Edward Yang – Yi Yi or A One and a Two

Today, the podcast does something different. In this episode, we are looking at a film. And not just any film. It is perhaps the greatest film ever made. Yi Yi or A One and a Two is the magmum opus of Edward Yang, the Taiwanese filmmaker. We are going to explore the symbolism of balloons, sticks and condems in this amazing film. 

The Scene from the Film Discussed in the Podcast (in Chinese):

If you want to rent or buy the Film in English:

Podcast Transcript (AI Generated):

My name is Lee Moore, and this is the Chinese Literature Podcast. I know, it’s been a while. Sorry about that. I just today finished my  Taiwan chapter for the book that I’m working on, China’s Backstory, and so I finally allowed myself to get back to it. to the podcast. Hopefully it won’t be this long again, but we’re back with the Chinese literature podcast.

Well, today we are going to be pushing the boundaries of that word, literature, because  in this podcast, we are going to talk about a film. Now I know most of y’all would say that a film is not a work of literature. Ah,  but here is the thing. In most literature departments in America, that is not true anymore.

We use the word text to describe anything. It might be a written text, but you can also talk about a filmic text. That’s just a fancy word for a movie, though we’re not allowed to say the word movie in literature departments. That’s verboten. It’s very Declassé.  You can talk about a painting as a text. You can talk about a propaganda poster that has elements of painting and some elements of written work also can be a text.

We can analyze all of these things in the literature department. Those today are considered literature. I know that sounds strange. That’s how I’m kind of making this theoretical leap here. This Podcast, even though today we’re discussing a film. So Does film fit within the ballywick of the Chinese literature podcast?

Kind of. I’m going to say yes, but also I will wait to hear back from listeners. If there’s this big rebellion, don’t ever do another movie again. I don’t want to hear, I won’t do it again.  If y’all like it, you know, if you send me an email saying, Hey, that was actually a pretty cool discussion. I will try and do that a little bit.

I think I’ve told y’all this, I taught Chinese film first as a TA for many years, and then last year I taught Chinese film as a, an adjunct professor. So I have a lot of things to say about, about films. Okay, enough preliminaries. What film are we actually going to be talking about? Appropriately, I have selected a film that, in my humble opinion, may be the greatest film ever.

ever made. Not the greatest Chinese language film ever made. The greatest of all time. The goat, in the parlance of our times.  The film’s Chinese name is Yi Yi. In English, it’s often translated as a one and a two,  although that’s not really a great translation. In truth, it’s hard to translate the title.

Literally, it means something like one, one. And when written out in Chinese, the numeral one is just a, Straight horizontal line, so there’s this mystical quality to the name. It almost looks like the start of one of the hexagrams from the I Ching, that book of Chinese fortune telling that still captivates readers in the West.

So, the title is hard to translate. That is not nearly as hard as trying to explain what makes this film such an amazing movie.  I almost said movie. Did you hear that?  So what is this film about? I don’t even know how to explain the topic that this film takes on. It’s about life. But that’s not really good.

That’s the worst answer one could possibly give because what film is not about life? And yet, When you watch it, you’ll realize that’s exactly what this film is about. You know, if  I were to give you specific examples from this film, every example that I would give would just seem unremarkable. There is a boy in an elementary school in Taipei.

He likes to take photos of the backs of people’s heads.  There is a grandmother. She collapses into a coma early in the film. And the family, who is the main subject of the film, become the main.  are all drawn from this family, the Jian family.

Almost all of the film, having people from this family talk to her while she’s in a coma. So those examples just don’t seem interesting. But when I teach this film, I still have students go, Yeah, you are right. That is the greatest film ever. Of course, I have plenty of students who say they hate it. It’s too long.

It’s too boring. All valid criticisms. It is a very long film. It’s almost three hours long. Too boring. There’s no explosions really. There’s one murder that I’m not going to tell you too much about. Cause I don’t want to spoil it for you,  but for the most part, it’s very mundane.  And yet. Every time I teach it, I’m still able to get students to go,  That film was really awesome.

Which is remarkable, because like I said, it’s a three hour long film, and students today do not like to sit through anything that’s longer than a short Disney film. Okay, let me just sketch a brief outline of what this film is. So, E. E. is directed by Edward Young. Edward Yang is born in Shanghai in 1947.

