c/o startrek,com, Paramount, and Oscar Kim Bauman, Editor-in-Chief
I was Spock for Halloween. The costume itself was a silly affair, as Halloween costumes tend to be, involving affixing the insignia of Starfleet, the central organization of the “Star Trek” world, to my shirt, reshaping my eyebrows to emulate Spock’s iconic, severe look, and applying pointy latex ears over my own. Yet as I looked in the mirror for the first time as Spock, the moment felt oddly meaningful. For decades, I’d felt a deep connection to the character, and this costume represented a culmination.
For those who don’t know, the character of Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy in the original “Star Trek” series and Zachary Quinto in recent films, is the second-in-command of the starship USS Enterprise. He is known for his cool, thoughtful demeanor. Central to my personal identification with the character, Spock is quite literally biracial, the son of a human mother from Earth and a father from the planet Vulcan. Throughout the original “Star Trek” series, Spock’s background is a frequent plot element. Spock is a representative of Vulcan culture for the Enterprise’s otherwise all human crew. Yet his heritage is often a subject of consternation. In the episode “This Side Of Paradise,” Spock becomes infected with a virus that causes him to lose his emotional control. To snap him back to reality, Captain Kirk (William Shatner) has to make Spock angry. The most cutting things Kirk can think of calling Spock? “Half-breed” and “freak.” In the episode “Amok Time,” Spock’s Vulcan fiancée T’Pring (Arlene Martel) rejects Spock for full-blooded Vulcan Stonn (Lawrence Montaigne). In a scene in the 2009 “Star Trek” movie, we see a young Spock (Jacob Kogan) bullied for his heritage in school on Vulcan. “You’re neither human nor Vulcan, and therefore have no place in this universe,” one of the bullies tells him.
I, myself, am also of mixed heritage; my mother is Korean American, and my father is Ashkenazi Jewish. Growing up, I was often questioned about my heritage. Full-grown adults would lean into my face and ask “What are you,” as if I were an exotic plant or a specimen at the zoo. When I answered, people would refuse to believe me, insisting I didn’t “look” Asian or Jewish enough to be those things. I, like Spock, have been told there isn’t a place for me, that I’d never fit in. I’ve been told I pass as white by some, yet dubbed obviously Asian by others. Certainly, I’ve looked Asian enough to merit the occasional anti-Asian slur by passersby. These experiences were all in liberal, multicultural, 21st-century Manhattan, and those comments came from people of all races. In a household where “Star Trek” was frequently playing in the background, where my father and I went to see the 2009 movie on opening night, even on a subconscious level, I couldn’t help but see myself in Nimoy and Quinto’s character.
Nimoy was also Ashkenazi, the child of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants born and raised in Boston. This Jewish heritage informed his portrayal of Spock; notably, he based the character’s famous Vulcan salute (the hand gesture in which fingers part between the middle and ring finger), on the Priestly Blessing performed by Jewish Kohanim, which Nimoy saw attending synagogue as a child. In his performance, Nimoy also tapped into the minority status he had as a Jew growing up in an Irish area of Boston.
“That alienation was something I learned in Boston,” Nimoy told The Yiddish Book Center in a 2014 interview. “I knew what it meant to be a member of a minority — and in some cases, an outcast minority. So I understood that aspect of the character, and I think it was helpful in playing him.”
While Nimoy was not of Korean, or of any Asian descent, there are nonetheless Asian elements to Spock. A 2016 New York Times article on Spock’s cultural impact by Robert Ito notes the palpable Asian shade that the artist Kip Fulbeck, who is of British and Chinese ancestry, identifies in Spock. This comes both from the character’s physical appearance, between Nimoy’s narrow eyes and straight black bangs (not a far cry from the bowl cut I and many other Asian children sported as kids), as well as the parallels between Vulcan culture and stereotypically East Asian culture: an aptitude for science, a high esteem for logic and reason, and a sense of emotional detachment. Spock, Ito notes, “even had a cheongsam-wearing fiancée,” pointing out the resemblance of T’Pring’s costume to the Chinese dress. While this depiction of the Vulcans may be problematic in its stereotypical foundations, it nonetheless rendered them perceivably Asian in a positive sense by Fulbeck, myself, and likely many others. Spock and his fellow Vulcans weren’t really Asian, but they weren’t not Asian. Kind of like us.
Fulbeck and I are far from the first mixed-race people to identify with Spock. Indeed, this recognition of our own multiracial selves in Nimoy’s character dates back to the original series’s airing in the 1960s. In 1968, the teen pop culture magazine FaVE! published a letter from a young girl, addressed to Spock, who saw parallels between the character and her own situation.
“I know that you are half Vulcan and half human and you have suffered because of this,” she wrote. “My mother is Negro and my father is white and I am told this makes me a half-breed…. The Negroes don’t like me because I don’t look like them. The white kids don’t like me because I don’t exactly look like one of them either.”
Nimoy became aware of the letter and wrote one in reply for the same magazine, offering words of comfort and affirming Spock as a multiracial role model.
“Spock learned he could save himself from letting prejudice get him down,” Nimoy wrote. “He could do this by really understanding himself and knowing his own value as a person. He found he was equal to anyone who might try to put him down — equal in his own unique way…You can do this too, if you realize the difference between popularity and true greatness.”
In a segment on the NPR show All Things Considered memorializing Nimoy following his death in 2015, host Arun Rath, who is of Anglo-Indian descent, explained the identification he felt with Spock as a child.
“Spock was the first biracial character I’d ever encountered in popular culture. And so weird as it may sound, Spock was a role model for me,” Rath said. “Watching him as a kid, I knew he understood the weird, wonderful, and awkward space mixed-race, mixed-culture individuals inhabit. I promised myself long ago that if I ever met or interviewed Mr. Nimoy, I would thank him for what that meant to me as a boy.”
Writing for NPR’s Code Switch in a 2015 piece on Spock’s legacy also written after Nimoy’s death, Steve Haruch wrote that he, too, identified with Spock. Although Haruch, a Korean adoptee, is not mixed-race himself, he nonetheless connected to Spock’s embodiment of a multicultural upbringing. While, obviously, they cannot be conflated, I’ve also found in my personal life that mixed-race Asians, myself included, often have very similar sentiments and experiences to Asian adoptees.
“Spock was Otherness personified — and dignified,” Haruch wrote.
That last aspect, Spock’s steadfast cool and dignity, his quiet confidence in his capabilities and refusal to bend to what others think, is central to why he was so important to me, Fulbeck, Rath, Haruch, the girl in FaVE!, and so many others. While obviously transposed to a fictional setting, Spock’s tribulations deeply resemble those of many real-world multiracial individuals. Throughout my life, whenever I’ve felt down or that I didn’t belong, as silly as it might sound, I’ve looked to Spock. In him, I saw myself: a tall, skinny, black-haired guy, a mix of Jewish and Asian cultures, and above all, someone proud of his heritage, refusing to be denigrated or have the terms of his identity dictated by anyone else. To all my fellow Vulcan half-breeds, as Spock might say, live long and prosper.
Oscar Kim Bauman is a member of the class of 2023 and can be reached at obauman@wesleyan.edu