I went to watch Didi in the theaters the day it released because I was extremely excited to watch a coming of age film that was centered around the Asian-American experience. However, I left feeling disappointed at the lack of emphasis in relationships.

The blurb for this movie on Letterboxd describes it as an impressionable 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy learns what his family can’t teach him: how to skate, how to flirt, and how to love your mom. Not only did he not learn to skate, flirt, he barely had a relationship with his mom who wrapped the movie up with a monologue that felt like the director wanted to have as much as an impact as Everything Everywhere all at Once did, but it was so badly written I was in awe when I opened imdb to find that it had a higher Rotten Tomatoes score than Everything Everywhere all at Once, albeit, with a much lower watch rate.

With classic coming to age stories like The Perks of being a Wallflower, Dead Poets Society, and Lady Bird, they center around relationships with siblings, parents, teachers, or peers their age. Watching Didi, I felt like all the relationships were superficial and it barely hit the rubric not only in depth but in creativity. Sean Wang had a great product to work with: Asian-American coming to age about self identity with being ashamed of culture or something along those lines and maybe I subconsciously was hoping for something similar to the graphic novel American Born Chinese. Only a few movies and stories come to mind that are able to hit that rubric where it becomes a staple for American Asians and conjoin the community over this representation. Now, just because the cast is entirely Asian does not mean the focus of the story needs to be about the Asian American experience but the topic was touched once and then never brought up again which felt like a cheat in my opinion. I understand why people like this film but again, everything was so sped up and topics were brushed by without saying anything of value.