One of the great joys of the theme month is getting to people I might not have ordinarily but who are absolutely ideal for the purposes of the column. Rosalind Chao has a family history that makes her ideal even if she hadn’t played three roles that were each important in different ways to me. And she’s simply not talked about the way her assorted costars are—well, she’s shared the screen with some serious heavy-hitters, though it’s really just as well I didn’t use her when I wrote about M*A*S*H, given how hard it was to fill the women of Deep Space Nine.
First off, Rosalind Chao was born in Anaheim. Her parents owned Chao’s Chinese and American Restaurant—across the street from Disneyland. They encouraged their daughter to pursue acting; as a child, she was in a Peking opera traveling company based in California; during the summer, she went to Taiwan to study acting. She played James Hong’s daughter on an I’m Sure Not Racist episode of Here’s Lucy called “Lucy the Laundress.” She even worked at Disneyland as an international tour guide. She went to USC and studied journalism, deciding she didn’t want to act. Then, while working as an intern at a radio station, she changed her mind.
After a few years of the Standard TV Career, plus a few outliers (The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island?), she got the role that would first introduce her to me—and millions of other Americans, more than had watched any TV episode in history. There’s a lot going on in “Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen,” but the story of Soon-Lee brings home that, while the Americans would be going home and back to their normal lives, untold numbers of Koreans found things so disrupted there would be no “normal” life for some time to come. I’m pretty sure I even watched some AfterM*A*S*H, when it was new.
She then went back to the Standard TV Career, plus a few outliers (two episodes of Max Headroom?) before Star Trek came calling. It seems she was being considered for Tasha Yar, originally. However, at roughly the same time as she was cast as Keiko Ishikawa, she was also cast in The Joy Luck Club as Rose Hsu. She was also pregnant with her first child. But she did the movie, which was something that was really important to her, and spent time with her child, and then Keiko married Miles O’Brien and eventually moved to a space station instead of the Enterprise, and Chao chose not to be a regular because she wanted to continue to spend time with her children.
As we’ve discussed before, there is a lot of room to cover people who did episodes of The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo and Chicago Hope and things. We need them in the industry, and we need to talk about them here when there are opportunities to do so. It would be hard to write about no one but people like that, but they drive pop culture in ways we don’t remember. However, it’s also true that Rosalind Chao was fairly easy for me to write about. Disneyland and M*A*S*H and Star Trek and The Joy Luck Club? How had I not gotten to her yet?
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