Garrett Wang says one of the reasons he got into acting was to chip away at racism and to be a role model for other Asian-Americans
Asian-American Garrett Wang says he didn’t face much discrimination during his time portraying Ensign Harry Kim, a crew member on Star Trek: Voyager — not because the public was accepting of his race, but because fans were up in arms about the first woman portraying the captain of a ship as a lead character in the Star Trek universe.
It was Kate Mulgrew, who played Captain Kathryn Janeway, who got the brunt of Star Trek fans’ displeasure. “She would get hate mail, with some even threatening to come to town and kill the cast and crew,” says Wang, whose parents immigrated from Taiwan in the 1960s. “I hardly got any attention, showing me that gender bias is even more ingrained than racial bias.”
He says that, until the last decade or so, you would see only one major Asian role a decade in Hollywood. George Takai, who is Japanese-American and played the helmsman on the original Star Trek series in the 1960s, was one of the first. But people’s ignorance of differences between Asian cultures came as a surprise. At one point, he was encouraging a studio executive to include a Chinese character in an upcoming show. “But we have you,” the executive said.
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