His family flees the communist and they make it to Taiwan. He’s one of the members of Taiwanese society.  That’s really the, the privileged elite, uh, the mainlanders in Chinese, they would be called Wai Zheng Ren. Uh, he grew up in Taipei. He went to the university and studied electrical engineering. He comes to the United States.

He goes to the university of Florida. Let’s Not hold anything against him. For those of y’all who don’t know, I’m a Georgia fan, and Florida and Georgia are rivals.  Young goes to Florida. He studies engineering there. He dabbles in film a little bit while he’s in the United States. He’s at USC, the University of Southern California’s film school, a bit.

It’s one of the best film schools in the world. Yang gets accepted into Harvard to be an architect. He doesn’t go, thank goodness. I don’t know why he doesn’t go, but I’m very happy he didn’t go. He works in the tech industry in Seattle for a bit. Yes, there was a tech industry in Seattle before Amazon. And then he returns to Taiwan and he gets involved in film there.

A young dies of cancer at the age of 59 in 2007.  He’s part of what came to be called the Taiwanese new wave cinema. Some famous members of that are Huo Xiaoxian, Taiming Liang. Edward Yang made some of these Taiwanese new wave films. This is his most famous film. This particular film, Yi Yi, won numerous awards.

It was awarded the best film at Cannes in 2000. The Village Voice, the influential New York newspaper, called it the third best film of the 2000s. After this film came out, Yang became highly regarded by film connoisseurs. The actual DVD sold out. that you can buy is from the Criterion Collection.

Criterion is just a company that’s kind of become the arbiter of great films in the world. Of course, Edward Young is not the only one who’s famous in this film. Uh, there is another man in this film. His name is N. J.  His real name is Wu Nianzhen. He’s oftentimes just referred to in real life as NJ. The name of the character that he plays is NJ.

Of course, he has a different last name because it’s the Jian family. So it’s Jian NJ. But NJ is his name in the film. The characters in the film all refer to him as NJ. So it kind of comes to seem like a film more about him than some of the other characters. Though really, it’s about him. This entire family.

So NJ is a famous Taiwanese actor and director He’s an actor in this film, but also in the City of Sadness Another famous Taiwanese film  if I do more films for the podcast, I could talk about that film But honestly, I find that film a little boring but boring for everyone Interesting reasons? Hey, I can’t believe I just said boring for interesting reasons.

Okay,  so NJ is a famous Taiwanese actor and director. He’s also a screenwriter for a film called Sandwich Man, a film that’s based on a Huang Chunming story. Huang Chunming is another famous Taiwanese writer. I don’t think we’ve done him on the podcast, but I’ve got a couple of stories that I want to do on the podcast for him.

So, what is this film, Yi Yi, about? This film follows the lives of this upper middle class family in Taipei around the turn of the millennium. There’s NJ, we already talked about him, he’s the dad, there’s Min Min, the mom, Yang Yang is the five year old boy, Ting Ting is the high school aged daughter, Ah Di is Min Min’s brother, and then finally there’s the grandmother, the mother of Ah Di and Min Min.

The film opens with a wedding, but it’s not a very happy wedding. Odd D has knocked up some girl who he’s not married to. In fact, she’s not even the girl he’s been dating for a long time. And this gets to one of the main questions of the film, which is fate. Odd D is this figure who’s obsessed with fortune.

He’s always talking about ways to get good luck.  He delays his marriage to this girl he’s knocked up because he wants a particularly lucky day to marry on. He’s So that his marriage will be lucky he doesn’t name his child because he can’t think of a lucky name So for some long period of time his child just doesn’t have a name So he’s obsessed with this idea of luck and fate this guy this character id  But id also keeps making these stupid mistakes and bad things keep happening to him because he’s making these stupid mistakes And so one of the questions Questions that the film seems to be asking, is the reason that Adi impregnates this woman because he’s unlucky?

Or is it just because he’s making the dumb choice to cheat on his girlfriend? Another example, Adi loans some money to a friend who’s not very trustworthy. But the friend tells him, Oh, I’ve got this amazing, too good to believe deal. And then of course it turns out it’s, it’s really too good to believe and the, the quote unquote friend runs off with I.

D. ‘s money and I. D. goes, Oh, I’m just so unlucky. But he’s not unlucky, he’s just stupid. And one of the questions that hangs over this film is, is life the result of fate?  Or is  It we who determine our life through our own choices. Now this question of fate, yuanfan in Chinese, is interesting because lots of Chinese literary works would have  fate as an important theme.

