I’m grateful for Edward Yang. The first and second generations of my family to settle in my home country speak their native dialects to each other. I’m 3rd gen, and grew up watching my uncles, aunts and parents speaking in dialect to one another, but they’d use a little Mandarin and mostly English with me. I know I’ll never be able to write characters who fully speak all three languages because I don’t, and it’s a little hard to swallow sometimes because by losing those languages, I lose all the specific accents that they have. I’m growing older and more distant from my relatives now, I don’t hear so many outstretched Hokkien conversations anymore. But when I watched the scene of NJ and Sherry arguing while walking the streets of Tokyo, I got to watch a conversation in that dialect with characters who weren’t stereotypes but actual people. They reminded me of my family, and the film as a whole feels like home. Along with the fact that it’s a philosophical(?) masterpiece, and incredibly well-written, I know I’ll keep coming back to this film to remember people whom I can’t recreate on my own, and I am so grateful for that.
Also my mom saw the scene where Yun Yun crashes the wedding, and she got so stressed out it was funny.