After Yang’s director explains how he upends sci-fi’s ‘hollow Asian’ trope

Kogonada’s melancholy sci-fi feature After YangThis book is many things. It’s a testimony on loss and an exploration of how technology has influenced our lives, as well as a story that reveals the human side of care. One thing it isn’t, however, is conventional. The futurescapes of sci-fi films are often painted in metallic sheens. Yang after YangThe soft scenes of domestic life and the gentle forest surround viewers. Sci-fi narratives often address discovery, adventure or conquest. Yang after YangTurns inward with a story that explores family, grief and memories. Kogonada deliberately subverts the tropes and mechanics we’ve come to expect, using them as jumping-off points to respond to the sci-fi genre’s dark legacy of Orientalism and the dehumanization of Asian people.

Although the story is simple, it has many layers. Yang (Justin H. Min) is a “technosapien,” an android-like bot purchased by Jake (Colin Farrell) and Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) to care for their adoptive daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) and teach her about her Chinese heritage. Yang’s malfunction causes Jake to have to transport him all over the place, searching for someone to fix it. While getting a diagnostic, Jake learns that Yang has a memory bank that’s stored a few seconds of footage a day. The rest of the film follows Jake’s journey through Yang’s memories, uncovering a past and life he realizes he knew nothing about, as he seeks to make sense of the loss and deal with the family tensions that Yang’s “death” has revealed.

By making Yang a robot whose function is so explicitly bound to Chinese culture — and outfitting the film with East Asian-inflected details, ranging from the kimono-like clothing everyone wears to Jake’s career running a tea shop — Kogonada explicitly situates his story among the vast number of sci-fi films that have drawn from Asian imagery and culture. It has always been obsessed with Asia. From the Fu Manchu-style antagonist in tomfoolery, Asian culture, iconography, and language can be seen throughout cinematic futures. Flash GordonThe Hong Kong-esque appearance of Blade Runner’sLos Angeles, the movie influences of kung-fu in The Matrix To the cityscape Her, This was created using references to Pudong in Shanghai.

Science fiction, on the other hand, has often ignored or typecast Asians it has borrowed from. This portrays us as if we were not there and reinforces old stereotypes. Yang after Yang director Kogonada tells Polygon, “There’s such a history of Orientalism in Western media’s engagement of the East — it’s something that’s often fetishized, and there’s so much literature deconstructing that. […]Because I am an Asian filmmaker, it was a challenge to me to approach this in a new way. My struggle with my Asian identity is often in its creation: Am I Asian? Too Asian? And there’s no solid ground for that identity, especially if you’ve been dislocated, so we have to contend with the way that Asia and Asians have been presented. There’s no avoiding Orientalism for an Asian.”

Recently, a term that describes this sort of appropriation has become popular: “techno-orientalism,” which at heart refers to the ways popular media has blended visions and anxieties of the future with reductive Asian stereotypes. At the height of this phenomenon lies what Kogonada calls “the Asian robot,” a character that strongly heightens the traditional racist tropes of Asians as hard-working but lacking rich internal lives, as machine-like math whizzes capable of executing tasks, but unable to think for themselves. The trope, an extension of the equally reductive “inscrutable Oriental” stereotype, makes Asian people hollow, empty, and passive — even when they’re flesh-and-blood characters, they’re still figurative bots, just as much as Yang is a literal one.

Occasionally, these “hollow Asians” are “freed” by an enlightened (read: white) agent, as in Cloud Atlas, where an artificial person called a “fabricant” (played by Bae Doona) is shown the harsh realities of their world by Jim Sturgess in yellowface. At other times, they’re used as plot devices or instruments to service the main characters in the film, like the mute servant-bot Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno) in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina. But more often, they’re part of the film’s backdrop, too busy selling things or laboring away to make their way into the main narrative. Sometimes, they aren’t even played by Asian people at all. (Looking at you, Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell). All these movies feature characters who support the notion that Asians are basically empty vessels. They can be used to plot, make props, or worn in films by other characters. But they remain void of any internal life.

“I’ll be honest, the conversations I have with Asian people are often existential and philosophically complex,” Kogonada says. “It’s a community that’s really consumed with these deeper questions. But I’ve almost never seen that in cinema, which has really simplified the Asian dialogue.”

Which is why Kogonada’s treatment of Yang is so subversive. The film opens with Yang, a character who fits snugly within this archetype. He describes him as a bot pre-programmed to perform tasks and live to serve. Jake and Kyra are fond of Yang, but they begin the film with exactly this basic understanding of him — that he’s just a machine that has served as a crutch, letting them neglect their parenting duties. Even though Justin H. Min is a wonderful Yang actor, Mika doesn’t seem to be able to really see Yang the way he should. It feels significant that Mika and a museum curator played by Sarita Choudhury are the film’s only major Asian characters, and also the only ones who initially see Yang as something other than a convenient device. It’s as though the recognition of his deeper, human identity could only occur to someone capable of seeing past his Asian-robotic appearance — and as if the only people with that capacity are other Asians.

