Mixed-Teen Candles: Representations of Multiracial Asian American Students and Their Families After Long Duk Dong

While the 1984 film Sixteen Candles is a coming-of-age story that follows the character of newly sixteen-year-old Samantha, it may be equally remembered for Gedde Watanabe’s trope-laden portrayal of Long Duk Dong, the “very weird Chinese guy” who is living in the United States with Samantha’s grandparents as an international exchange student. Reflecting on his character in a 2014 interview, Watanabe imagines Long Duk Dong has gone on to father eight or nine multiracial children. Forty years after Sixteen Candles debuted, there has been a rise in the representation of multiracial Asian American characters in U.S. film and television—particularly students who navigate their mixed identities across home and school contexts. Grounded in Asian Critical Theory and Critical Multiracial Theory, I examine representations of three teenage characters on contemporary digital streaming services—Paxton Hall-Yoshida (Never Have I Ever), Hunter Chen (Ginny & Georgia), and Maya Ishii-Peters (PEN15)—while drawing parallels to Long Duk Dong as a metaphorical father figure. Using focal scenes at the family dinner table and in school settings, I argue that these multiracial Asian American characters, unlike Long Duk Dong, draw on mixed-whiteness and U.S. citizenship to traverse (but not transcend) the model minority and perpetual foreigner stereotypes while critiquing monoracial norms.