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." Legacy as Asian caricature 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." In addition to being called "Donger", the students were taunted with quotes of the character's lines in poor English such as "Oh, sexy girlfriend." 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