Tabula Rasa

If you give someone a blank canvas, what will they fill it with?

Life has a peculiar way of coming full circle. Eight years later, the pristine, winding hallways of the local mall in Bellevue (aka Seattle’s suburb straight out of The Sims) have once again become my runway; the slick, reclined movie theater seat my perennial throne.

Dìdi is a coming-of-age film, directed and written by Sean Wang, following a Taiwanese-American adolescent boy’s summer before high school. The basic premise is similar to Inside Out, a Pixar animation where the main characters are the personified emotions of a young teenage girl. Both films dramatize the symptoms of teenage angst like FOMO and the rash decisions teens make to try to fit in. Puberty twists their bodies as well as their words, lies beginning to slip off their sharpening tongues.

Dìdi and Inside Out don’t leave much room for interpretation and contemplation. The utility of these films surges in the moment, wrenching you in the gut with one flick of the director’s wrist, not the slowburn buildup arising from post-theater fermentation.

The plots are relatably frustrating and frustratingly relatable. They conjure up core memories of my own. When I got my first pimple in fifth grade, a gnarly little red bump on my cheek that I swear was a magnet for everyone’s stares, I told my friends that it was a mosquito bite. Or the vigorous shouting matches between my brother and I at the dining table, scraps of my mother’s cooking (and on lazy days, Kraft mac n cheese) strewn across the floor.

In Dìdi, emotion and culture walk hand-in-hand. Director Wang just gets it. By “it,” I mean the second-generation Taiwanese/Chinese-American experience in a neighborhood where other immigrant kids are hosting pool parties on summer afternoons and bent over math workbooks in the evening under their parents’ tsk tsk. The film doesn’t seek to tackle meta questions like “what does it mean to be Asian-American?” It’s merely a summer-sized appetizer—a slice of the life of a random Taiwanese-American boy in early 2000s California. The taste of Dìdi lingers on your tongue for a little bit and crumbs might fall onto the tablecloth. But inevitably, you take a sip of water, lips smacking for the next course.

The telephone pad

I saw this thing on Instagram Reels… Before you go 🤦🏻‍♀️, hear me out.

So, I saw this thing on Reels. A guy brought a blank pocket notebook to a houseparty and had everyone fill out a spread with whatever they wanted. A drawing, a quote, a piece of writing, stream of consciousness, literally anything (within reason). They left a sliver of themselves for the next person to glimpse. In some respects, the notebook is a physical manifestation of an Instagram story: a non-sequitor series of travel film shots sandwiched between impulsive 2am musings, the unemployed friend spectating a baseball game on a Tuesday afternoon, your ex-situationship at a new cocktail speakeasy (you swipe out of the app to bookmark it on Beli).

I’ve been passing my own notebook around to the characters of my own purgatorial slice-of-life drama. It holds polaroids at a housewarming party, a ludicrous dream diary entry from my high school debate partner, a sketch of someone’s favorite street in Seattle, and a hand-written melody in bass clef from my coworker.

This desire to create and leave our mark tickles all of us. It manifests in million-dollar blockbusters down to low-budget indie films, from curated Instagram highlights down to hand-written pocket notebooks for our loved ones’ eyes. Even equity research weaves in an element of creativity that I don’t have the eye for. We simply need a canvas and someone to tell us, “hey, I want to know more about you.”

Nonetheless, there are the people who, by the very nature of their character, relinquishes an unquenched curiosity to excavate the inner workings of their mind. These people inspire us to learn, make, and create. They seemed to have unlocked some secret to living a joyous life that, in being around them, you hope to osmose.

A sparkly person creates not just for passive consumption, but with the result of inspiring others. To all the sparkly people in my life, thank you for being you! ✨