Thursday, October 1, 2009

Exchange students in popular culture

In popular USA culture, exchange students from other countries have often been stereotyped as exaggerated caricatures of their home countries, thus doing a disservice to exchange programs whose rules would not allow a student with bad behavior to remain in the host country.
Long Duk Dong (played by Gedde Watanabe) in the movie Sixteen Candles was a Chinese exchange student who adapted a fork and spoon to function as a pair of chopsticks.
Fez (his name merely being the phonetic version of the acronym FES: Foreign Exchange Student) is a foreign exchange student of unknown origin (widely believed by fans to be from Latin America) in the television series That '70s Show who adds comic relief to the show.
While male exchange students have been portrayed as caricatures played off for comic relief (for example Üter from The Simpsons), females such as Nadia - played by Shannon Elizabeth in American Pie, the Swedish exchange student Kristina - in James at 15, and French belle "Monique" - played by Diane Franklin in Better Off Dead were portrayed as exotic sex-objects. This trend was skewered in the 2001 film Not Another Teen Movie, in which "Areola", an exchange student of unspecified origin (played by model Cerina Vincent) is nude throughout the entire film.
The popular French film L'Auberge Espagnole tells the story of European college students from various countries studying in Barcelona for a year.
Fabiana Udenio portrays an Italian exchange student in the 1987 film Summer School.

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