television’s first ever interracial kiss during its third season in 1968.

For the purposes of this post, I decided to take a look at George Takei and the character of Sulu. The Starship Enterprise is supposed to be a metaphor for “spaceship Earth”, and Sulu is intended to be a pan-asian character, essentially representing all of Asia. The name Sulu is intentionally detached from common Asian surnames because of their connotations with specific nationalities. Star Trek fell prey to many of the flaws of multiculturalism, including representing a mostly white future with token POC characters, and yet, it was still one of the most progressive shows on television at the time.  During the 1960s, Sulu was one of the few Asian characters on television, and certainly the character least prone to relying on racist stereotypes. In interviews Takei describes how lucky he was to have landed the role of an Asian character that wasn’t perpetuating stereotypes, “ I knew this character was a breakthrough role, certainly for me as an individual actor but also for the image of an Asian character: no accent, a member of the elite leadership team. I was supposed to be the best helmsman in the Starfleet, No. 1 graduate in the Starfleet Academy. At that time there was the horrible stereotype about Asians being bad drivers. I was the best driver in the galaxy! So many young Asian Americans came up to me then—and still do today, although they’re not that young anymore—to tell me that seeing me on their television screen made them feel so proud.” (Source)

Growing up in LA, Takei and his family were interned in a Japanese American concentration camp during WWII. Takei has gone on to become an outspoken advocate for both the Asian American community and the LGBTQ community. In 2012 he created and starred in a musical about Japanese American internment called Allegiance.
In the video below, Takei talks about his experience with internment:

Click here to view the embedded video.

“I went to school behind those barbed wire fences. And we started every morning with the pledged of allegience to the flag. I mean, i could see the barbed wire fences and the sentry towers and machine guns right outside the schoolhouse window as we recited the words, ‘with liberty and justice for all’ ”  – George Takei on Japanese internment

 Takei was one of the few prominent Asian Americans to lobby for reparations for interned Americans whose property and goods were taken away when they were put in the camps. 

Monk Xing Hao walks along a boardwalk in Texas. He points excitedly at the tall prairie grass, shouting, “This gives you a great sense of the American West!”. The following scene positions Monk Xing Hao and Monk De Shan in front of the Houston Space Center. They practice Shaolin kung fu, wearing their traditional monks clothing while a rocketship looms in the distance. The narrator says, ”Like many pioneers of the Old West, Monks Xing Hao and De Shan have come to look for gold. They are Kung Fu brothers with a common goal of making a Kung Fu homestead in Texas”.

This sequence of images was fascinating to me. The immigrant journey of the two monks is told through the narrative of the Great Frontier, while being juxtaposed over the image of the rocket ship. Looking back at Orientals, one can see why invoking the Frontier narrative is particularly jarring, “God’s Free Soil did not have space for the Chinese, whose presence disrupted the mission into the wilderness” (Lee 50). The Chinese were seen as a pollutant, interrupting the Eden of the West and white man’s advancement into the “wilderness”. Shaolin Ulysses is recalling that same narrative, but putting the Chinese monks in the position of white frontiersmen. An initial reading suggests that the background image of the rocket speaks to the monks’ cultural displacement — their traditional martial arts are at odds with the technologically advanced American culture. It’s possible that this was the director’s intent, yet another reading lies beneath the surface. NASA often refers to outer space as the “New Frontier”, or “Last Frontier”, calling forth the same narratives the narrator uses to describe the monk’s experience. The rocket serves as a poignant symbol for American imperialism, where even the “Great Frontier” of space is not free from colonialism.

“The Wrath of Fu Manchu” by Sax Rohmer

Dr. Fu Manchu is the 1913 creation of prolific English novelist, Sax Rohmer. Dr. Fu Manchu forever twined the mad scientist iconography with the figure of the Asian Other. Situated within its historical context, Rohmer plays off of white fears of the “yellow peril”. Significantly, 1903 marked the end of the Russo-Japanese War, the first time an Asian nation defeated a European power. Suddenly Western conceptions of Asia had to be reconfigured with Asia emerging as a geographic and cultural location  from which to draw on for futuristic and or alternate temporalities.

Dr. Fu Manchu is a stereotypical Oriental fiend. His genius with dark sciences, biological, and chemical posit him as a threat to Western civilization. The stories of Fu Manchu popularized the law abiding West vs. the evil Orient as an archetype in movies, books, radio, and comic books.