by Aiman Tahir Khan
There is a moment in Edward Yang’s seminal final feature Yi Yi (2000) when the father walks with his estranged former lover while trains arrive and depart on multiple parallel tracks. When he recalls his sweaty palms from the moment he first held her hand, the screen cuts to his daughter in the present, though in a different location, reaching for the hands of the person she likes for the very first time.
Yi Yi is a film which, unlike conventional conflict-driven Western storytelling, relies on the juxtaposition of fragmented, interpersonal moments to reveal cycles of life and death. This evening, upon my second viewing, I realised that as the film progresses—each member of the family ensnared in their storyline—Yang refuses to portray human faces simply talking with one another, choosing instead camera angles that cleave image and emotion. What we are confronted with, as a result, is a film that returns us to our own lives, like a mirror catching the afternoon light in unexpected ways.
A film can be a place to return to—for consolation, for remembrance, for imagination. “My uncle says we live three times as long since man invented movies,” Fatty tells Ting-Ting, because “movies give us twice what we get from daily life.” I have decided to spend a month with Yi Yi to explore this notion, re-watching it once a week as I crochet my cardigan, to engage in what critic Mitch Therieau describes in the Chicago Review as a new function of criticism: not evaluating the object but capturing the critic’s experience of the object. I plan to record a journal with my thoughts as I cast my gaze on the question: what compels us to return—to a story, a lover, a place?
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This evening, as I skimmed through Alfred Corn’s The Poem’s Heartbeat (1997), I was enthralled by his hypothesis that the repetition we seek—in music, poetry, even matching bathroom tiles—springs from the sensory experiences we encounter in the womb. Before birth, the first sensations we perceive are our mother’s heartbeat and the rhythm of her daily walks, both occurring in regularly recurring sequences. Over time, we develop our own heartbeats and the rhythmic pattern of breathing: inhale, exhale. These patterns accustom us to a human sense of rhythm, which we intuitively gravitate toward.
Perhaps to be alive is to endlessly place things side by side. In her last year alive, Lebanese-American artist Etel Adnan painted a black line over and over again, replacing her earlier vibrant palettes with a series of minimalist paintings concerning her daily confrontations with mortality. Simple black brushstrokes against a pure white background.
In Chinese, when the characters 一 (one) are placed vertically, one above the other, they visually form the character 二 (two). This is how the title of Yi Yi (一一), which translates literally to “one by one,” becomes the English title A One and a Two in the opening sequence.
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Today, I finished the thirteenth row of my raglan cardigan, and now I will alter the pattern to begin shaping the sleeves. Fernando Pessoa once compared this kind of crafting to his literary activities, describing it as “stitch on stitch forming a whole without a whole” in a poem. Edward Yang’s approach to storytelling in Yi Yi is much the same as he portrays each family member’s storyline. There is something mechanical and precise about his style, which could be rooted in his scientific training.
Before turning to film, Yang received his graduate degree in electrical engineering and worked for seven years in the United States, gradually questioning the direction of his life. In a quiet theater in Seattle, a screening of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) roused his passion for filmmaking, compelling him to return to Taiwan and experiment with cinema. “This is what I thought a film should be,” he remarked.
I feel a deep surge of affection for this transformative power of art: how it provokes us, again and again, to wrestle with the purpose of our lives.
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The past few days, a gentle winter sun has dappled through my windows in the afternoons, and today, it was a warm companion as I watched Aguirre, the Wrath of God. The opening shot, elevated by the trance-like background score, sets the pace for the intensely slow, close-proximity examination of the doomed journey of conquistadors in the lush jungles of South America. Though I found it tedious to watch due to its pacing, I could see why this meticulously-crafted project served as inspiration for Edward Yang. Both Yang and Herzog make use of long, static shots which allow the environment—the urban settings in Yang’s films and the natural in Herzog’s—to act as a character in the narrative.
One of my favorite of Yang's aesthetic tendencies is the depersonalized manner in which he portrays particular moments. When Ting-Ting and her grandmother return home after the lively opening wedding scene, they are seen entering through slightly distorted security camera footage; the Y2K style blurry figures evoke a nostalgic sense of the passage of time. More often, Yang uses mirrors or glass panes as mediating surfaces. In some of the most emotionally charged scenes, such as when Min-Min attempts to convey her existential despair to her husband, she is shown through the window, her figure interspersed with lights flashing from outside. This heightens her emotional unreachability; she remains in shadows, similar to how her family struggles to grasp the depth of her suffering.
