Sean Wang, best known for his Academy Award nominated short film, Nai Nai & Wài Pó (which screened at CAAMFest 2023), is making a splash with his feature–length, narrative debut, Dìdi. Set in the summer of 2008 in Fremont, California, the film follows Chris Wang (Izaac Wang) as he navigates learning how to skate, how to film, how to flirt, and how to love his mom (Joan Chen), all in the lead up to the start of high school. In having to code-switch in a heavily dense Asian American community, yet in a time period where representation on a mainstream level was still largely absent, it’s a story that speaks to a unique experience, in a place in the San Francisco Bay Area that hasn’t been as prominently explored.
Ahead of the film’s release in the Bay Area, Wang sat down with CAAM over Zoom to discuss telling a story about an “outsider in a community of outsiders” and why it was so important to him to shoot the film in his hometown of Fremont.
-Lauren Lola
Lauren Lola: For you growing up in Fremont, what kind of exposure did you have to Asian American films?
Sean Wang: None really. I wasn’t a cinephile kid growing up either. I liked movies, but I definitely didn’t have an education for it. I wasn’t someone who was like, “I’m going to go find this director and watch their entire filmography.” I feel like I didn’t really scratch the surface of what you would consider the canon of Asian American films with films like Better Luck Tomorrow or Saving Face until I was in college. But I guess my diet for films was a little hodgepodge when I was a kid. I definitely didn’t have the vocabulary to call it Asian American cinema by any means. But obviously, I watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and a lot of Ang Lee movies because my parents were obsessed with Ang Lee, but that’s not Asian American. I guess [it’s] slightly different.
LL: So for Dìdi – it’s a coming-of-age film [that’s] set in a suburban setting, and that setting just happens to have a large Asian American population, which is different from other coming-of-age stories where it’s in an urban setting and maybe there aren’t as many Asian Americans in said population. I was wondering what your thoughts are about that.
SW: Well, I guess it is just honest to my upbringing. There’s a deeply rooted immigrant community. I grew up around a lot of children of immigrants in Fremont and a lot of Asian American kids of all different backgrounds. But I think what I wanted to try to explore in the movie was, I think, when me and my friends look back at that time and talk about it, I think we all still felt this subtle ambivalence about being Asian, even though we all grew up around each other and went to each other’s houses and ate each other’s cultures and foods, and that stuff was always stuff we were really proud of. I would love going to my friends’ houses and eating and being introduced to Korean food or Indian food. But I think subconsciously, being around and [being] friends with so many Asian people, but then you look [at] the culture and what society at large reflected about Asian Americans and how we were represented in mainstream media during the time and we just weren’t. It was like we were the butt of a joke or something.
So I think there was this strange gap between how we saw ourselves and how the world saw people who looked like us. And I think that was, in a way, the heart of the movie. And the question that was driving me which was, what does it feel like to be an outsider among outsiders? By the time I was writing the script, you had seen the narrative of being the one Asian person in a sea of white people or any other group, but just being so viscerally aware of your otherness. And I think I wanted to try to explore something a little bit different, which was what does it feel like to not fully belong in a place where you feel like you actually should, where everyone around you looks like you and talks like you and maybe shares a similar immigrant background as you, and yet you don’t feel like you fully belong because of again, what the culture and society was saying about you.
And then I think within that, I heard things like, “Oh, you’re the coolest Asian” growing up. I heard stuff like that growing up, or “You’re the cutest Asian” or “You’re cute for an Asian.” That’s in the movie. That’s things that I heard. That’s things that my friends and I all heard. And I think there was something to that that was like, oh, that’s specific and unique because you can’t really hear that unless you grow up around a lot of Asians. You can’t be the coolest, only Asian. I think there’s something here that is hopefully specific and unique, but can get to familiar emotions in a different way.
LL: Why was it important for you to shoot in Fremont as opposed to a lookalike city, especially since Fremont doesn’t necessarily have the well-developed infrastructure for movie making?
SW: I think I just kept going back to the personal. Even though Fremont doesn’t have the infrastructure of production the way that LA or Atlanta or these hubs of filmmaking have, I do think there’s something that is a resource in that sense. I think when you shoot things in LA, a lot of the time, people are jaded and over it. You walk into a restaurant and you’re like, “Can we shoot here?” And people are like, “Oh, a million things have shot here. It’s going to cost $100,000” or some outrageous amount because studios shoot there, corporate things shoot there.
Not to say that the Bay Area isn’t changing. I think Oakland and San Francisco are starting to become hubs, and in this canon and resurgence of Bay Area storytelling, even just you look at the last ten years of Sorry to Bother You, Blindspotting, there were so many things that I felt like stories that were popping up, and I felt like the story that I had to tell was maybe a little less loud and maybe a little bit more humble, but it was no less emotional.
And it felt like the corner of the Bay Area that I knew, again, with this multicultural community of immigrants and immigrant children, I felt like there was a story that was specific to Fremont that, as much as I wanted to contribute to the canon of coming of age stories, I also wanted to hopefully try and contribute a story to the canon of Bay Area films. And by shooting there, I think again, people were excited. The city was really excited to have us shoot there.
And I think you don’t get that feeling in Los Angeles. You don’t get that feeling in other places. Just this excitement and passion that someone from the city is trying to come back to the city and do something hopefully special. That was the hope was that we could bring the community into it and bring all of these local businesses and people who grew up in the Bay Area and my family and my hometown friends and their parents. The orthodontist in the movie is my orthodontist growing up. The guy who plays the rent-a-cop is my friend’s dad who still lives in Fremont. The woman who plays Max’s mom is my best friend’s mom. And she’s from the Bay Area. So it was trying to just do things that felt like the way you made stuff when you were a kid like, “Who can play this role? Let’s go get Vivian’s mom.”
LL: What do you hope for local audiences in particular to take away from watching Dìdi?
SW: I never saw the people who looked or talked or felt like me and my friends from Fremont in the things that I loved growing up and movies of this ilk. And so I hope that anyone anywhere can see themselves in our movie, but I hope that local audiences can just get that special feeling sometimes you get from watching films and seeing that there’s something so specific and familiar and local that sometimes this idea of seeing yourself on screen can be really powerful.
But if you’re from the area or you have some lived experience to compare it to, hopefully seeing Golfland or seeing 680 or seeing the golden hills of the mountains or seeing roads in elementary schools that you maybe went to or know or drove past, I think that can be a very transportive, visceral feeling that I felt watching other pieces of art. So if I can give that back to, again, a community that has shaped me so much and is really in the DNA of our movie, I think that would be so cool.
LL: Yeah, for sure. I didn’t grow up in Fremont, I grew up in Newark, but even still, these are all sites I’m very familiar with. And I was a teenager in the summer of 2008 as well, so [the experience] feels very familiar to me. To now be able to see a movie centered around that is just so wild, and also makes me realize how much time has passed.
SW: Yeah, that’s awesome. I remember when I saw Fruitvale Station for the first time, and again, I’m not from Oakland, but I’m just seeing BART and I was like, “Oh, I’ve driven past that. I know that place. I know the textures.” Oakland is different than Newark, and Newark is different than Fremont, but there’s something familiar – the sound of BART or just the highways that I’ve seen. And so I remember that feeling of seeing Fruitvale and just being like, “Whoa, I didn’t know you could make movies. I didn’t know you could do that.” I love that feeling. So I was like, if we can do that times 100 for people who are from a corner of the bay that I felt like hadn’t really been depicted in movies, then we should try to do that.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
