We don't learn the name of the title character of "Didi" (Izaac Wang) until pretty late in the film. We know his friends, Fahad (Raul Dial) and Soup (Aaron Chang) call him Wang Wang. He tells the older skater kids he's trying to impress that his name is Chris. However at home, with his ever-nagging mother (Joan Chen) and paternal grandmother (Chung-Sing Wang), who speak very little English, he's Didi, which means younger brother in Mandarin. Notably his older sister Vivian (Shirley Chen), who is about to go off to college, doesn't call him Didi. Vivian and Chris Wang have grown up in the suburbs of Fremont, California, and don't speak Chinese to each other. They only speak Chinese to their mother and grandmother. Their father is absent, said to be working in Taiwan.
"Didi" captures a very specific time and place, but also a more universal experience. Chris is thirteen years old, and it's the summer before he starts high school. His sister, who he bickers and fights with constantly, is about to leave for university. He hangs out with his friends, pulling pranks and posting stupid videos on Youtube, which is just starting to become popular. The movie takes place in 2008, so Chris chats with his friends through AIM, and gathers information about his crush, Madi (Mahaela Park), through her Facebook page. He works up the courage to talk to her, one thing leads to another, and then everything in his life starts to change much too fast. And when Madi asks him what she should call him, at first he's not sure what to say.
I was initially very apprehensive about watching "Didi," which was written and directed by Sean Wang. As much as I am invested in Asian-American representation, Chris Wang is exactly the kind of teenage boy - constantly pulling pranks, talking like a wannabe rapper, and indulging every stupid notion that comes into his head - that I loathed being around when I was growing up in not-so-dissimilar circumstances. To be blunt, I was always the Vivian in this story, though my relationship with my younger brother was never anywhere near as bad. I wasn't keen on sitting through ninety minutes of teenage male nonsense, wrapped in skater-boy nostalgia, like Jonah Hill's "mid90s." I'll admit here that I had a harder time trying to decipher some of the mid-2000s vernacular and acronym-heavy chatspeak used by Chris and his friends than I had with the Mandarin dialogue.
However, it wasn't hard for me to find some empathy for the kids in "Didi." Despite being about half a generation older, I recognized a lot from my teenage years in the film. Sean Wang captures the look and feel of California suburbia better than most - the sunbaked sidewalks, the kids being a mix of ethnicities, and not being able to go anywhere without a car. This version of the Chinese-American immigrant community also rings true - the achievement-oriented chatter among the adults, the test prep classes, and the endless unsolicited advice from family members forever highlighting your deepest inadequacies. The most important character in the film after Chris is his mother, played with just the right amount of warmth and steeliness, by Joan Chen. I don't know that I'd characterize "Didi" as a film about the mother-son relationship, but it's a big piece of the picture, and done beautifully.
And by the end of the film, I found I liked Chris Wang very much. I got invested in his search for identity, his missteps with his friends, his attempts to become a skateboarding "filmer," and finally finding some meaningful connection to his family. I appreciate that a lot of his journey to maturation comes from reacting to negative social pressures in a constructive way, and realizing that he doesn't have the luxury of staying an adolescent asshole forever. Sometimes it's painful to watch, but it's also tremendously satisfying to see Chris figure things out. Even though a lot of what came out of his protagonist's mouth got lost in translation, Sean Wang got all the important parts across just fine.
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