This film is made in 2000, so it’s a very contemporary film.  But in past literary works in China,  the answer to this question would have been yes, fortune, fate, these things play a very important role in life. But the answer that I come away after watching Yi Yi probably  a dozen times by now is that  I don’t think Edward Yang thinks luck is really a thing anymore.

He’s kind of abandoning this traditional Chinese Obsession with fate. And he’s saying, you know what, the choices we make are the things that drive our lives. There is no such thing as fate beyond us that’s deciding what will happen to us. It is in our hands. So, at the very beginning of the film, Aunty and this girl, he had a fling with, they get married, Then, almost immediately, the grandmother collapses outside the family apartment while taking out the garbage.

And these two events are the inciting events for the rest of the plot. We follow these characters as they experience their life. Ting Ting is the daughter. She’s in high school. She deals with her sexual maturity and issues she’s having with boys. Boys and the threat of violence that comes with becoming involved with men sexually.

Yang Yang is a young boy. He’s in elementary school. He’s starting on this journey of sexual maturity at a very young stage. Of course, he’s too  young. Journey is also a sexual journey. Um, but it’s, it’s a very obviously different kind of, of sexual journey because he’s, he’s only in elementary school during that wedding in the very Beginning of the film young young is teased by some of the girls.

He doesn’t understand why they’re interested in him He’s got this childlike sexuality where these girls are kind of  picking on him and he doesn’t get it and he feels bad And that’s the beginning of his his journey towards maturity in this film And we do see him mature in this film during the wedding he also picks up a balloon which he takes to school and And while he’s at school, one of the girls at school, she’s the class monitor.

She’s the, in Chinese, we would say the banjang, uh, the sort of class president, something like that, but has more power than class president. They kind of arrange day to day things about the class and who is in charge of cleaning up what, that sort of thing. So the banjang, the class monitor,  Yang Yang likes her, but she seems to hate him.

She taunts him all the time. And the banjang. reports her to the teacher saying that Yang Yang has a condom in his pocket.  Now, the teacher that she reports him to is really, really weird. He’s not one of the main characters, but I have to talk about this teacher a bit. This man walks around with this big stick, which he’s always threatening to smack students with.

He never does. We never see him physically violent, but there’s always this implicit threat there. There’s also a sexual threat. And this is where things get very weird in this film. I know I use the word sexual to talk about this five year old boy, and a lot of people would say, Mmm, it’s probably not really sexual.

But, let me just say this.  When you see the relationship that Yang Yang, the boy, has with this teacher, and how they’re kind of in this love triangle, with the banjang, the, the class monitor, it gets a little weird. Almost to the point where, once you start thinking about the film, it almost gets a little icky.

In the film, we never actually learn this girl’s real, given name. The characters in it just refer to her as the concubine.  Xiaolapu. Very weird for a six, seven year old girl. And the teacher is swinging this big stick around. Sometimes he’s referred to as the husband. There is no further explanation given for this relationship in the film.

It’s just left there. The implication being that something’s going on. It’s So Yang Yang comes into school with this balloon in his pocket. He brought it from the wedding, and the concubine reports him to the teacher. The teacher calls him out in front of class, saying he knows someone has something that they shouldn’t have.

in their pocket, and he shouldn’t have brought it to school. The teacher says, it’s a condom. Come on, just admit it. Yang Yang doesn’t say anything. The teacher turns out Yang Yang’s pocket,  and it turns out just to be, be a balloon.  The teacher plays it off. Next time I’m going to catch you. But there’s this weird tension between these two male characters, one  in his forties and one not yet ten, and the relationship that they have with this girl.

And that leads me to my favorite scene in the film, which is somewhere in the middle of the film. Yang Yang and some of his friends are going to get back at this girl. So they’re going to try to drop a water balloon on her. Yes, it is a balloon. Edward Yang is very good with slipping these symbols into his film.

Yang Yang himself tries to drop a balloon onto the concubine from an upper floor of this elementary school.  The balloon misses and it accidentally hits the teacher who’s the one who’s always carrying the big stick. That teacher comes running after them. The group scatters and we see Yang Yang run into this classroom where they are watching an educational video on how life was created.

And in this magical moment that only Edward Yang could pull off,  the concubine walks into the classroom and this video is actually projected onto the concubine’s body as she tries to find a seat in the front of the classroom.  And they are talking about how positive and negative charges are opposites and the tension between positive and negative charges build and build and build until it’s too powerful to resist.

