Edition note: An independent English rewriting for viewers of Edward Yang’s 2000 film Yi Yi. It preserves the Chinese argument while reorganizing its sequence for an English-language essay. Full-film spoilers.

NJ spends the year carrying out other people’s decisions. His partners send him to negotiate with Japanese game designer Ota, then abandon the deal for a cheaper imitation. NJ objects and complies. Even when vindicated, he does not say “I told you so.”

I. The competent man who has receded

NJ attends meetings, solves family problems, travels, returns, and keeps functioning. His passivity is not laziness. It is the gradual removal of his authorship from actions that still require his labor.

He speaks about his own company with the detachment of an observer.

II. Ota’s ordinary originality

At dinner Ota performs a card trick, then plays piano. He says every day is a first day because no morning has been lived before. Isolated, the sentence could be inspirational decoration. In context, it describes the only adult whose work, play, music, and judgment visibly belong to him.

When NJ’s partners betray the agreement, Ota loses business but not the capacities by which he conducts a life.

III. Repeating the past in Tokyo

NJ meets Sherry, the lover he abandoned decades earlier. They walk through old memories and ask whether the past can be lived again. Yang crosscuts their middle-aged return with Ting-Ting’s adolescent first romance. Both encounters stop before becoming the alternate life imagined around them.

NJ returns saying that if a second life would unfold much like the first, perhaps there is no need to live twice.

IV. Min-Min’s mountain

Unable to speak meaningfully beside her unconscious mother, Min-Min retreats to a Buddhist center. She returns with a parallel discovery: the practices there feel much like the repetitive days below.

Changing location does not by itself change the authorship of action. Tokyo and mountain retreat can become new stages for the same relation to oneself.

V. Activity that cannot be outsourced

Ota does not control markets or other firms. He can be deceived. His freedom lies neither in success nor immunity. It lies in the continued possession of what he does—designing the game he believes in, playing music, performing a trick, choosing a partner.

NJ’s problem is not that other people make demands. It is that his own judgment has become commentary on actions whose course he no longer claims.