Didi

In 2008, during the last month of summer before high school begins, an impressionable 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy learns what his family can't teach him: how to skate, how to flirt, and how to love his mom.

In the summer of 2008, 13-year-old Chris Wang, called Di Di by his family and Wang Wang by his friends, is a middle-class Taiwanese American kid living in the heavily white suburb of Fremont, California.

He lives with his Taiwanese immigrant mother Chungsing, who loves to paint, her demanding mother-in-law, and Di Di’s grandmother, Nai Nai, who reminds him every day that she will be dead soon, and his soon-to-be-college-bound older sister Vivian, who he fights with constantly, and at one point, pees in her lotion.

Chris’s father has moved back to Taiwan for his work. He never comes home, but he sends money support the family. His grandmother blames his mother for this, and is not shy about saying so, and this causes a lot of stress at home.

Chris's two best friends are Fahad and Soup. They’re string bean silly little nerd boys like Chris, strutting and posing around like they’re cool, when they’re actually all just McLovin, a movie they love. Otherwise, they mostly chase after any girl who pays attention to them, and otherwise spend their time making YouTube videos and goofing around, or capping on each other’s moms, even though they keep forgetting that Soup’s mom has cancer, so that’s awkward.

Chris is just your average awkward suburbs kid trying to figure his shit out, with all the typical triumphs and failures.

He has a crush on a girl named Madi and often haunts her MySpace, using it to tailor his own in order to maximize his appeal to her, should she ever look at his page. But when they do hang out, she tells him that he’s cute “for an Asian,“ which makes him nervous and insecure, and he fumbles their make-out session, and afterwards, totally embarrassed, he blocks her on MySpace.

Then, at a group hangout with his buddies and some girls, Chris's own misogyny, not to mention some poorly-chosen anecdotes, causes him to wreck the vibe. His friends abandon him to hang out with the girls without him, offering the worst and most transparent of excuses. They drift apart, and eventually drop Chris from their "top eight friends" on MySpace. 

His social life is dead.

All the stress from his stumbles out in the world begin to cause a rift between him and his mother. Her overbearing mothering, as well as her difficulties dealing with her mother-in-law, her insecurities about her husband, and her recent failures as a painter, leads her to criticize Chris’s grades in front of another Taiwanese mother and her son, Max. Max and Chris aren’t friends at all, despite their mothers forcing them to hang out, and even sending them for extra tutoring together at a Cram School. But during one of their Cram School classes, Max lets his friend Josh bully Chris ruthlessly.

Lonely and hoping to reinvent himself, Chris befriends a trio of cool older skateboarders by offering to film their skate reels for them, even though he’s never done anything like that before. And still reeling from recent events, especially with Madi, he tells the skaters (who are white and African-American) that he is half-Asian. They take him with to a party where he tries alcohol and marijuana for the first time, and when he gets sick, his big sister Vivian covers for him.

The pair reconcile before she leaves for college.

Which is nice.

But after that, the skateboarders visit Chris at his house, and discover that his skate footage is unusable. His mother chooses that exact moment to walk in and greet the boys, inadvertently exposing Chris’s lie about being half-Asian. Angry and embarrassed, Chris berates his mom, and chases her out of his room. In the wake of all this, the skaters reject Chris, and walk out of his life.

Finding himself at his tutoring class at the end of a shitty day, Chris decks Josh when he tries to bully him, and is nearly expelled for it. During the car ride home, he and his mom have a blow up, and each of them say a few angry, hurtful things. Chris runs away from home for the night. But when he returns in the morning, they have a long talk, and reconcile.

Chris’s first day of high school is both a good and bad experience, but during it, it seems like Chris a little more able to handle it than he has been over the past few weeks. He’s not perfect, but he’s grown a little.

There’s hope for his future, maybe.

A really good, but emotionally brutal film about the pressures of growing up in general, the pressure of growing up Taiwanese in a Taiwanese community, and the pressure of growing up Asian in a racist White America, Didi is a lot. It’s stressful. It’s cringey. It’s way too fucking real and relatable.

But yeah, really good.

