There are movies in which you wish so desperately for there to be a happy ending, because that’s all it takes for the story to become complete and for the audience to achieve a soothing sense of satisfaction. Then there are other movies whose stories are most complete when they are incomplete. Didi (directed by Sean Wang) is one of those films.
I originally signed up for a pre-release screening of the film because my company was offering tickets for free. Not thinking much at the time, I thought that spending a Tuesday night at the theater instead of working on some Machine Learning project would be a well-needed reprieve — yet this movie was so good I will be watching it again as soon as it comes out for real.
At its core, Didi is the story of what it means to be Asian American. These were not just the director’s stories, but the stories of all of us. The conflict that we grew up in — yet largely refused to admit existed — was prominently depicted: that of the clash between what a modern, American society expects out of us in our youth and what a family built around conservative Confucian values expects at the same time. I won’t spoil the movie for you, but the protagonist’s interactions with his family perfectly epitomizes this. He has an idea of the friend groups he wants to cultivate, the image of himself that he wishes to project, yet at the same time this clashes directly with what his mother and grandmother have in mind for him ahem SAT prep school.
The best part about the movie is how it can make you cackle wildly one second — especially at Chris’ attempts to find love but screws over the opportunity even though all he had to do was bring it to home base — but it will also make you reach for tissues the next. In fact, the moment when the movie transitions from pure comedy to in the feels type beat is almost exactly the midpoint of the film. Perhaps the fact that the movie ends on such a melancholy note begs for a Part 2 — what happens to Chris when he actually finishes high school?
The main reason why I felt compelled to write this today was that I saw myself in Chris many times over. Every heartbreak, every disappointment, every moment of frustration with the family — I had experienced all of these moments myself. Many times, in fact. But I also saw part of myself in the ending, when Chris begins to develop a clearer idea of who he is and how he fits into the world as an Asian American. I like to believe that I was ignorant to this until very recently, but I lacked the tools to really understand these emotions and struggles, thus preventing me from truly opening up and understanding my place in society and the world.
Like Chris, I completely understand that growing up Asian American in these kinds of places was an absolute struggle. On the one hand, society was telling me that I had to act a certain way to be considered cool, yet what my parents often told me at home was often the complete opposite. I hold a strong thesis that many aspects of traditional Asian culture are fundamentally irreconcilable with modern American culture — hence why such a strong culture clash exists. I was told that I had to like fantasy football (which I gave zero shits about), play basketball, and be able to recite the entire list of MLB draft picks to be considered cool. At home, I was told that the only thing worth memorizing was the SAT vocabulary list so that I could be on the path to getting into a good college. Asian parents’ tendency to compare their kids with each other doesn’t help at all either: there is a scene in which this happens in Didi, and every Asian kid probably can relate to the pain of watching their own parents praise lavishly about the accomplishments of some other family’s kid while admonishing their own kid to do better. This fact is precisely how toxic natures of competition arise.
Even just two years ago, I was still debating with my family the validity of keeping our ethnic culture alive. For many years, I was trying to figure out the legal name changing process to get my middle name changed to something like "Parker" or "Chase" because I thought my middle named sounded too ethnic in its current iteration. I also proudly proclaimed to my parents that I would make sure none of my kids would learn how to speak the Chinese language or anything about Chinese culture/history because I believed that these ideas were fundamentally useless in a modern, 21st Century America. Instead of having them toil away at language schools on the weekends, I wanted to teach them how to play baseball and basketball. Instead of throwing them in SAT prep classes during high school, I wanted them to experience a real high school party (which I had been severely deprived of since I was working a research job alongside classes in high school). Instead of having them pull all nighters trying to finish up a CS/Math project, I wanted them to experience the joys of being in a frat/sorority and getting to learn who their people truly were.
The biggest challenge of growing up as the child of immigrants is of course that your parents can rarely help you navigate the social aspect of life in a land still foreign to them even many years after immigration. In fact, the director himself said in an interview that “Your parents are immigrants and they’re not like ‘OK, now listen to the Rolling Stones.’ They didn’t show me the Beatles but people were talking about the Beatles …" I stubbornly used to ask my parents why, considering that they had been in the US for more than half of their lives, had they not fully adapted to American culture. Even though my mom was an English major, she still spoke English with a noticeable accent. We still observe many holidays that are traditional to the Chinese culture after almost 30 years of our family being in the US. I also didn’t understand why my parents (and their friends) observed some particular quirks originating from Chinese culture — such as selecting phone numbers and license plates with the number “8” for luck, or why during school gatherings, they always tended to mingle around the same group of Asian parents (when in fact there were tons of other families there). My mom’s answer was always the same: the culture that you grew up in is something that you can’t outgrow. No matter what new culture you end up immersing yourself in life later on, the culture you experience during the years in which you grew up is a part of you that you will almost never be able to let go.
As Asian Americans, the strong conflict between our home and societal cultures is precisely what defines us. We may have had to suffer a lot growing up due to this, and in some cases it may be something that you never recover from. To understand what it truly means to be Asian American, therefore, is to continue climbing a hill of diverging paths, stopping to look back, and seeing those paths somehow magically converge.
Growing up, I used to be super uncomfortable with sharing stories about growing up in America as someone of Asian descent because I thought it was a burden that I would have to carry my entire life. To the untrained eye, it might seem full of extra studying, missing out on fun, and learning the culture of a foreign land. Now, I’m not so sure anymore. There’s something about the Asian American story that’s just so beautiful when you view it in the big picture (pun intended).