Good Acting: Still Racist?
August 27, 2007
“What’s hoppinin’ hot stuff?” is actor Gedde Watanabe’s opening line as he hangs upside down from a bunk bed, playing foreign exchange student Long Duk Dong in John Hughes’ 1984 movie Sixteen Candles. The film was shown in July at Dolores Park in San Francisco and raised concerns about negative stereotyping.
As Dong sits at the dinner table with his shiny, oiled hair, he eats with the opposite ends of the fork and spoon, holding both utensils in one hand as if they were chopsticks. The Caucasian children laugh at him and his grammar and pronunciation mistakes. After Dong says, “I love a visiting with gronma on gronpa and riteen letters to parents, and pushing lawn mowing machine so gronpa’s hyena don’t get disturbed,” the insolent son in the film, who was about nine years old, chuckles and corrects him saying, “Hernia.” A gong sounds at the beginning and at the end of Dong’s scenes as traditional Asian music is played at times in the background.
With the racial slur “Chinaman” thrown left and right in the movie, it is difficult for Chinese Americans in particular not to take offense to this movie.
Media Action Network for Asian Americans founding president, Guy Aoki, believes Long Duk Dong is one of the most infamous Asian characters in the history of motion pictures. “Time and time again, I’ve heard of Asian Americans — particularly Asian American men — who went to see this film and wanted to disappear into their seat because they feared everyone would think of them as backward and as embarrassing as the character,” Aoki said. “Everyone in the film laughed at Dong, not with him.”
Philip W. Chung, playwright and AsianWeek columnist, said: “Sixteen Candles came out when I was in junior high at a mostly white suburban school, and it did have an effect on me because there were so few positive Asian male portrayals, and to be defined by an image like this was not the best thing.” He now acknowledges the humor of it and calls Watanabe’s performance “actually brilliant in terms of comedic acting. There’s a reason that character is still iconic — Gedde’s comedic skills are as good as anyone else’s.”
Chung says the offensiveness of such a character is diminished by the Daniel Dae Kims, the John Chos, the Masi Okas and the Jackie Chans — diverse actors who balance out a stereotypical role.
Keith Kamisugi, director of communications at the Equal Justice Society, said: “The most unfortunate aspect about the movie was that an Asian American actor made a personal choice to portray such a racially offensive role. I wouldn’t buy it on DVD or watch it again.”
Aoki said while the average white person can looked back fondly on the film, “Asian Americans have a very different perspective on it. It’s like Birth of a Nation: it’s considered one of the best movies ever made, but historians note it was a racist film, which made the Ku Klux Klan look like heroes and blacks look inferior to whites.”
In 2004, Charlie Lustman, owner of the Silent Movie Theater in Hollywood, canceled a screening of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation after the NAACP threatened to picket. Aoki believes that there should have been a public discussion before screening Sixteen Candles to avoid the risk of condoning racist portrayals, and that showing the film in such a highly Asian populated area was insulting.
According to Aoki, Hughes later admitted Dong’s character was a bad idea. Actor George Takei had told Aoki that Dong’s inclusion did serious damage to an otherwise warm-hearted film.
Tin Le, Webmaster for saigon.com, viet.net and other Vietnamese Web sites, said the character would be different had the movie been filmed today. “Without defending it, for the time that it was produced, [the] producer did not know any better,” Le said. “There is more sensitivity now.”
San Francisco Neighborhood Theater Foundation Board of Directors
- Alfonso G. Felder, vice president of administration for the San Francisco Giants
- Jack Bair, senior vice president and general counsel of the San Francisco Giants
- Andrew Roth, sound designer
- Meagan Levitan, San Francisco government relations consultant and member of the San Francisco Democratic Central Committee
- Denise La Pointe, principal of LaPointe & Associates, a government advocacy and public affairs firm in San Francisco
- Christine Pelosi, grassroots strategist and attorney
- Rachel Herbert, proprietor of the Dolores Park Café
- Katherine Petrin, architectural historian at Architectural Resources Group
- R. James Slaughter, attorney with the San Francisco law firm Keker & Van Nest LLP
- Ned Segal, vice president in Investment Banking at Goldman Sachs
The San Francisco Neighborhood Theater Foundation, sponsor of Film Night in the Park 2007, can be reached at afelder@sfntf.org or (415) 465-FILM.
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The Phil Chung quotes were the best–nicely balanced and good perspective. Anyone who knows Aoki knows he’s a broken record who is constantly trying to appropriate the black experience out of context and hates all depictions of Asians unless they’re supercool Sansei James Bonds or unless the producers let him read the script first. Sixteen Candles is the Asian Birth of a Nation?! Give me a break. Yes, the satire is more vicious and less sensitive than it would be if the film were made today, but Dong parties down and scores with a white girl and he’s an accepted member of the tribe by the end. A Birth of a Nation type non-redeeming “other” he is not.