It's fair to say that there's a lot of similarity here with some of the more recent early aughts "nostalgia of youth" films, like Eighth Grade or Mid90s, for example, any of those films about being on the precipice of high school, and all the trials and tribulations of moving from adolescence to teenagedom, as well as the struggles of an outcast trying to fit in, learning how to be a good friend, and also a good child to your parent, but Didi is by far an all-around stronger and much more affecting film than those other films. Didi doesn't shy away from the uglier parts of Chris. It doesn't just focus on the pain that happens to him, but the pain he inflicts as well.

In short, Chris is often a little shit.

We watch as Chris flails about as he tries to figure out who he is. He changes his hobbies, his name, his life story, even his race, but it doesn't work out, and he only comes off as fake and mean and petty, and then he gets rejected, and all the toxic hypermasculine misogynistic bullshit he gloms onto whenever he's embarrassed about something only amplifies all of his insecurities, his perceived inadequacies, and because of all that shit, he only hurts, both himself and others. But still, the film shows compassion towards the little fucker. He doesn’t know who he is, he’s trying to force himself to be someone else, he just wants to be "normal" and fit in, and he's angry and confused, especially when shit doesn't work out for him. I like how the film shows that he is clearly responsbile for the hurt he causes, but at the same time, it just as clearly shows that he can't help it, at least sometimes.

Hurt people hurt, right?

So, we see Chris here at his best, and also at his worst and his most vulnerable, because that's the universal stuff, that's the stuff that none of us want to remember doing. And that is why it's so satisfying to see that he begins to discover himself, to allow others to see him, to love him, and to love himself. There's no happy little bow or anything, but still, there's a nice indication that he's all right, and that, with a little little self-interrogation and growth, things can get better.

I also liked how Didi captures the feeling of growing up in the middle of white america when you're not white, and the constant external pressure that comes with being aware of this, the way they (white people) will come up to you and ask "What are you?" and gesture vaguely at your face, even though they're complete strangers, or the way that they will all stop and look when you enter a room, or the way they respond to you, or not respond to you, and the look they will give you if you force them to respond to you, all of those little interactions that constantly remind you of how they see you, how they think of you, how they categorize you, and how that impacts your life in big and small ways, every day, all the time, over and over. And always, for white people, on their end, they either meant it as a direct insult, or they're completely oblivious to their casual racism. There's never another option.

And Didi absolutely captures that.

I really love how racism in america is depicted here not as the main bad guy, not as an obstacle to triumphantly overcome, the film never goes "This is all whitey's fault," it's just shown as an accepted fact of life of being a POC in white America. It’s this constant and pervasive low dirge of "white" noise. It's reflected here in the way that Chris's friends are all people of color. And in the reason why Madi, despite being an Asian-American girl herself, would tell that Chris he’s cute "for an Asian," as if it were a compliment and a totally normal thing to say. It’s in the reason why Chris would claim to be half Asian, and why he would scold his mom for being “too Asian.” It’s shown in the way the cool older skater boys all chant “Asian Chris” instead of just “Chris" and how it was sincerely meant by them to be taken in a friendly way.

It's a fucked up country, man.

Fucked. Up.

The whole cast is great here, especially Izaac Wang as Chris, but it’s Joan Chen (The Blood of Heroes) who’s the true shining star.

As Chris’ mother, she is brilliant as a single mom dealing with two kids drifting away from her, and the overbearing and ever-present mother-in-law she has been saddled with. And all while... she just wants to paint, man. She just wants to paint and have someone tell her it's nice. Her life is truly one long thankless task, but she does her best. She endures. And she keeps everything tightly controlled behind her eyes. But Joan Chen is so good, every small twinge of hurt, every tiny little flare of anger or disappointment, every glimpse of the deep well of love she has for her childen, it's so clear. It’s just heartbreaking, fantastic work, and she does it all so naturally and so easily. It’s great stuff.

It's a shame she didn't get a nomination.

In the end, there’s no answers here, there's no big cathartic ending, no neat little bow, but still, Didi feels real. It feels honest. This was a good film. A nice little slice of life. Sad, but sweet, and all around well-done.

Definitely worth checking out.