About his filmmaking style, Yang once remarked that he perceives the process of making a film as similar to writing a letter to a close friend. When I watch his films, I see this in the way he lays bare the emotions of his characters and articulates the world that lingers between people—the regrets and the half-truths they cling to, all achingly familiar.
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Lately, my days have been filled with mundane tasks: gardening mint leaves from our lawn, ironing my mother’s clothes, squeezing home-grown kinnus for bittersweet juice. In the afternoons, I read; I’ve just begun Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile (1994), a novel set in 1980s Taiwan.
Written in the experimental form of loosely-connected diary entries, it follows a young woman grappling with her sense of self. Interspersed between accounts of her tumultuous relationships are monologues by an anthropomorphized crocodile, which allude to the loneliness and grief of living in disguise from society. Qiu Miaojin was one of the first openly lesbian writers in post-martial-law Taiwan, and the scholar Dylan Suher, writing in Asymptote, situated her work within the Chinese tradition of qing: passion as a full-blown aesthetic ideology.
In Notebook #4, the narrator, Lazi, asks: “What is the human race, anyway, but a multitude of outlets for desires?” If the book answers any questions, they extend beyond such observations of human nature to include the possibilities of literary form. Miaojin has employed montage and jump-cutting techniques to structure the story, a feature also present in Yi Yi. Encountering these storytelling methods, I imagine the work as being centered not on a theme, but a wound—one picked incessantly, until it might heal.
In Notes, there is no resolution. Qiu Miaojin took her own life when she was only twenty-six.
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In the final Notebook, Lazi writes to Shui Ling, “Part of me has been secretly hoping that good things do last forever, but it’s time to renounce that hope. I looked across the water, and as my tears fell, I told myself: You can’t hold on to a beautiful thing forever—not in your memory, not even if you keep loving it.”
Dreams of love and hope shall never die, reads Edward Yang’s epitaph.
I am placing things side by side again, in vain.
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On the way home from a long drive, I rewatched Yi Yi. Each time I looked up from my screen, the full moon appeared red through my window, dust in the atmosphere refracting light at odd angles. The film too begins with a blood-red background, and Yang sets up the internal conflict for each member of the family within the first eleven minutes of screentime: Ting-Ting’s palpable longing as she walks past a pair of lovers hand in hand, Yang-Yang’s reticence at dinner because of being bullied, NJ’s unexpected encounter with his past flame, the ex crashing A-Di’s wedding festivities, Taipei’s bright lights in the foreground.
This time around, I noticed that in a repeatedly shown shot of the family apartment’s hallway, a picture of Bob Dylan hangs on the wall. Below it, the album cover for A Hard Day’s Night (1964) by The Beatles. When I zoom in, the image in the middle of the album is the back of someone’s head.
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One of my favorite sequences in the film takes place midway, when Yang-Yang arrives late to class. A documentary about thunder plays through a projector. As the narrator describes how violent opposite forces attract to cause lightning, which might be the source of all life, the girl tormenting Yang-Yang appears, the back of her head set against a lightning flash on the screen. It feels as though something profound has happened, something that has reached the river that curls inside Yang-Yang. Then, it cuts to a scene outside where heavy rain falls and Ting-Ting stands on the opposite side of the street from Fatty.
“The poem, the picture, the song is only water drawn from the well of the people and given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink—and in drinking, understand themselves,” spoke Langston Hughes in a radio speech from Madrid in 1937. The role of art is to educate the heart, to enlarge our inwardness—a theme Edward Yang grapples with through his child philosopher. Near the end of the film, NJ is shown looking through the pictures Yang-Yang has taken on his camera: the back of people’s heads.
In a later encounter with his uncle, Yang-Yang reveals the purpose of his photography project. Since people cannot see behind themselves, he is showing them the part of reality they cannot see. And I am thinking now of Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977), where she wrote: “To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have.”
