Yi Yi

It was past ten by the time I finished watching Yi Yi. After walking my friend to the bus stop, I went back to West Hall to grade papers for a while. I kept thinking about an argument I’d had with a student over a grade during office hours that afternoon. I was angry: I hadn’t done anything wrong, yet I couldn’t hold my own. I started wondering why I was so easily pushed around. Then I remembered something similar happening in a student club, and how I’d asked myself the same question back then. Life goes in circles. So many things seem to change, only to repeat themselves in a different form. That was also how I felt after watching Yi Yi.

I’d worried that a three-hour film would feel too long. While watching it, I found myself wishing it would last a little longer. Three hours aren’t enough to capture an entire life, but they are enough to tell the story of a year in one family. Beginning with a wedding and ending with a funeral, the film follows everything that happens to NJ’s family over that year: a major project at work, Tokyo, A-Di’s marriage and the birth of his child, Ting-Ting’s first love, and Grandma’s death. The camera and the storytelling remain remarkably calm, but that calm can’t conceal the upheaval within the characters.

From the adults to the children, everyone in NJ’s family shares something. After talking it over with my friend, we settled on a description: “They look calm, but they’re all a little unhinged.” NJ is supposed to be the dependable, honest one, yet he refuses to put profit first and often disagrees with the other executives. Ting-Ting, the well-behaved daughter with good grades, blames herself for Grandma’s coma and loses sleep over it for a long time. Yang-Yang says little, but his head is full of strange ideas. The characterization in Yi Yi is extraordinarily delicate. Its dozen or so major characters all feel fully alive. Even when someone who initially seems perfectly ordinary turns out to be a murderer after only a few appearances, it doesn’t feel abrupt.

I love what Fatty says: “Since the invention of movies, human life has become at least three times as long.” Sometimes I feel as though my head is full of all sorts of muddled thoughts that would sound childish if I said them aloud. I’m not even sure whether they count as thoughts, or whether they’re just some unnecessary thing people call “teenage restlessness.” So I keep them to myself. After watching Yi Yi, I felt that perhaps everyone is like this. NJ, A-Di, Lili—all so calm on the surface, all carrying so much inside, sometimes doing things that seem absurd.

A few days earlier, I’d finished Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy. If Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance pushes human anger to its breaking point, then tears everything open to show us what people really are, Yi Yi is a beating heart beneath a calm face. Look: even amid the small, everyday concerns of family life, this is what people are like.

If you asked me which character I liked most, I’d say Yang-Yang without hesitation. It almost seems as though the director couldn’t help loving him either: the film ends with him, and he’s on the poster too. (P.S. Quite a few people seem to see Yang-Yang as a stand-in for Edward Yang himself.) There’s more than innocence and curiosity in his eyes. There’s a kind of resolve, something I don’t see in the softer eyes of the adults who have been worn down by life. Even when the girls pick on him, even when his teacher does, he still stubbornly raises his camera to photograph the backs of people’s heads, showing them a side of themselves they cannot see.

He says, “Grandma, there’s so much I don’t know. So, do you know what I want to do when I grow up? I want to tell people things they don’t know and show them things they can’t see. I think that would make every day fun.”

At the wedding, a grandmother who knows everything and has been through everything chooses silence. At the funeral, a child who knows nothing and has been through nothing has so much to say, and so much he wants to know. Life comes around again. If I could, I’d like to always be Yang-Yang.

It’s two in the morning as I finish writing this. I have office hours again tomorrow. I hope they’ll be a little calmer than today. After watching the film, I still couldn’t see the back of my own head. But at least I’d seen the backs of a few other people’s. I seemed to know a little more, and to have a little more I didn’t understand. Perhaps that’s what the title, Yi Yi, means.