Sean Wang’s Dìdi (弟弟) is about a young boy named Chris Wang (played by Izaac Wang), lovingly called dìdi (‘little brother’ in Mandarin) by his family. I hate him.
Well maybe not hate. He makes me uneasy. Dìdi (弟弟) is a curious film. It very intentionally sets itself up as a nuanced, modern coming-of-age story: following a 13-year-old Taiwanese boy in his final summer before high school begins, this is the story of his search for self, undergirded and informed by — and rubbing up against — his identity as a second-generation immigrant growing up in a Californian suburb. The film stridently satisfies this intention, crafting a tender and aching sketch that gestures toward mighty and worthwhile ideas: the painful friction that is a part of growing up as a person of colour in Western society, the unique and simultaneous shame and guilt attendant to honouring family values while also shrugging them off in front of friends, and the ways in which the former takes place in secret for repressive reasons that loom large only in our minds.
Dìdi (弟弟) is a good film for its slice-of-life look at what growing up under the gnarly pressures of race, gender, and class looks like, all capably carried by its young star. Izaac Wang perfectly brings to life Sean Wang’s (who also writes the film) vision, wearing Chris’ perspective with keen understanding and precision, offering a lived-in portrayal that recommends the young actor to great future success.
This is a good film, but it still manages to grate against my nerves for the particular kind of anger it depicts. There is something nasty here — it’s present in how Chris interacts with his sister, mother, and friends, how he presents himself before us. As Chris flits from his elementary school friends to new friends made at a skatepark and from the sweet pangs of a first crush to pretending to know how to edit skate videos, something floats to the surface of his presentation that I have a hard time comprehending. There is an unadulterated and pure anger to Chris as he interacts with his family. It’s something more than the hormonal anger that teenagers experience, which, fiery as it is, is often yoked to a kind of unconditional love. Here, though, the anger is unhinged.
When Chris fights with his sister Vivian (Shirley Chen), which he does often, it’s unbridled and unrestrained, just one note of pure white hot heat. When Chris blows up at his mother, the incandescent Joan Chen as Chungsing Wang, it’s a bit of a horror show for how unwarranted it is. The young boy contains an anger that is something off-kilter from the kind typically depicted in teenage boys. It confuses and frightens me for the way in which it seems misplaced in its direction toward his family, while its origins or provoking force is unclear. Certainly it is the case that emotions during our adolescence run wild and according to their own strange logic, but something here still seems a puzzle.
It’s in the way that Chris and Vivian scream at each other over dinner — nothing tempers the screech of their screams; it’s in the way that Chris’ voice slams against Chungsing’s small and kind voice, his voice especially loud after all his general silence. Chris is often very silent, quietly observing and not letting others know his thoughts and feelings. His shyness offsets his anger, making it seem all the more large and destructive. The anger directed at his family often comes after he suffers an embarrassment in his social life, which is totally understandable. I recall often feeling irritated and angry and sad at home if something happened at school with my friends that unsettled me. But at the same time, I recall all my negative moods — and they were often very negative, like blinding bouts of anger that often frightened my sister, emotions I didn’t know how to deal with firing out in self-destructive ways — always carried with them something else. My anger, my yelling, my tears — they always were undergirded by knowledge that the people around me are my family, that I am supposed to love them; that is, there was always something, no matter how slight, tempering my moods, smoothing over their razor-sharp edges, even if slightly.
And this something — the softening factor, that flicker of regret twitching in the eyes after a violent outburst, the cracking in the voice at the end of a scream, which evidence regret or immediate, perhaps fearful, recollection of what one has just done — this is what I find is missing in Dìdi (弟弟). When Chris and Vivian yell at each other or when he yells at his mother, there is nothing else there but hate, and it seems out of step or discordant. Not because teens shouldn’t be that angry, because I am all for teen anger, but it seems out of step to me because it is too vitriolic, only vitriolic, and therefore frightening.
