Dìdi: On Belonging, In-Betweenness, and Coming of Age in the Myspace Era

By: Phoebe Pineda

Warning: minor spoilers.

As the summer winds to a close and students head back to school in earnest, the release of director Sean Wang’s feature-length debut, Dìdi (“younger brother”), could not be more perfectly timed. A worthy addition to the coming-of-age genre, Dìdi tackles the confusion (and cringe) of adolescence head-on with humor, heart, and a boatload of 2000s nostalgia.

Drawing heavily on Sean Wang’s own youth, the film follows 13-year-old Chris (Izaac Wang) through the summer of 2008, his final summer before starting high school. It’s a time of great change not only for Chris but for his family: his older sister, Vivian (Shirley Chen), is moving to San Diego for college, while their mother, Chungsing (Joan Chen), struggles to hold the family together with her husband away working in Taiwan.

We embark with Chris on a challenging journey into this strange new teenage world as he searches for his place and identity. He talks to girls, learns to skateboard, and fistfights neighborhood boys. He pesters his sister and falls out with his friends. He attempts to leverage a fledgling YouTube channel into a gig filming content for older skaters. He lies about the music he listens to, the movies he watches, and his own ethnicity in an attempt to construct a newer, cooler, older self. It’s a hilarious, frequently uncomfortable viewing experience, the self-actualization saga of the hormonal teenage boy displayed in all its crude, disgusting, occasionally homophobic glory.

Meanwhile, we witness Chungsing’s everyday hardships as they unfold in parallel to Chris’s misadventures. She applies for an art competition only to be rejected. Her mother-in-law, Chris’s Nǎi Nai (Chang Li Hua, Sean Wang’s own grandmother), berates her for failing to rein in her arguing children. It’s a nice way of putting Chris’s antics into perspective, allowing the movie (and the audience) to empathize with Chris while recognizing his selfishness and acknowledging the quiet sacrifices of his mother, the family’s unsung lynchpin. In the moments where their two storylines converge—tense dinners at home, lunch with a friend and her son, and the film’s touching conclusion—we realize how similar Chris and his mom actually are. Both are under an immense amount of pressure from everyone around them (including each other), and both feel they are failing to live up to those expectations.

Dìdi itself, on the other hand, certainly lives up to the hype it garnered at Sundance. The movie manages to pack an entire summer’s worth of chaos into a tight 91 minutes, none of which feel wasted. Buoyed by Sean Wang’s fantastic script, the performances are solid—impressive, given that many of the cast members were first-time actors working alongside seasoned vets like Joan Chen and Izaac Wang. Izaac, in particular, makes for an excellent lead, perfectly toeing the line between annoying and painfully vulnerable. We root for Chris even as he fumbles his way through pseudo-dates, parties too hard, and hurts the people around him. We relate to his struggles even as we understand how much growing up he still has to do.

One of the film’s unique strengths is its wholehearted embrace of the 2000s, particularly the experience of growing up during the rise of social media and modern internet culture. I watched Dìdi with a group of friends from high school, and while none of us were in middle school in 2008 (I was in second grade), we all experienced a nostalgic thrill at seeing Chris’s awkward teenage exploits play out over the digital interfaces we grew up with Windows XP, Facebook, and AIM, early YouTube. “Myspace should never have died,” remarked one friend. I cheered when the pipe screensaver flashed across Chris’s computer screen, unlocking a window into my childhood I’d completely forgotten existed.

Paramore fans will also appreciate how heavily the band features in the movie, with Chris stealing Vivian’s Riot!-themed T-shirt to impress his crush, Madi (Mahaela Park). Unfortunately, “Misery Business” didn’t make it into the soundtrack, but the band does get a shoutout in the special thanks section of the ending credits.

It’s exciting to see a movie from a filmmaker I share generational overlap with (and from my neck of the woods to boot—I live about half an hour from Sean and Chris’s shared hometown of Fremont, California). So much of mainstream media struggles to understand us, the younger millennial and Gen Z crowd, and we’re finally in a position to tell our own stories and explore and reflect on our own experiences. Sean Wang is conscious, too, of the overwhelming whiteness of Hollywood and the coming-of-age genre. Though Dìdi never directly addresses the issue of Asian-American media representation, we feel the subtle impacts nonetheless, as Chris waters down his heritage to boost his social cred, and Madi calls him “cute for an Asian.”

I’m not surprised that Lulu Wang, director of The Farewell (one of my favorite movies), mentored Sean Wang. Both Dìdi and The Farewell deal with the liminal nature of first-generation diasporic identity, the challenge of existing in two worlds and not feeling as though you fully belong to either. Martin Tsai has an excellent piece contextualizing Dìdi’s cultural nuances using his own background, underscoring the importance of films like Dìdi in celebrating characters and communities whose stories have often gone untold.

More than anything, Dìdi reminds me why I create art, why we create art: we want to share a bit of ourselves with the world in the hopes that someone like us will see it and remind us that we aren’t alone. Chris doesn’t realize the significance of his impulse to document his life, share his view of the world, and tell his own story. But we do.