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.

"[1] He said that "some time" after the film appeared in theaters, he learned how many people were upset about his character, recalling an experience at the Metropolitan Museum of Art when an Asian woman came up to him to complain about his portrayal.

[8] 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).

"[9] 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.

Critics noted that the character embodied numerous negative stereotypes, with his exaggerated accent, comedic incompetence, and gong-accompanied entrances contributing to a lasting cultural legacy of mockery for Asian-American men.

Martin Wong and Eric Nakamura, co-founders of Giant Robot magazine, highlighted how "The Donger" became a common source of ridicule for Asian-American students during the 1980s, replacing earlier stereotypes like Bruce Lee with a more demeaning caricature.

[1] 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.

NPR's Kat Chow highlighted how the character reinforced tropes of Asian men as socially awkward, sexually inept, and perpetually foreign, further emphasizing the harm caused by such portrayals.

Academic perspectives, such as those of Kent Ono and Vincent Pham, criticized the film's comedic framing of Long Duk Dong's gender and sexuality as aberrant, which contributed to the feminization of Asian-American men.

The Hughes teen is white, suburban, and normatively middle-class... non-white characters appear in the background or are crass caricatures like Sixteen Candles' Long Duk Dong (Gedde Watanabe).

"[1] In the TV series Fresh Off the Boat episode "Good Morning Orlando", in 2015, the specter of Long Duk Dong looms over Louis as he struggles with the responsibility of representing Chinese culture on a local talk show without perpetuating stereotypes.