Can We Talk About the School Club Fair in Didi? Spoilers

When I was in high school, I took video production classes as electives. Every year, we had to make a music video. Our sets were confined to the high school and our homes. Our casts were almost all teenagers. Our music videos frequently wound up with themes like bullying, mental health, and parents divorcing. These are all vital topics. I doubt any of my old classmates would deny that, but, at the time, we grew tired of what we saw as the tropes of our high school’s videos.

The music videos were usually formatted as a series of vignettes- three to five characters with different struggles that all connect somehow. The best comparison I can think of might be Crash- the controversial Best Picture winner at the 78th Academy Awards. Our videos would typically include a vignette about someone struggling academically. We would film a close-up shot of a student’s desk as a teacher dropped a marked test on it. We would draw an ‘F’ or a ‘D’ in red marker at the top of the prop test.

In my second-to-last year of high school, my classmate pointed out that, in real life, our tests did not have letter grades. We used percentages. Less than 50% was a failure. 50-59% was D. 60-69% was a C and so on. As Canadians, we had picked up on Americanisms from TV. It came out in our videos. A large red letter is easier for a viewer to read than a large red double-digit number. We opted for the letter grades. Shorthand overruled accuracy.

I was reminded of the importance of visual shorthand in summer 2024 when I saw Didi. (Spoilers below)

Towards the end of the movie, Chris Wang (Izaac Wang) starts high school. He attends some kind of club fair and puts his name down on a sign-up list for a visual arts club.

Sign-up list? Visual arts club? I recognize that the high school experience is not uniform across North America, but I watched that scene with envy typically reserved for children gawking at a model train in the window of an old-timey toy shop in a Christmas movie. You see, my high school had neither visual arts clubs nor sign-up lists.

My high school was a sports magnet school. Athletic kids meant to feed into other high schools fought for spots at my school to play on our teams. Teachers showed enthusiasm for coaching. It was a Catholic high school. Religion-based clubs were the next most prominent.

Other clubs lacked the same faculty and student enthusiasm. Creative clubs would start and falter after a year- the school paper, the improv club, the film club, etc. We had a school play every two to three years instead of every year. I always auditioned. In Grade 9, it was the school musical. In Grade 10, it was improv club. In Grade 12, it was the school play. I never got a part. I think I was known as the worst actor in school. (At least, the worst actor who consistently auditioned for school plays and took drama electives.)

I did score a single line in the play the school put on when I was in Grade 12. I suspect it was out of pity. The line would have typically gone to a Grade 9 student. I ended up quitting the play before opening night in the spring.

I thought I might try to get involved in drama in other ways. I wasn’t good at sports, so I had time. After I didn’t make the school musical in Grade 9, I thought I might try to volunteer backstage. I thought I could be the stage manager, or at least, a stagehand.

There was no convenient sign-up list for backstage work. I asked the drama teacher how I could volunteer. She absently told me to show up at the weekend rehearsal. It was the Saturday of Easter weekend. I got my parents to drop me off at the high school after a church function. The rehearsal was on the stage in the cafeteria. Costumes and props occupied the long tables. So did I. I don’t know how long I sat there, waiting for an opportunity to volunteer, but it must have been a few hours. I don’t remember what I told my parents when I got home.

I think the ultimate stage managers would have been teens who got in through their networks. They might have been friends with the actors. They might have been younger siblings.

We often tell adults to network, network, network to find jobs, but shouldn’t high schoolers have immediate opportunities to learn and discover passions? It’s not like anyone’s paying these kids. Why was my high school so focused on sports? High schools should not focus on niches like stalls in a mall food court. They should offer a charcuterie board, as deep as it is wide, of interests to explore.

Earlier in the film, Chris tries to fit in with some older, “cooler” skater kids. He does so at the expense of his friendship with Fahad (Raul Dial). It backfires when he disrespects his mother (Joan Chen) in front of them. “Dude, don’t talk to your mom like that.”

The ending of Didi signifies self-acceptance. Chris pursues his interests, reunites with Fahad, and learns to cherish his family. The final few scenes are light on dialogue. Facial expressions capture everything. I trust that the visual arts club would help keep Chris on the path we see him on at the end of the film. Chris is, after all, based on Academy Award-nominated filmmaker and Didi director Sean Wang. Extra-curriculars teach kids that they can do more than just “be cool.”

I’m around the same age as Sean Wang, the director of Didi. Wang started high school in 2008 in California. I started it in 2010 in Ontario, Canada. Fast forward a decade and a half later, and the current rhetoric around extra-curricular activities looks very different from what’s portrayed in Didi. In my home province, the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation (OSSTF) published a press release earlier this year, drawing attention to government cuts to education. The release notes the loss of mental health professionals in schools. Many have left for higher salaries in the private sector. It makes no mention of extra-curricular activities. That said, I suspect that a school with inadequate mental health supports likely lacks both the funding and morale to invest in a visual arts club.

School funding is one issue. There’s also the question if students have the capacity to assemble. We live in an era where special interest groups want to police school sports, clubs, and libraries.

Maybe I have rose-coloured glasses. These issues may have been just as prominent when I was a kid. All I’m saying is that when teenagers discover Didi ten or twenty years from now, I don’t want them to experience the same WTF moment I did when Chris signs up for the visual arts club. I don’t want them to watch any old movie, see a kid in a school club, and marvel at it. That’s what movies with landlines are for.

Next time your country, province, state, city, or town has an election, please vote. Vote for better school funding, the right to read, and the right to play sports. The world would be a better place with more visual arts clubs and sign-up lists. At least in this case, let’s make visual shorthand a reality!