Yet as the film progresses and Jake delves into Yang’s memories, he finds a life well-lived, iridescent and beautiful. Kogonada says he wanted to evoke those personal conversations he’s had with other Asian people, the ones so rarely seen onscreen. “As much as Yang is a mystery to me — and I wanted to keep it like that — he also reflected a sort of Asianness that was really familiar to me,” he says. “As much as he was a robot, he was the most engaged with the world, the most sensitized to what was beautiful around him.”

Kogonada uses these childhood memories to help Jake, in an interesting twist on the white-savior stereotype. “I knew that the film could be set up as a white-savior narrative because of the race of the family,” he says. “But for me, I knew that the father was the one who was lost and disconnected, and it was going to be Yang who was fixing and saving the father.”

By letting the audience see Yang’s memories, Kogonada takes us into Yang’s body alongside Jake, and shows the world through his eyes. In doing so, Kogonada runs the risk of playing into the trope of the Asian body as something you can “put on.” It’s something that happens explicitly in films that use yellowface and reduce Asianness to a costume (like Cloud AtlasAnd in an even more subtle way, Asian robots are not allowed to possess the kind of inner essence that could prevent them from being played by a white actor. Ghost In The Shell). It’s also a practice we see all the time online, when people take on Asian symbols to signal a sort of Asianness. (Think of all the online user names that start with “Samurai” or “Geisha,” or Oli London, the British influencer who rebranded himself as Korean after getting plastic surgery.) All these instances use the idea of the “hollow Asian” as a pretext to justify white using a racial identity as a costume — after all, there was “nobody home,” so to speak, so the body is up for the taking.

Photo: A24

But instead of furthering this trope, Kogonada uses the idea of a white man stepping into an Asian body to place the audience face-to-face with Yang’s delicate sensitivity, his unspoken histories, and ultimately, his impenetrable complexity. He fits the “Asian robot” trope until he doesn’t, until he reveals he was never the empty vessel other people assumed he was.

The beauty of the montage sequences that show Yang’s memories heightens this realization, and gestures toward a complex soul that lies just out of frame. Kogonada crafted the visuals of Yang’s memory interface specifically to strengthen that association. “I didn’t want it to be something cold and knowable like a desktop,” he says. “I felt like the form itself should feel like a mystery […] that the space itself should have an emotion to it, beyond the content.”

Through Yang’s memories, Kogonada returns us to one of sci-fi’s eternal questions: “What does it mean to be human?” Different forms of human identity are a constant specter throughout the film, especially when it becomes clear that Yang himself was musing over his Chinese identity. Since Yang was designed to strengthen Mika’s relationship with her Chinese heritage, he was outfitted with an Asian body and a head full of “Chinese fun facts,” but he’s unsure whether those things actually make him Chinese. (It’s a sentiment likely to resonate with other Asian-Americans watching the film.) While Jake is initially surprised that Yang was more concerned with ethnic identity than with a “deeper” existential human identity, the film makes it clear that these questions are deeply attached, a double provocation behind the question of “What am I.”

As Kogonada puts it, “There’s this question of what it means to be human that we’re used to in sci-fi, but as important in my film is what it means to be Asian, which we find out is what Yang cared about, moreso than this Pinocchio question. And it puts this thing that’s normally in the background to the foreground.”

By simultaneously raising and relating questions of heritage and humanity, Kogonada sheds light on a fact that science fiction has often ignored: These questions of humanity haven’t historically been applied to everyone equally, and by choosing to ignore these other dimensions of identity, sci-fi has often proceeded at the expense of those of us who don’t fit the predominantly white, male profile of the genre’s longstanding primary protagonists. Yang after YangAlso, he refutes the notion that human identity and race questions are mutually exclusive. As if serious artists had to choose which one they want to explore.

“That’s exactly the way I wanted to approach [human identity and cultural identity] — in dialogue with each other,” Kogonada says. “I really believe in conversation, and we’re in a crisis of discourse nowadays. Real conversation requires space and openness, and I think that our mediated world has amplified a kind of shouting and simplification, which fights against genuine dialogue, where you can have more than one kind of conversation going.”

By challenging and complicating the trope about the Asian Cyborg, Yang after Yang paves a new way forward, showing us another way sci-fi’s fascination with Asian culture and people can come to life, and creating a space where Kogonada’s “existential and philosophically complex” questions can find room to breathe. He gives us a radical departure from a genre that has taken the easy way out when it comes to its Asian characters, and he does so by acknowledging and working off science fiction’s problematic legacy. It recognizes how the Asian-cyborg trope dehumanized real Asians and takes that as an opportunity to help re-center them in this genre. It’s simultaneously an interrogation of what it means to be human, a rebuttal to fetishists, and a critique of a genre that has often left us on the margins. “Those are my favorite kinds of conversations,” Kogonada says, “where things aren’t contained in one space or subject.”