John Hughes films as a rule haven’t aged nicely — simply ask Molly Ringwald about Breakfast Membership. However few characters are extra problematic than Lengthy Duk Dong, the sexy Asian trade scholar in Sixteen Candles performed by Gedde Watanabe. (Cue GONG sound impact.)
As a younger actor, Watanabe was simply glad to get the work, he advised PEOPLE. “Frankly I used to be like, it is a good job, and I’m going to receives a commission extra doing one week on this film that I did for all of the years I used to be within the theater.”
Did Watanabe have second ideas about enjoying such a stereotypical character? “It did not actually happen to me that it was a stereotype as a result of there wasn’t actually something on the market for Asian actors on the time,” he says. “It was simply so scarce. So I didn’t suppose it was stereotypical or racist. Isn’t that bizarre?”
For higher or worse, there might have been much more Dong. And Hughes being Hughes, it will have concerned much more racial stereotypes with Dong performing a rap (circa mid-Eighties) on the college dance. “It went one thing like, ‘I like Coca-Cola, woman skate curler, rock ’n’ rolla,” Watanabe says within the e book You Couldn’t Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Affect on a Technology. “By some means, I sneak behind the rostrum within the health club. I get everyone dancing. I used to be actually disillusioned that they didn’t use it.”
Nowadays, Watanabe admits he wasn’t utterly blind to the character’s potential offensiveness. “I bear in mind the film utilizing the phrase ‘Chinaman,’ and even then I used to be like, ‘Oh, that’s not nice,’” he says. “However you even have to recollect in that time period, folks nonetheless needed to be educated about parameters, what the alarm bells had been when it got here to being offensive.”
Watanabe, who was born in Utah, acquired the position by studying a good friend’s heavy accent. As a result of he stayed in character, Hughes had no concept that Watanabe didn’t actually speak like Dong till he lastly got here clear throughout a desk learn. “(Hughes) completely burst out laughing,” he says. “He was in shock.”
The actor lastly realized the impression of the character when he was approached years later on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork. “This Asian lady got here as much as me and mentioned, ‘How might you try this?’ She was actually upset over the film,” Watanabe says in You Couldn’t Ignore Me. “Again then I didn’t perceive as a lot as I do now. I used to be just a little bit ignorant, too, as a result of I grew up in Utah. I had a really unusual upbringing the place I didn’t expertise that a lot racism. I simply thought I used to be part of everyone else.”
Watanabe advised PEOPLE that he believes Hughes at the least performed in opposition to stereotypes when Dong acquired an attractive American girlfriend. “That was actually uncommon in a way, for the Asian character to get the lady and occasion and be in bliss like that.”
