Yi Yi Through Time and Space

A few years later, for what may have been the twentieth time, I watched Yi Yi, again, on a layover in Taipei. The extended wait was now a part of my usual itinerary to Japan, where I’d visit friends, opting for a cheaper ticket in exchange for a daylong pit stop. It’d been a decade since I’d first seen Yang’s film—and since then, I’d watched it on mute, a little incessantly, just to see how the images connected with one another. Sometimes, I watched those same scenes on repeat, looping one after another, trying to dissect how NJ’s jaunt in Tokyo carried so much narrative momentum, or how Ting-Ting’s searching and Sherry’s resolve exerted so much gravity.

The airport’s colors were muted in a way that felt appropriate. I spent the first hour or so of my layover walking from one end of the terminal to the other. I stepped in and out of T-shirt shops, where employees gently chastised me about choosing the correct sizes. And I definitely had time to leave the premises, just for a bit, but I didn’t trust myself to make it back for my connection to Narita. So I opened my laptop instead, slipping in my DVD of Yi Yi—one of the handful of possessions that I rarely traveled without.

The airport’s food court was a loose circle of noodle bars. I started the film there, only to pause it, before drifting from gate to gate, restarting it at each stop. When I finally made it to my gate, another dude who seemed to be traveling alone slept on the seats just behind me. From time to time, I looked up at the clock, and, eventually, I noticed that he was watching my screen too. He gave me a look, and I nodded, unplugging my headphones from the laptop. And the film continued from there—for two viewers now—with this stranger saying “Wow” from time to time, and my nodding along in agreement.

The closing piano notes hit just as the final boarding call began. As the credits rolled, we stood together in line: not quite bawling, but rubbing at our faces nonetheless.

One of the last times I watched Yi Yi was in a theater, two years ago, back in my old neighborhood on the outskirts of Houston. The town hadn’t changed too much. But it was different, at least a little bit. The pockets of diversity that had been so scarce were more prominent. The rice fields and football turf shared space with comic shops and bakeries and coffee shops. One day, in the summer, a theater owner reached out to ask if I’d be interested in screening a film—I’d just published my first book, and this felt like a low-key event for all parties involved. He said he’d be open to anything I had in mind—and for me, the choice was abundantly clear.

The day of our screening, about fifteen people shuffled into the theater. They didn’t appear to have much in common. By way of introduction, I only asked how many folks had already seen the movie. Two people raised their hands. One woman said that she’d heard of it, but she’d never watched it. Another family said the film that they’d actually come to see had already started, but this one seemed interesting enough. Their experience stumbling into the film didn’t feel too far from how I’d arrived at it myself.

So I thanked them for taking the time. I shuffled up to the top row, in the back. From the adjacent screening rooms we could hear the sounds of other movies: a big-budget superhero film on one end, a white Oscar darling blasting symphony strings on the other.

As many times as I’d seen it, the story before me felt like a brand new thing, and I found myself turning toward the details that had first captured me: The way that light plays off of each streetlamp. How colors blend from one sky into another, or how a scattering of cars smooths into traffic. Everything in the shots, however quotidian, contributed to the larger mural of the character’s lives. At one point in the film, when the child protagonist leaps into the water, there was a collective gasp through the room, heard over murmurs and rustlings. The woman sitting in front of me held her breath for what felt like twenty minutes—until we saw the boy again, happy and amiable, soaked and plodding across the screen. The lady, and the rest of us, let out an audible, breathy “Jesus.”

In his notes, Yang wrote: “I’d like viewers to come away from the film with an impression of having been with a simple friend. If they came away with the impression of having encountered ‘a filmmaker,’ then I’d have to consider the film a failure.” It’s a reminder that simple stories can contain entire worlds. This is something—a momentous thing—that Yang accomplished: within the mundanity and approachability of Yi Yi, its precision and clarity of vision are implied. It’s a film that quickly and irrevocably reveals itself to be one that only Yang could have made. Yang found connections between the tiny moments that can make a year, between streetlights and skylines and sidewalks, and allowed us to find them too. Not in a showy way. But the film allows us to make the connections on our own, guiding us with the deftest of hands.

When the piano melody drifted in and Yi Yi ended once again, there was a collective shift in the crowd. It sounded, to me, like the exhalation of recognition: what a gift to see yourself, across the world, in someone else, among so many others. But no one stood up. We all sat for a little longer, seemingly waiting to see if there was another minute, or if there was anything else for us to glean that we could take with us, until we could watch Yi Yi again.