I am not saying that Chris has no right to be angry, that his moods are wrong, or that he should be more kind. He is a teenager and his moods are a mystery even to him. What I am saying is that there doesn’t seem any love here; Chris seems not to be able to relate to anyone, and this dynamic within him, which could be a sign of many things, isn’t explored because maybe it is not understood that it is there.
When I would get angry as a kid or as a teen, these outbursts, I learned later in life, were signs of my neurodivergence. Chris is shy, but he is so shy to the point of being unreadable. And so, when Vivian does show sisterly signs later on in the film, offering kindness to her brother who she sees is buckling under his own social missteps, it seems jarring because that love never undergirded her outbursts earlier; and it makes a curious kind of sense that Chris doesn’t offer much active kindness back. It feels like this one-tone anger that is depicted within the family might be the fault of either writing or direction. While the general and whole story is nuanced, the same nuance isn’t carried to the sibling dynamic.
When Chris spends a night away from home after an explosive argument with his mother, and when he comes back, he seems disconnected from what his mother tells him. She explains that she didn’t expect for her life to turn out as it has, she wonders whether maybe she could have been an artist. Chen’s performance is so striking, so poignant as to move one to tears, but an earlier scene of Chris telling his mother that her painting isn’t good without ever even looking at it flashes in one’s mind. Chris doesn’t apologize; he just remains silent, and I ache for Chungsing.
Fights with family often contain these glimmering moments of understanding that if you laugh at any moment during the fight, it will be okay, because the love abides, regardless of it all. The love that Chris’ mother, that Joan Chen depicts, is nuanced, and this is perhaps because of her skill as an actress, and it casts in stark relief the one-dimensionality of Chris’ anger. Joan Chen is the star of the film, for me. Exceedingly patient and understanding, her Chungsing is a marvel.
Chen plays Chungsing with texture as she depicts a mother fracturing under the stress of raising teens, of dealing with a garrulous mother-in-law, and of the single motherhood foisted on her by a husband who is back in Taiwan working. She wants to be a painter, so when she shows a painting she is proud of to Chris, and he tells her it’s not good, it becomes a display of Chris’ wretchedness, which is so extreme as to make you want to scream.
None of the nastiness thrown her way by Chris is warranted — she is a good mother, allowing Chris the freedom and independence to do effectively whatever he wants, and yet he is still awful to her. Chen’s portrayal is at once aching and strong, that one wonders whether a woman ought to be this strong. But of course the stark truth is that women, especially women of colour, often are this strong, due to the strength wrenched from them by the world. Chen’s complex portrayal, with her unconditional love that undergirds her exhaustion and fear, offers a masterclass in delicacy and in portraying characters with fulsomeness and fallibility.
While every actor puts in a stellar performance, I feel as though there is a piece of the puzzle missing when it comes to Chris. His anger rankles my soul because it is so fiery when it devours his sweet, loving, and kind mother. And it certainly could be argued that his anger is unique to his situation as a second-generation Taiwanese boy coming of age in a white society, that his anger is justified in a cruel and racist world — and I would certainly agree.
But as the film presents it, Chris seems to be a whirling ball of fire within a fairly kind social circle; his anger is offbeat within this story’s world. His friends are nice to him, while he is weird; and this could also certainly be explained by his internalized ideas of the right way to be, but I’m not sure we know many of Chris’ ideas of the right way to be. There seems to be a disconnect as Chris is written, something missing, a step in logic between his environment and his anger, that I wish was better explored. While anger certainly is a productive and useful force, especially in the context of racial and social injustice, it’s left unexplored here, like a half-finished sentence. Chris, as he is written, remains a bit of an enigma to me.
Ultimately, Dìdi (弟弟) is a challenging film that is exceedingly worthwhile for the way in which it represents a kind of teen we don’t often get — a second-generation immigrant whose feelings are unruly, confounding, and confronting. My gripes with this film ought also to recommend it. Even though I feel as though the anger is too strong, strangely strong, it is still worthwhile in this film. We get to see anger from a child of immigrants, something we don’t often get; with Dìdi (弟弟), Sean Wang explodes notions of “ought” when it comes to immigrant kids, allowing for more textured possibilities in ways of being and becoming.
