AAPI Month Highlights upcoming documentary “What’s Wrong with Dong?”

A new documentary highlighting the portrayal of Asians in Hollywood is set to be released later this year. What’s Wrong with Dong? documents the history of Hollywood’s cringeworthy depictions of characters from East Asian descent, by riding on the coattails of success of the 2017 documentary The Problem with Apu. While Apu was a cartoon character in The Simpsons donning a South Asian accent and portrayed by a white actor, Dong (aka Long Duk Dong) was an actual real life character in John Hughes 1984 coming of age film Sixteen Candles. Geddy Watanabe played “The Donger” with a thick accent although he naturally spoke without an Asian accent having been born and raised in Utah.

Just as standup comedian, Hari Kondobolu, produced and directed the Apu documentary, another standup comedian, Bobby Lee, produced and directed Dong. Lee, along with other actors interviewed in the documentary such as Ken Jeong and John Cho speak of the bullying and racial injustices they endured growing up. However, Watanabe shows little remorse at playing the character who perpetuated emasculating stereotypes of Asian males. “I was born with some talent for the theatre, and in the time of Reagan when good paying middle class jobs were disappearing, I was happy to take any job to be able to put food on the table,” Watanabe said. “If they would have offered to pay me to jump out of a car naked and show my dong, I would have readily taken that gig just to be able to put my kids through college. rather than taking any two-bit roles throughout my career.”

“If it weren’t for Long Duk Dong, then I would never have gotten beaten up in high school,” Bobby Lee quips at the start of the film. “Then again if I hadn’t gotten beaten up, then I wouldn’t have gotten into heavy drugs which gave me courage to act and do crazy things like playing Connie Chung and Kim Jong-Il on MadTV.”

Actor / Comedian Ken Jeong added, “In the Hangover, in playing Leslie Chow, I used Long Duk Dong as inspiration. I imagined a high school foreign exchange student who was picked on so much when he came to America that he made revenge his lifelong mission and eventually evolved into a mastermind crime lord like Chow.”

John Cho, who now commands leading roles on the big screen, believed in changing the Hollywood system from within. His famous roles in American Pie as MILF Guy #2 and as Harold in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, portrayed a coolness about being Asian. “Although I would have liked to have been the one who banged Stiffler’s Mom, since I first discovered her glamor shot during the party scene, I suppose that in 1999 Hollywood wasn’t ready for an Asian male character to orgasm on the silver screen.” Cho humbly bragged, “But the rumors are true that Jennifer (Coolidge) and I did have a hot fling during filming. It was during the summer of 1998 and I fondly refer to that summer as the summer we did 69.”

With the 40th anniversary of Sixteen Candles initial release coming up in 2024, Watanabe reveals a bombshell that he was seeking to reprise his despised character of Long Duk Dong. He is seeking to make amends to his fellow Asian male actors for indirectly inflicting undue prejudice by portraying an updated persona of Dong. The working title of the film is called, Sixty Candles, and takes place in the present day, when Dong is a successful businessman about to turn 60 years old. “Dong may have made his fortune in semiconductors, fast food restaurants, on-line shoes, internet search, fitness tech or organized crime,” Watanabe states. “There are just so many storylines of immigrant success stories to choose from that we’ll have to focus on just a few.”

Watanabe added that he would like to “pay it forward” by casting many younger Asian and multi-racial Asian actors and artists to be a part of the film including Awkwafina, Bowen Yang, Jimmy O Yang, Joel Kim Booster, Ross Butler, Ashley Park, Olivia Rodrigo and Alan Kim. He is also hoping to get Anthony Michael Hall and Molly Ringwald to reprise their characters who grow up to be a real farmer and a “drunk mother in the Caribbean.”

No comment has been made by the Hughe family about the documentary or the long overdue film sequel idea.