How Sean Wang Brought 2000s Asian American Realness to Dìdi

Finding your way as a teenager can be brutal. A whirlwind of big emotions and desires is tough to make sense of, let alone communicate. The need for social acceptance can feel intensely urgent, even if it means being untrue to yourself. And the adults raising you never seem to get it. What’s a kid to do?

Filmmaker Sean Wang dives deep into these growing pains in his debut feature Dìdi, a heartfelt follow-up to his Oscar-nominated short documentary Nǎi Nai and Wài Pó. Wang’s coming-of-age tale, now in theaters, centers the inner world of Chris (Izaac Wang), a 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy growing up in the Bay Area suburb of Fremont in the late 2000s. Chris regularly bickers with his older sister, lives with two doting matriarchs—his mother, Chungsing (Joan Chen), and his Nǎi Nai (paternal grandmother, played by Chang Li Hua), both of whom immigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan. His free time includes recording the neighborhood shenanigans that he and his friends get into for his YouTube channel. But he also yearns to belong; the film beautifully captures the nuances of navigating being a first-generation kid fluent in a culture that the adults raising him are not.

The script began to materialize when Wang was 22, though he credits an “existential crisis” at 26 for getting his creative wheels turning. “That was the [age] both of my parents immigrated to America. For the first time, I had a direct connection to what my parents’ experience was,” he says. “They didn’t speak the language and didn’t have any friends and hoped for the best. It felt wild and made me empathize with the experience they had—and while trying to raise two more-or-less American children in America. As we get older, the gap becomes wider and wider.”

But Wang’s hope for what comes next is clear: that Dìdi unlocks inspiration in a new generation of storytellers. “Hopefully 10, 20 years from now, this movie won’t be unique and there’s a bunch of coming-of-age movies about Asian American kids and the different kinds of experiences that they live.” And, Wang adds, “shoutout to my mom.”

W caught up with the director about seeing his parents through a more empathetic lens, bringing the AOL era back to life onscreen, and his advice to budding filmmakers ready to tell their own coming-of-age tale.

Fremont is a big part of the movie. Have your feelings about your hometown changed as an adult compared to when you were a kid?

Yes, absolutely. So much of what I thought was a negative—like growing up in what I considered at the time to be a boring, mundane suburb—is what made it so fun. My friends and I would meet up and go do whatever, create our own fun.

The Bay Area is diverse, but Fremont especially is a deeply rooted immigrant community. I’d go to my best friend’s house and eat home-cooked Korean food, and then have a really amazing home-cooked Pakistani dinner at my other best friend’s house. I didn’t realize how special and unique it is to grow up in such a multicultural community until I got older. I’m really appreciative of it now.

So much of Dìdi feels anchored in teenage angst and the dynamic between Chris and his mother. There’s a specific grief and sense of isolation I think a lot of first-gen kids don’t recognize or process about their parents’ experience in a new country until adulthood. Did those sort of themes and meditations come up for you when working on Dìdi?

Definitely. There was a lot of life informing art with this movie. Growing up, you only know what you know. You’re not growing up like, oh my immigrant parents...that’s just the world you’re born into. Then you start thinking, what is my context and what is the context of the generations before me?

It was cool to experience the early 2000s nostalgia in Dìdi, like seeing a character scoping out an old-school Myspace profile of a crush, having your feelings hurt by a friend’s Top 8, and hearing the AIM messenger sound.

The movie takes place in 2008 because I was 13 that year. The Internet was such a big part of our lives, but it wasn’t our whole lives. I thought about the movies I loved like Stand By Me and The Sandlot and I was doing that with my friends during that time—just running around outside and hanging out until the sun sets. But it was fun to integrate all of that Internet language into our movie in a way that felt not gimmicky and just a part of the story.

Many Asian people from different walks of life, and especially Asian boys and men, have shared how seen they felt watching Dìdi. Do you have any advice for upcoming filmmakers who might feel inspired to tell their own story after watching the film?

I would say look inward. There’s so much noise out in the world now with Instagram, the Internet, and everything coming at you all at once. The exercise I had to keep doing for myself on this movie was trying to make it more personal. I get a lot of people asking me what advice do you have for Asian American filmmakers…but you’re also a filmmaker, you’re not just an Asian American filmmaker. A lot of people were like, how did you nail the Asian elements of this movie? Just think of your own life experience. The things that are closest to home for you are the things that you know the most intimately. All of that is a resource as a director and a filmmaker.

Bringing a movie to the big screen is a huge feat. What’s one aspect of this experience that makes you especially proud?

I’m really proud of the number of people who worked on this movie, for whom it was also their first feature experience. My producers Carlos López Estrada and Valerie Bush, it was their first movie as producers. It was my first movie as a writer-director. My cinematographer, who I’ve worked with for ten years, it was his first narrative feature film. My editor, who edited the movie Missing which takes place almost completely online, it was her first live-action narrative. It was the casting director’s first time casting a feature.

People would maybe advise against that, but I felt so strongly in my gut that these people were right for the job. We weren’t hiring them based on their résumés. And a lot of that energy and excitement of having never made a feature before seeped into this movie—not necessarily knowing the “right” way to do it because we’d never done it before, but trusting when it felt right to us. That sort of naivete worked for the better.