Dìdi and my mom
So, I finally watched Dìdi (2024). I cried like a baby.
"In 2008, during the last month of summer before high school begins, 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." (Letterboxd)
I was initially intrigued by the film when I heard it was essentially "Lady Bird for the guys". Sean Wang's autobiographical coming-of-age film, however, isn't the copy and paste portrait of tough motherly love I had expected after hearing that comparison. Sean Wang's portrayal of Dìdi (called "Wang-Wang" by his friends) and subsequently his mother is intimate, deeply personal, and kind.
Dìdi, as teenage boys tend to do, fails at every turn to listen to his mother. His mother, Chungsing Wang, traded her dreams of becoming a professional painter in New York to raise him and his sister, and cares for their absent father's mother as her own family. Chungsing reminds me of my mother, who got a Master's Degree in Fine Arts just before she had me. She worked in museums, as a photographer, as a creative, and lived a young and ambitious life in Chicago I never saw. Like Dìdi, I was an accident. And like Dìdi, I didn't understand why my mother traded her dreams for me until much, much later in life. Until I had dreams of my own she helped me to actualize. Until I realized she left her studio behind so I didn't have to.
"You know, sometimes I sit and think about... how I ended up here. So ordinary. Is this what my life has amounted to? I wonder... what if I didn't marry your father, if I didn't have you and Vivian. What would my life be like? Maybe I would've come to America by myself. And I'd have become a successful artist by now, with my own studio in New York. (in English) Sometimes I dream."
When Chungsing tells Dìdi about these what-ifs, she isn't complaining. She isn't wishing she never had him. She isn't voicing regrets about having children and settling into a life of complacency. She is telling how much him she loves him, sharing her sacrifice so he can know to dream big.
"But then, getting to watch you and Vivian grow up here, make friends, and learn so many things I can't teach you, I realize... you are my dream."
Chungsing reminds me of my mother. She tells me to be the creative person I was always meant to be. She reminds me to never stop, to never let my expectations of what is ordinary to get in the ways of my dreams. There was a time I didn't know of the life she traded to raise me. There was a time when I was too young to know what sacrifice meant. But I know now.
Dìdi reminds me to be kind, to listen, and to reach for the stars, just like my mom taught me.