DÌDI (弟弟): A Son’s Coming of Age

by Aayushi A.

When I was first asked to watch DÌDI (弟弟) (2024), I immediately felt a kinship with the title. It’s what my younger sister calls me—didi (दीदी), meaning “older sister” in Hindi. But in the context of the film, it’s the affectionate Mandarin term for “little brother.” We both have the same name but somehow it means the complete opposite. I know what being Didi means for me, but what does it mean for Chris Wang, the 13-year-old protagonist of this film?

Following Chris (Izaac Wang) the summer before he starts high school, DÌDI (弟弟) is debut director Sean Wang’s time capsule of his childhood in Fremont, California. Be it exchanging awkward texts on AOL (“water you dewin”) or scrolling through his crush’s MySpace page, this film is so innately 2008. YouTube is freshly three years old and, as an aspiring filmmaker, Chris often posts short videos of his life on his channel with titles like “crazy white lady freakout” and “smoking sticky note.” He steals his older sister’s Paramore t-shirts to look cooler and lets his friends call him Wang Wang. He’s your average 13-year-old boy.

Even though Chris is an Asian American kid growing up in a city of Asian American kids, he still feels out of place—that nagging sense of “otherness” that comes with being a teenager and never quite leaves. He doesn’t fully understand how to fit in with his friends or how to make his crush like him, no matter what version of himself he is.

However, as much as the film is about Chris trying to discover who Chris Wang is as an individual, it’s also about Dìdi—who he is to his family. At home, he lives with his paternal grandmother Nai Nai (Chang Li Hua), his mother Chungsing (Joan Chen)—an aspiring painter—and his older sister Vivian (Shirley Chen) who is about to leave for college. One of the first scenes in the film is the Wang family at the dinner table—a short but telling glimpse of their dynamic. The siblings argue over something silly and the grandmother scolds the mother for raising her children like this. One by one they all leave until only the mother is left sitting at the table—a motif we keep coming back to.

As Sean Wang describes it: “Every relationship that Chris has in the movie is conditional. Everything that he wants is conditional to him being a version of himself that he isn’t. And his mom is there every step of the way. Every time he fucks up, she’s there. It’s the only relationship in the movie where the love is unconditional.”

Though this film is largely a coming-of-age story, what shines through isn’t Chris’s journey to find himself. Rather, it’s the touching and sincere relationship between him and his mother, the only person who loves him so purely. No matter what Chris does, he always comes back to the quiet question of, “Have you eaten yet?” and a mother who is happy to watch him as he does.

As he struggles to understand himself, he also struggles to understand his mother—he brushes her off when she asks him for help submitting a painting to a competition and calls her annoying when she checks in on him and his friends. As much as he doesn’t know how to be a friend or a boyfriend, he also doesn’t know how to be a son. He doesn’t know how to respond as he watches his mother struggle to be a professional painter, watches her constantly get put down by her mother-in-law and friends for raising her children alone.

Chris’s relationship with his mother is almost uncomfortably familiar to me: a mother just doing what she can and a child not knowing how to consider a parent as a person in themselves.

“Sometimes I dream,” Chungsing says quietly to Chris in a tender moment towards the end of the film. It’s a rare time when Chris and Chungsing are fully facing and listening to each other—an open dialogue. I couldn’t help but burst into tears as the two met each other halfway. Joan Chen did a beautiful job in this scene, and it was hard not to see my own mother in her.  

The movie ends quietly. After his first day at high school, where he lets himself explore things that feel real to him, Chungsing asks Chris if he’s eaten yet and watches him as he does. This time, he looks up and watches her too.