A Young Lady
A young lady heads home down a street from her school. The road is dusty, yet well built, vibrant, and clean. Signs in English, French, and Vietnamese line the streets, advertising wares and businesses. Alongside this lady, also going home, are schoolkids and fellow classmates also walking to their homes, or perhaps after-school studies. Some live far, and take their bicycles. Or, if they are affluent, they sit in a privately hired bicycle rickshaw. There is an underlying tension but it is peaceful enough for citizens to live normally, and children to run carefree in the daytime.
After all, there is a war raging on in the rainforests north of here, and the eventual target of the enemy force is here: the city of Saigon.
It is early 1966, or thereabouts. The Vietnam War had yet to reach its peak. The day is peaceful, with cars, transports, and military vehicles milling about. The night is uncertain, with fears of hearing any strange digging noises underneath the soil, and the possibility of potholes and explosive devices.
The lady arrives home. It is a decent place, and the war is far away. In the corner is one of the country’s first television sets, introduced a few years ago. It is only in black and white. She doesn’t turn it on – she prefers to read and study. But she hears things.
In the streets, she can hear other people her age yelling. Once a week, at around the same time, there is a commotion – not to mention the bizarre things they say during the week. The kids playing in the streets stop and gather around.
“Did you see the donkey-ear show last week? It was so cool!“
“Hey, hey, do you know someone with a TV in their house?“
“I do! Hey, it’s nearly time! Let’s go watch the show with the donkey-ear man!“
If the lady turned on the television at this point, she wouldn’t understand a thing. After all, virtually everything on that particular dial was in English. That channel was for the Americans, and no one could speak their language. At best, a well-studied South Vietnamese student might speak French.
In fact, no one at the time even knew the name of the show. They only knew it as, “The Show with the Donkey-Eared Man“.
But if she did, and if she understood, then perhaps this connection – this lost story in history – would be known sooner.
A Young Man
A young man heads home from his school. The road that his bus takes is dusty, yet well built, vibrant, and clean. Signs in English, French, and Vietnamese line the streets advertising their wares. The city of Saigon is peaceful, but there is a light tension in the air. In the future, when he is of age, he may have a fate that takes him north, to where the battles are.
But for now, he takes a detour. His cousin has a television set, and it’s a Tuesday afternoon. It’s somewhere in early 1966, or thereabouts. He is excited – earlier, perhaps weeks or months ago, he saw the most wonderful film at the cinémathèque. He didn’t understand everything, of course – but there are subtitles to help – but it was about a submarine shrinking down and diving into the blood vessels of a human body. He’s fascinated by these fantastic stories of future technology.
“It’s a special reel,” his cousin tells him. “They sent it directly.”
But this part is a digression. On this Tuesday afternoon, he enters his relative’s home and heads to the TV room. It’s a small screen, about 19 inches, but the wooden cabinet it’s built inside is large. It’s a good, popular brand – a National. He opens the cabinet doors that reveals the glass of the cathode ray tube, and turns the dial to the frequency of the nearby US Army’s television tower: Channel 11.
He doesn’t understand a thing, and the images are monochrome. After all, he’s still in school and doesn’t know a lick of English. But the characters travel around the world – many worlds, in fact, flying to exotic places in a mobile base and speaking into their watches to communicate impossible distances. It excites him, and the images stay in the mind. Among this motley crew is a strange man with donkey ears, so everyone refers to the show as the “Show with the Donkey-Eared Man“. He watches it every single week, in early to mid-1966.
He never learns the name of the show, for sixty years. It was a brief couple of months after all, and things got… busy, later. Until it comes up again in a conversation with his child about solar eclipses.
If he did know English back then, and understood, then he would have known that the words at the beginning of each episode were these:
“Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise.“
The First Trekkie
This is a small, true story about my parents. It fascinated me when I first heard it, but it makes things rather awkward when I use a Japanese pen name online. It sorta just ended up that way.
When talking about the great US solar eclipse of April 8, 2024, my dad mentioned his fascination with a show he saw as a child, but I, being a bit of a sci-fi nerd, still couldn’t quite figure out what it was. He said there were all sorts of technologies that have now become real, that there was a man with pointy ears, and they spoke into their watches. He never figured out what that show was, and after racking my brain all day, I eventually realised that it was the first, most obvious choice: He saw Star Trek as a child in South Vietnam.
The stumbling point that got me was the watch communicator – only the movie version used wristwatches, but then I eventually realised that at that time, people would have compared the Star Trek communicators to pocket watches. Of course, it all became clear in the end after opening a Youtube video that night.
Given how long ago it was, it’s hard to pinpoint a date, but we’re certain that Star Trek: The Original Series aired in South Vietnam in late 1965 or early-to-mid 1966. Which doesn’t make total sense, since the show officially aired in the United States in late 1966.
But this has a simple explanation, albeit merely a (very plausible) conjecture: The US Army would have had a habit of recieving tapes of shows weeks, if not months before it officially aired in the US itself. Aside from increasing morale, a side benefit of this is that soldiers writing home could write to their kids about the shows currently on TV, taking into account the delivery time delays.
Of course, there was no reason to encrypt these things, and Saigon and South Vietnam in general was being supported by the US Army. There were all types of schools held by the Americans, including English classes, so letting schoolkids see a slice of contemporary US culture with what was on television at the time was a perk. It was apparently full of all sorts of US programming, such as The Wild Wild West, various Westerns and European TV shows, and whatever Charles Bronson was doing at the time.
After discussing this strange story for several days and learning the surrounding details, I learned that the entire Saigon population was exposed to Star Trek and its pioneering concepts, since it was within range of the US Army’s base antenna. Yet, no one really knew what the show even was. Every Saigon citizen just called it “The Donkey-Eared Show”, since the most obvious and easiest way to describe it was to refer to Spock’s physical appearance. I found it fascinating and mildly hilarious, given that Spock, the most intelligent character, was innocently given a nickname associated with an animal that was considered dumb.
But of course, the peace and unrestricted media access wouldn’t last for more than a few years afterward.
After some attempt at online research, I couldn’t find anything at all about Star Trek in South Vietnam. This particular bit of history about Star Trek’s role during the Vietnam War isn’t publicly known. Maybe I didn’t try hard enough, or it’s too esoteric. After all, only a resident of Saigon during these few years would be exposed to this. As a result, I felt it was worth sharing, even though it’s a bit personal.
I must concede, however, that it’s not totally clear if Star Trek unofficially aired in South Vietnam before it was broadcast in the US proper – perhaps it was after. But it’s very plausible, and the window of when these events occured is quite narrow, according to my discussions. So I imagine this to be true, and this leads to a fun, fascinating claim:
My father, along with all the children and half of Saigon’s Vietnamese citizenry, were the first, original trekkies.
Eiri Sanada 