Where the Future Is Asian, and the Asians Are Robots
“After Yang,” the second feature by Kogonada, takes place in a speculative future that looks uncannily like our listless present, with holograph-like phone calls that resemble Zoom and domestic interiors that could have been lifted from an Architectural Digest slide show. The technology has improved in this world, populated with clones and friendly robots known as “technosapiens,” which are practically indistinguishable from biological humans. Looming in the background is the hint that some catastrophic geopolitical conflict has ignited between China and the U.S., but the central crisis of the film takes place much closer to home. Based on a short story by Alexander Weinstein, “After Yang” follows the everyday lives of a couple, Jake and Kyra (Colin Farrell and Jodie Turner-Smith), and their beloved technosapien, Yang (Justin H. Min), whom they purchase to help their adopted daughter, Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja), connect to her Chinese heritage. Early on, however, Yang starts to malfunction—suddenly glitching in the living room, in the middle of a multiplayer game reminiscent of Dance Dance Revolution. The rest of the film tracks the effects of the loss of Yang on each member of the family, Jake in particular.
“After Yang” follows a long tradition of science-fiction narratives that fall under the category of “techno-Orientalism,” in which the future is often figured as Asian, and Asians are often figured as robots. The genre is historically understood as emerging from American anxieties about Japan’s postwar economic boom, starting in the nineteen-seventies. Techno-Orientalist texts typically forecast an impending future, as in nineteen-eighties cyberpunk media such as William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” and Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner.” These earlier, Japan-inflected techno-Orientalist worlds, however, have since become a template for speculations about the future—any future. There are techno-Orientalist sensibilities in “Ghost in the Shell” (adapted from the Japanese anime franchise and featuring Scarlett Johansson as a vaguely Asian robot), the Asian-inspired action sequences of “The Matrix,” the Asian-infused aesthetics of Spike Jonze’s “Her,” the futuristic Asian section of the Wachowskis’ “Cloud Atlas,” the dancing Asian robot in Alex Garland’s “Ex Machina”—you get the idea. In these films, an ambient dread about Asian influence gets expressed through an aesthetic sensibility rather than by representing or centering actual Asian characters.
As with Edward Said’s foundational theory of Orientalism, in which the Eastern Other is framed as peripheral to the rich humanism of the Western subject, techno-Orientalism figures Asians as distant, unrelatable, and inscrutable. Whereas Saidian Orientalism understood the Eastern Other as fundamentally backward and uncivilized, however, techno-Orientalism presents an upgraded vision of the Asian as threateningly futuristic and advanced. In both iterations, the Other is a robot—or at least robotic—because Western speculations about an Asianized future still rely on stereotypes of Asians as passive, unfeeling, and good at math.
Earlier instances of techno-Orientalism largely fixated on Japan’s technological advancements, but the twenty-first century has progressively shifted toward “rising China.” (Techno-Orientalism might be traced as far back as the British author Sax Rohmer’s infamous evil scientist, Dr. Fu Manchu, who plots to build up Chinese power by kidnapping European engineers.) As scholars David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu write, in “Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media,” “Japan creates technology, but China is the technology.” In other words, if Japan was once the innovator, then China is now the relentless manufacturer.
“After Yang” falls into this genealogy of techno-Orientalism, especially in its focus on Chinese hegemony and Chinese robots. Yet, if the future is Chinese in “After Yang,” it still looks pretty Japanese. Kogonada, a South-Korean-born American who first made a name for himself with short video essays on auteurs such as Yasujirō Ozu and Hirokazu Kore-eda, is especially indebted to Japanese filmmaking aesthetics. (His mononym riffs on one of Ozu’s screenwriters, Kogo Noda.) “After Yang” is aggressively populated with Japanese cultural signifiers, from kimonos and bowls of edamame to its Mitski soundtrack; even Mika’s name is Japanese, not Chinese. As with Kogonada’s first feature film, “Columbus,” the mise en scène references Japanese architectural modernist tropes with minimalist interior spaces that integrate elements from nature. What makes “After Yang” feel futuristic becomes indistinguishable from what makes it appear generically Japanese.
The means by which the central couple, Jake and Kyra, adopt Mika remain vague, but the main takeaway is that, even in this speculative future, there are still a lot of Asian people to go around. The film’s mixed-race family promises a kind of Benetton neoliberal fantasy, but it’s still Mika, and, by association, Yang, who are visually and culturally flagged as outsiders in this globalized world. In a flashback, Mika confides in Yang that children at school keep asking her about her “real parents”—a racial microaggression that apparently hasn’t been subdued even in a China-inflected future. Besides these two, no other Chinese characters appear in the film.
Like Kazuo Ishiguro’s “artificial friend” in “Klara and the Sun,” Yang is a technological accessory purchased to help keep a lonely child company. With time, though, Jake and Kyra become overly reliant on Yang, as both grow increasingly absorbed in their respective work lives. Jake runs a failing tea shop (a nod to the old-school version of Orientalism), while Kyra is employed at what appears to be a high-end corporate office, where she often spends nights working. (Many of the couple’s conversations take place via speakerphone, with Kyra calling from her office and Jake from a self-driving car.) In the relative absence of Mika’s parents, Yang takes on an outsized role in the child’s life, much like a live-in caretaker (or older sibling) might. “We bought Yang to connect Mika to her Chinese heritage, not to raise her,” Kyra says, after Yang breaks down. Jake nonetheless seeks to salvage their trusty technosapien: “We spent a lot of money on Yang. I’m not gonna feel bad if he does more for Mika than teach her Chinese fun facts.”
As he tries to get Yang fixed at a series of increasingly dubious repair shops, Jake discovers just how much more his technosapien knows than he does. Yang is permanently broken—irreparable because he’s an outdated model of technosapien, one that has stored memory banks. As Jake watches snippets from Yang’s memory bank—a kind of film within the film—he witnesses a depth of feeling and emotional complexity that was previously imperceptible to the family in which Yang played such a crucial part. What’s remarkable about this Asian robot lies not in his technological futurism—in being better, faster, or stronger—but in his complex interiority: one of a person with memories and a secret past. Jake realizes that he has been a parent not to one but to two adopted Chinese children.
The techno-Orientalism of “After Yang” is muted in comparison to most of its forebears. Sure, it’s got the video calls and the self-driving cars, but these trappings have been associated with the future for so long that they now appear almost quaint. Here, the future is Asian in the way that the present is Asian: filled with high-end ramen shops and white people who know a lot about exotic teas. This sense of banality—of genericness—actually might be the most original thing about the film. “After Yang” is refreshing amid a landscape of tired films about wired Asians, because it seems to recognize itself as arriving rather late. What makes “After Yang” feel new lies precisely in how it renders its techno-Orientalist future as an alternative version of our everyday present.
If anything, the real anxiety haunting Kogonada’s film is not necessarily pegged to a U.S.-China rivalry, or even to rising Asian power, so much as it is to a generalized anxiety about our globalized moment. “After Yang” isn’t really “about” Yang so much as it is about what the spectre of a Yang portends. The eeriest thing about Kogonada’s science fiction is how its future feels pretty much already here: the film taps into fears about a shared vulnerability that anyone raising a child or trying to keep afloat in her job might understand. The characters in “After Yang” live in tremendously uneasy, isolating times, heightened by the mediated quasi-intimacy of adults who interact over video calls and children who are increasingly dependent on living among—and learning from—technological gadgets. If Yang symbolizes the long-held techno-Orientalist anxiety about futuristic Asian robots, then, in a sense, we are all living after Yang.
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