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Another theme that recurs in Edward Yang’s films—and in the works of Taiwanese New Wave directors Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang—is alienation: not only the growing estrangement of modern man from his surroundings, but also the distances between people inhabiting the same space. In Tsai Ming-liang’s garish yet tender Vive L’Amour (1994), three individuals unknowingly share the same decrepit apartment until they fall into each other’s orbits. The wound: a black hole inside each life; a crack in the wall to peer through.
In Yi Yi, I was fascinated by how quietly Yang portrayed the struggles of each member of the Jian family. The family barely interacts with one another about their inner turmoil; the apartment and bedridden grandmother are the only things they truly share. By the end of the film, I felt intimately familiar with the contours of their apartment—the pink orchids populating sullen corners, the vintage frames lining the walls, the messiness of everyday life laid bare. And to talk to someone who cannot respond—a peculiar way of being both connected and disconnected at once, much like the relationship between a film and its audience.
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In Notes, Qiu Miaojin: “There are times when affection between family members is so deep that emotional burdens become too much to share. When the boundaries are nearly nonexistent, who has the heart to impinge on the other?”
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This morning, as I finished crocheting my cardigan, I listened to The Beatles. Fans of the band have spent decades trying to identify the opening chords of A Hard Day’s Night. To pin it down would require precisely determining every note played on every instrument in that moment, which modern technology has enabled researchers to do, but even so, conclusions about which notes belong to which instrument remain elusive.
In Yi Yi, it is nearly impossible to individuate which character is the protagonist.
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Though it felt absurd as I was doing it, I rewatched Yi Yi today with a pen in hand, recording the minutes each character spent at the center of the story. There are scenes where multiple characters share the focus, but after adding up my entries, I found the most time was devoted to the father, NJ. What surprised me was that A-Di, the brother-in-law, received more screen time (21 minutes) than Min-Min (16 minutes). I wonder if this was a deliberate choice to reflect how invisible her character feels and the lack of recognition she receives from her family.
I’m not sure what else to do with this data; I feel more interested in the ways characters on the periphery receive meaningful attention in Yang’s films. In Yi Yi, even the neighbor’s daughter has a narrative arc worth following, seamlessly entwined with Ting-Ting’s.
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Last summer, a friend analysed Yang’s storytelling approach using Kishōtenketsu, a four-part narrative structure widely used in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean literature.
What strikes me about this structure is that it is not based on the traditional arc of conflict, tension, and resolution. It lacks symmetry: the first two acts are slowly developed until a surprising turn appears that introduces a new element. The fourth act “harmonizes” all the preceding elements, not necessarily through a peaceful resolution, but through a revelation about their interconnectedness.
Before I knew the language for it, I observed this kind of narrative in the unhurried, contemplative works of Yasujirō Ozu, a filmmaker whose sensibility Yang shares. Both are auteurs of a distinct grammar that punctuates the world’s indifference to our wounds through the debris of daily life. In Ozu’s Late Spring (1949), there is also a tender scene where two characters walk along train lines: a father and daughter, a duty and an obligation, a one and a two.
Donald Richie described the final impact of Ozu’s films as a “kind of resigned sadness,” which applies equally to Yang’s work, though I might call it a sense of exhalation. Although the characters undergo events that transform their inner lives, there is always a feeling of resignation—a sense that everything is changing, yet somehow remaining the same. Near the end of Yi Yi, NJ and his wife reconcile, sitting together on the bed they share, succumbing to their reality. Perhaps this is the deeper truth all along: that we cannot control anything, that there are places lost to us forever, people no longer ours to keep—and to accept it all is to continue being alive.
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Now that I’ve reached the end of my month, my cardigan completed, I am unsure if I have found answers for the questions I set out with. Regardless, I feel enriched by the experience and its solitude, having done what Rilke urges: “to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms.” And I feel glad to walk back into the rooms of Edward Yang’s Yi Yi, though I know now by heart the cards he will pull from his deck.
Aiman Tahir Khan is a writer from Lahore, Pakistan. Winner of the inaugural Pakistan National Youth Poet Laureate title in English, her work is featured in or forthcoming from Nimrod International Journal, Harpur Palate, The Penn Review, Wildness, and elsewhere.