Review: Kogonada’s Sophomore Feature ‘After Yang’ Explores the Nuances of Cultural Identity
“You should know that both trees are important. Not just this one, but the one from this branch, too.”
Yang is an android. While he can perform many tasks and act just like a human, he is brought into his new family with one purpose: to bring Jake and Kyra’s adopted daughter Mika closer to her Chinese heritage. Together, Yang and Mika are just like siblings, with Mika not only learning from Yang as an older brother, but also seeing him as her best friend, which at the age of seven is one of the few things that matter. That is until Yang unexpectedly malfunctions and stops working.
Jake tries his best to get his analogous son repaired in the following days, refusing to recycle him and get a new android even when advised otherwise, but despite his best efforts, Jake can’t find anyone to help revive Yang. He is only left with Yang’s memory cube, a small dice-sized object that houses five second daily clips of what Yang sees. The grim reality that Yang is never coming back stares down Jake, but before he can accept such truth, he looks at all the “memories” Yang has accumulated over the years, piecing together an android’s existence and what kind of “life” he lived.
Those words so inseparable from the human experience are in quotes because androids theoretically don’t have them. A perennial theme of science-fiction grapples with the very notion of whether or not these aspects of humanity can be imbued in an artificial being and whether or not those metrics make ourselves human. While that idea is not completely ignored in Kogonada’s sophomore film After Yang it is not the central one. Adapted from the short story written by Alexander Weinstein, After Yang’s thematic focus arrives on three fonts, each with varying degrees of effect: grieving through the living memory of someone lost, maintaining the integrity of the family dynamic in the face of said loss, and Asian cultural identity, the later of which being the most compelling dissection.
While the science-fiction genre commonly elicits existential questions from android compatriots, on rare occasion does it find itself at the intersection of ethnicity. Kogonada’s film can be found here where it evaluates measures of cultural identity when our heritage isn’t traditionally defined. For Yang, he is engineered and programmed to replicate Asian cultural identity but, in a similar way to how we question if an android has humanity, Kogonada asks if these traits define Asian culture and if not, what constructs do. This same line of questioning extends to Mika who was born in China but raised in America. She feels alienation at school from kids who bully her because of her heritage, and she acknowledges that her adopted status means she has one foot in Chinese culture and another in American culture. One scene that Mika shares with Yang shows them walking through an orchard of trees that have grafted tree branches. Mika notes the strangeness of these trees and how they appear artificial, but Yang reassures her the importance of both the originating tree and the new one, offering a clear analogy for her situation and those experiencing diaspora.
Where themes of grief or struggling family dynamics can be commonplace across film, it’s After Yang’s take on cultural identity that stands out. In the world of science fiction cinema, it feels particularly novel, but what I admire is how Kogonada’s leverages the genre to think on these ideas, to explore the nuances of what merits our own cultural identity, and in the wake of the film, it’s this aspect of the film that I find most rewarding.
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