Ancient Web: Roger Tang's University Homepage Mixed Theatre with Star Trek

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Roger Tang's University of Washington homepage announces that it is under construction, gives an email address, and explains which person in the photograph is him. The photo caption clarifies that his hair used to be dark.

Visit Roger Tang's homepage.

A short list of interests follows: Asian American theater, comic books, Star Trek, a management association, and trivia. There is a photograph from the twentieth-anniversary celebration of Northwest Asian American Theatre with playwright David Henry Hwang and other theater colleagues. Nothing on the page tries to turn these subjects into a coherent business category. They belong together because Tang belongs to all of them.

The original address printed at the bottom is a University of Washington tilde page, weber.u.washington.edu/~gwangung/. The page now survives under the institution's staff.washington.edu host, preserving the older personal address as part of the artifact.

A username that comes with its own footnote

The small Trivia page explains 'Gwangung.' Tang identifies it as a figure in Cantonese opera and Asian American cultural storytelling, a name he encountered through the plays of David Henry Hwang. He recalls doing the lighting for a 1980 Stanford Asian American Theatre Project production of Hwang's F.O.B., with broomsticks serving as makeshift lighting supports.

That is an unusually evocative biography to find behind a single link marked 'Trivia, Etc.' A handle reveals personal history, theater history, and something about the early web's habit of explaining names rather than choosing them for search-engine performance.

Tang's Asian American Theatre Revue identifies him as a long-serving producer and playwright and traces its work covering the theater community back to the early 1990s. Period 1996 Usenet posts also carry his University of Washington email and a signature identifying him with Asian American theater work. Those dated traces support the historical setting even though the homepage itself gives no creation date.

The Star Trek link is not currently dependable, and the homepage is too sparse to reconstruct an entire lost website. Its value is precisely this little surviving self-portrait: theater, fandom, a public email address, and the human story behind a pseudonym.

Explore the old homepage and why Roger called himself Gwangung.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.