“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.
,” 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 , while Kyra is employed at what appears to be a high-end corporate office, where she often spends nights working. 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 might.
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 Yang is permanently broken—irreparable because he’s an outdated model of technosapien, one that has stored memory banks.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.
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.
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.
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