#jonathan chang

Happy 35th, Jonathan Chang.

The greatest novel I've ever watched. Overwhelming scale, as Yang's extraordinary empathy allows us to see, from a careful distance, the mechanisms of a family in all of their different perspectives. If this was the only film I had ever watched, it alone would have tripled my lifetime. What lives we have been given to inhabit, even if through narrow doorframes and darkened shades. When we are lost at sea, there is chaos, as the water rises and falls around us, rocking our vision so we can only make out some small piece of the vastness we occupy. Yang allows us to glimpse the view from the shore, the ocean stretching out to the horizon, filling our vision with its intricate tides and currents. But we can only imagine what immense, invisible depths give rise to the dance of the waves on the surface.

What a beautiful, impossible world we see when we close our eyes. And how new everything feels when we open them again.

Daddy, I can't see what you see and you can't see what I see. How can I know what you see?

Yi Yi (2000)

Yi Yi