I get the feeling she dug the accent not for the reason Logan intended - it made him sound posh - but because it made him a little more of an outsider. Kimmy's already told her Jake Ryan-esque suitor, a blonde trust-fund beau named Logan Beekman, to shove off when he reveals a few unsavory details, including that his British accent is fake. The gesture Kimmy's making doesn't mean the same thing to Dong.Īnd while we don't know what's next for Kimmy and Dong - the season ends on a romantic cliffhanger - we already know it'll look way different from Sixteen Candles' final scene, in which Samantha shares a kiss with the studly all-American Jake Ryan. Their social ineptitudes are invitations to empathize, as The Atlantic's Megan Garber has put it. They're all delightfully awkward, and I think we're meant to like them more for the strangeness that binds them together. Her boss, a wealthy Native American woman, is purposely passing as white. Her struggling actor roommate finds he gets treated better in a werewolf costume than as a gay, black man. She's possibly the last person in New York still using the classified ads. Kimmy just spent the past 15 years in an underground bunker, trapped by an Ariel Castro-inspired doomsday cult, and she's as new to the city as Dong. Everyone we come to care about is an outsider misfit. Unbreakable, after all, is all about foreignness. But within the universe of this show, Dong's foreignness completely makes sense, and it makes him a stronger character. In the bigger, bird's-eye view of Asian-Americans on screen, the squickiness people feel over Dong is completely understandable, especially since the landscape was so desolate until recently. So which is it: Does Dong push back against Asian stereotypes, or does he just prop them up? The joke is an equalizing force - depending on the context, both of their names can read as ridiculous.īut for a lot of viewers, including a lot of Asian-American ones, the traits that make Dong such a classic Fey-sian misfit also make him a dull, even infuriating Asian stereotype: his thickly accented, broken English his gig delivering Chinese food by bike his aptitude for math his deportation-anxiety storyline. The irony that Dong is the one teasing Kimmy about her name floats completely over his head, which is partly what makes him such an endearing character: He unwittingly reclaims the gag. "In Vietnam, Kimmy means penis!" he says, leaving her stumbling for words. But this time, Dong, played by Ki Hong Lee ( The Maze Runner and a whole bunch of Wong Fu videos), has his own reason to snort. "Nice to meet you, Dong, I'm Kimmy," she spits out. And, as surely happens to Dong all the time, ever since he immigrated to New York from Vietnam, she's stifling a giggle over his name. The very first time we encounter Dong Nguyen, one of several hotly debated characters in Tina Fey's Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, he has just introduced himself to Kimmy in their GED class. Dong (Ki Hong Lee) and Kimmy (Ellie Kemper), right after they meet.
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