And then you suddenly have lightning and we see yang yang wave. watching this film. It’s literally being projected onto the concubine and he’s putting these two things together, this positive and negative. Here’s this girl who I have feelings about. I don’t really understand them. And now I get it. It’s about the creation of life.

This tension between male and female that he’s dealing with at that wedding, the very beginning of this film, it builds up and builds up until it’s released in this very powerful way. So that’s the story of Yang Yang. We have this arc of sexual maturity that goes on throughout the film.  In Jae, on the other hand, is the dad.

He’s facing a very different situation. He’s married, he has two kids, and the marriage that he finds himself in at this stage is not a particularly happy one. It’s not a horrible marriage. It’s not like they’re fighting. In Jae and his wife, Min Min, just Don’t seem to have any spark in their life. We never see them showing any sign that they’re in love during the middle of the film.

Mean mean has what’s essentially a nervous breakdown and she retreats to a Buddhist sanctuary and just disappears out of the film for an hour, leaving NJ in charge of the family. NJ faces his own midlife crisis. At the wedding, he actually runs into an old girlfriend. They spend a lot of time together while Min Min is off at this Buddhist sanctuary.

I’m being careful not to reveal too much. I want y’all to go and see the film for yourselves. It’s a fantastic film, really long, but so powerful. It’s available on YouTube, at least in the United States, it is. The Chinese version is up there for free. I don’t know if someone purchased it. Put it up there illegally, or if YouTube decided to make it available for free, which they frequently do with films, but it is there.

I will link to the scene I talked about with Yang Yang and the positive and negative charges when I put up the website in case you’ll want to go watch it.  Unfortunately, because, uh, I, I only have that available to me free in Chinese. It’ll, it’ll just be in Chinese and you’ll just have to kind of see what he’s doing without it.

Without necessarily understanding everything. If you don’t speak Chinese,  though, you can rent the film with English subtitles on YouTube or by the DVD, of course. So I’ll post those links on the website, Chinese literature, podcast. com. While you are there at the website, why not pre order my forthcoming book?

The one that  is taking me away from podcasting. And it’s the reason that I haven’t come back.  Oh my goodness. I think this is going to be five weeks since my. Last episode,  five weeks in between this episode and the last episode, goodness gracious,  to preorder my book, China’s Backstory, you don’t need a credit card, just an email address, you give my publishers your email address, and they will give you updates on when the book is coming out.

Also, please email me to let me know what you thought of the show. The email address is Chinese literature podcast at gmail. com. Did I do an okay job discussing it? Was that to your liking? Did Do you want me to just go back to, to literary text? Or, or is it okay if I occasionally throw, throw some films in there?

Or, you know, whatever you want to talk about. I, I love hearing from people, although it sometimes takes me longer to get back to folks than I, than I would like in responding to emails.  If you want to give more than just an email, you can always find me on Patreon, ChineseLiteraturePodcast at Patreon. com.

Last time I talked about this as an accidental Taiwan series, I’ve done a bunch of stuff that’s Taiwan related. I’m not sure if I’m going to keep that going. I have a couple of interviews that I’m trying to line up with some big names. I don’t know if they will happen. Uh, by the time the next podcast comes out, maybe fingers crossed, I have a ton more material in Taiwan since,  you know, I taught a whole course on it.

Uh, so maybe I’ll just keep the Taiwan theme rolling or, or maybe I’ll go back and forth between China and, and Taiwan. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t plan very well. I will be slower in the past. Previously, I did an episode every two weeks. Now it’s gotten to be more like every four weeks since I’m, I’m rushing to finish China’s backstory.

please forgive me, as we say in Chinese, you know, before I go, for a while I’ve forgotten to do That final chungyu that I was doing at the end of the show. And I just realized that. So I decided to actually bring that back. Today’s chungyu is to see a small clue and to know the whole picture. I think this film is so special.

Focused on small things in life  and these for the film become a means for understanding the larger picture We see this one family’s life passed before us in three hours three generations And somehow it feels like once we watch this film We’re able to comprehend all human life at one single sitting It’s really that kind of feeling I get when I watch this film so that Chung you is again  Jian wei chi  zhu.

I babbled on for way too long. I’m going to sign off by saying my name is Lee Moore and this is the Chinese literature podcast.