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The mystery of Gene Roddenberry's wartime friend "Khan Noonien Singh" (startrek.website)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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SNW S2 EP3 piqued my curiosity in who this character was based off of and so I did a very basic search. I already knew Roddenberry named Khan and Dr. Noonian Soong that way to try to get the attention of his friend, but seems like the friend never noticed and reached out.

My current search yielded a VERY comprehensive post on R3dd!t from 2020 where the OOP and commenters came up with some possible iterations:

-Kim Noonien Singh

-Kim Noonien Wang

-Kim Ngyuen Singh

-Kim Noonan Singh

Unfortunately, the trail seems to have run cold as the OOP has not updated on any new leads and the last comment in that thread is a year ago.

Do you think we are ever going to be able to find out who the real life "Khan Noonien Singh" is/was?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I've always been a little unconvinced about this particular story. Memory Alpha seems to suggest "Kim Noonian Wang": https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Khan_Noonien_Singh#Background_information

But, I dunno... it seems like a little bit of an odd way to reach out to an old friend. This friend was supposed to be Chinese... if so, why give him the additional decidedly un-Chinese names of Khan and Singh (and in more prominent positions)?

There's also an odd pan-Asian quality to the name: Khan is a South Asian name, usually given to Muslim men; Noonien is apparently supposed to be Chinese; and Singh is usually associated with members of the Sikh faith.

This calls to mind the origin of Sulu's name: the Sulu Sea, apparently so named because Roddenberry wanted Sulu to represent all of Asia.

In both cases, we have this peculiar situation of various Asian backgrounds being smooshed together into a single character. Now, don't get me wrong, there are lots of people with mixed Asian backgrounds, so it's not that either Sulu or Khan are impossible. But... I dunno. It just makes me think that Roddenberry came up with a cool-sounding name and then figured out an impossible-to-prove backstory to provide for it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

I guess we should take a step back, then to determine whether this as a person existed. If the person as an individual didn't, then perhaps it was a group of buddies named Kim, Nyguen, and Singh. Probably a stretch, though.

I'm just wondering if there are no photographs or any other of Roddenberry's war buddies can corroborated this guy's existence. Should he also not have shared wartime stories with his children and wife? AFAIK, they haven't shared any information but it's also possible that no one had asked them.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

One thought just occurred to me... let's say "Khan Noonien Singh" as a real person was made up because Roddenberry just didn't want to let the execs win. Why would he then name Dr. Soong what he did in TNG? He couldn't have liked those strings of syllables that much...?