"Сегіз қыздан туған күндік" фильміндегі Лонг Дюк Донг кейіпкерінің талқылануы

Fictional character in Sixteen Candles

Long Duk Dong is a fictional character who appears in Sixteen Candles, a 1984 American coming of age comedy film written and directed by John Hughes. Played by Japanese American actor Gedde Watanabe, the character is a Chinese foreign exchange student and a supporting character in the film set at a US suburban high school. The character has been called an offensive stereotype of Asian people.

Actor Gedde Watanabe, a Japanese American from Ogden, Utah, was cast as Long Duk Dong in what was "his big Hollywood break". He auditioned for casting director Jackie Burch in character, convincing her that he was from Korea and barely spoke English. Since Burch used to teach deaf people, she tried to use sign language with him before he revealed that he was born in Ogden, Utah. Watanabe said some sequences with Long Duk Dong were left out of the final cut of the movie including a scene with him and his love interest in bed smoking and a rap performance at the school dance which got everyone dancing. Watanabe said the rap went something like: 'I like Coca Cola, lady skate roller, rock 'n' rolla'". Watanabe expressed his hope that Universal would bring back Long Duk Dong's rap in a future release of the film. Watanabe said he had "a great experience" making Sixteen Candles but recognized in retrospect that he was "a bit naive" about his role. He said, "I was making people laugh. I didn't realize how it was going to affect people."

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times gave the film a positive review and said of the character, "There are a lot of effective performances in this movie, including Gedde Watanabe as the exchange student (he elevates his role from a potentially offensive stereotype to high comedy)." Janet Maslin, writing for The New York Times, said, "When the movie goes too far, as it does with a stupid subplot about a sex crazed Oriental exchange student or a running gag about a young woman in a body brace, at least it manages to bound back relatively soon thereafter."

Alison MacAdam wrote in NPR in 2008, "To some viewers, [Long Duk Dong] represents one of the most offensive Asian stereotypes Hollywood ever gave America." When the film came out in 1984, several Asian American groups condemned the character "as stereotypical, racist and part of a long history of Hollywood's offensive depictions of Asian men". In 2011, Susannah Gora, writing about the 1980s films of John Hughes, said, "The only significant non white character in any of these films is also the basest caricature of all: Long Duk Dong A heightened national sense of cultural sensitivity (or political correctness, depending on how you look at it) swept America and the movie studios in the early nineties, and so the 1980s were, in many ways, the last moment when racially questionable jokes regularly found their place in mainstream comedies." Actress Molly Ringwald, who starred in Sixteen Candles, wrote in 2018 that in the film, "Long Duk Dong is a grotesque stereotype." The co founders of the Asian American popular culture magazine Giant Robot, Martin Wong and Eric Nakamura, said before Sixteen Candles, students of Asian descent in the United States were often nicknamed "Bruce Lee". After Sixteen Candles, they were nicknamed "Donger" after Long Duk Dong. Wong said, "If you're being called Long Duk Dong, you're comic relief amongst a sea of people unlike you." Nakamura said, "You're being portrayed as a guy who just came off a boat and who's out of control. It's like every bad stereotype possible, loaded into one character." Of Dong's love interest who is physically larger than him, Kent Ono and Vincent Pham write in Asian Americans And The Media, "The gender roles are switched. While this representation aims to provide comic relief, it both feminizes Asian American men and simultaneously constructs alternative gender and sexuality as aberrant." NPR's Kat Chow said, "To be sure, there's nothing wrong with swapping gender roles, on screen or off. What's icky about this relationship is how the filmmakers present it Dong's femininity makes him weak, and we're meant to laugh at this." In the 2007 book Don't You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes, Long Duk Dong is described as defying stereotypes, noting that "uberdork Long Duk Dong proves himself to be a party animal" and "by the nights end the school's entire social strata will have turned upside down" with Samantha, the freshman geek, and also foreign exchange student Long Duk Dong finding romantic and social success. Gedde Watanabe commented that perhaps John Hughes thought he was breaking a stereotype with the character because Long Duk Dong was not the stereotypical nice studious Asian boy and was instead interested in going out and partying. A 1980s cover band based in Lexington, Kentucky calls itself Long Duk Dong after the character. Band founder Shaun Justice said, "It's odd that a character that's not a primary character would have so much notability. But that one certainly did."