Sean Wang must be an up-and-coming director to watch since he managed to get Joan Chen to appear in his debut feature. It joins a growing lineup of Chinese American films and appears to be a semi-autobiographical account of the director’s own childhood in Fremont, California in 2008. The main character is a little shit who I don’t find sympathetic in the least but I suppose this attests to how realistic it is as a coming-of-age film. It’s the kind of film that can feel underwhelming as nothing especially earthshattering happens. But I like understated films so this is a winner for me.

Chris Wang is a young teenager growing up in California with his elder sister Vivian, paternal grandmother Nai Nai and his mother Chungsing. His father is absent as he works in Taiwan and his elders prefer to speak Mandarin at home. He has few friends and feels insecure in his ethnic Asian identity. He acts out, engaging in juvenile pranks against Vivian, possibly because she is due to move out soon to go to college. He has a crush on a half-Asian girl Madi and gets a chance to befriend her at a party. Meanwhile Chungsing faces a constant stream of criticism from Nai Nai for poor parenting while she herself dreams of being a painter in her free time. Chris is compared unfavorably to the son of another Taiwanese American family and pressured into attending a cram school to prepare for entry into a prestigious college. He want to be a skateboarder and not being very good at it, attempts instead to make skateboarding videos. Through this, he gets an in with an older group of skateboarders who introduces him to a more adult world of parties with drugs and alcohol.

One part of the appeal of this film is the not-so-long-ago nostalgia. Chris and his friends use MySpace, Facebook is brand new, YouTube consists of amateur videos instead of the slick productions that we see today. There is online chatting with text emojis, mobile phones that are not yet smart, and the general vibes of an era in which kids still go outside to play. It’s actually shocking to me how gross Chris’ pranks are, like peeing into his sister’s lotion, but I suppose such stories are drawn from the director’s own life. I underestimated the boy’s age when I was watching the film, so his acting out and juvenile psychology makes a lot more sense in retrospect. He’s a real shithead for being so terrible to his family as he basically has a good home and a decent upbringing. Check your privilege indeed. His gripes about fitting in with friends, coming across as being cool and finding his own identity as an Asian American loom large only inside his own mind. It is fascinating that it ties with the larger community he is a part of and portrays the internalized racism among them. No one actually singles Chris out for being Asian but he still sensitive to it and tries to minimize his heritage.

I suppose Chris’ story is meant to be relatable so messing around with squirrels in the park with his friends is seen as a dumb thing that kids do and will make for a great story after they’ve grown up. I must be too much of a square because I think it isn’t funny at all and he deserves way more of a smackdown for his misdeeds. That’s why while this feels like a honest and realistic depiction of adolescence, by contrast it makes out his mother to be too much of a saint. I understand that this is coming from a son who is looking back at how he treated his own mother with regret. But this would have been a better film if it had portrayed Chungsing as less of a saint with near infinite patience with her children. Her one flaw is that she eventually has enough and confronts Nai Nai about her endless hectoring. This is shockingly unthinkable by Asian moral standards but does align with the American sense of what is right and wrong. So this apparent character flaw is really just another way that he is valorizing his mother.

The film shows only a tiny slice of Chris’ life and nothing particularly dramatic happens. That’s alright because life isn’t only just about high adventure and confrontations. It does mean that this does have an anticlimactic ending which might feel unsatisfying. I admire the authenticity and the honesty here and learned something from it but I wouldn’t say this is one of favorite coming-of-age stories.