Chi-Tsung Chang
After Yang, written and directed by Korean-American filmmaker Kogonada, is a 2021 science fiction film that tells the story of Yang (Justin H. Min) and his American family in the aftermath of his loss. Yang, a Chinese-presenting robot, or a techno sapien, suddenly becomes unresponsive after a family dance competition in the opening credit sequence. As Jake, the adoptive father (played by Colin Farrell), embarks on the quest to repair the unconscious Yang, the family members each introspect their life and the meaning of Yang’s words and deeds. With the box office success of Crazy Rich Asians and the subsequent emergence of more Asian-led projects, one could say Hollywood is finally joining the tech and the finance field in the so-called “Asian Century,” a futurist-conceived time that sees “a reorientation of global activity from the West toward the East.”[1] However, in American popular culture, “Asianness” has already made its way into the science fiction genre in the 1960s—seen in foundational works such as Frank Herbert’s Dune and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. Betsy Huang writes that, as renowned authors such as Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin “look to Daoist thought as a means of cognitive revision and spiritual transformation for the West,” the “technologizing of the Orient” paves the way to “the postmodern techno-Orientalism of the eighties cyberpunk and beyond.”[2] But whether it is the premodern techno-Orientalism of Star Wars—also heavily inspired by Dune—evoking ancient Chinese philosophy with the absence of Asian bodies (until Disney and Lucasfilm try to court the Chinese theater audience with the casting of Donnie Yen and Jiang Wen in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story in 2016), or the postmodern techno-Orientalism of Blade Runner and its depiction of a Los Angeles already conquered by highly industrious and technologized Asians
In Vivan L. Huang’s Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability, she proposes a reconsideration of inscrutability—from an Orientalist rhetoric that casts Asians “impenetrable or unfathomable to investigation; quite unintelligible, entirely mysterious” from the perspective of “Euro-American subjectivity” to an Asian diaspora-centric way of engagement that “protect a creative space and time in which minoritized lifeworlds may exist for their own audience.”[3] The term “surface relation” refers to how the Asian population and its culture are flattened and homogenized, but it also describes a way to interface with other people while maintaining cultural opaqueness. Huang uses a passage from the San Francisco Chronicle from 1906 to illustrate the common temporal paradox that simultaneously portray Chinese people as “the awakening infant” and “forty-four centuries in the making”—adding racist anatomical descriptions of their lack of expressions and stressing cultural difference, the Oriental subject is conceived as the temporal, epistemological—and as history has proved, legal—Other.
Likewise, in Long T. Bui’s Model Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton, Bui traces the racialization of Asians as automatons back to European Renaissance and the humanist project to determine the qualities—“self-control, rationality, and autonomy”—that separate “humans” from nature, and so the metaphor of the Oriental automata emerged in the seventeenth century to put in contrast with the humanistic values possessed by the enlightened Occident.[4] The European nations’ colonial conquest and dominance on the world stage cemented the idea of “Africans, Oceanians, and Amerindians [occupying] an obtuse place in humanity’s primordial past,” with Asian nations in the process of passing out of history and Europe as “the absolute end of history.”[5] The Oriental automata then manifested in the colonial myth to describe colonized laborers as human machines to “substantiate white racial superiority” and justify the exploitation of colonized subjects, since “adherence to primitive lifestyles meant they did not maximize or utilize the ecological abundance of nature.”[6] The rhetoric of Asians as automatons later coincided with the emancipation movement that threatens the African slave trade, and the demand for labor “only reinforced workers’ nonhuman status rather than encouraging their inclusion in the Western humanistic tradition.”[7] For the Irish and Italian workers and American progressives who advocated for better pay and working conditions, the racialized— “machine-like” and “unnatural”—work ethics of the Chinese workers render them into the threat of automation akin to new factory machines.[8] The inhumanity of Chinese workers was considered fundamentally incompatible to the American society and its idea of personhood, since they “[contributed] nothing to the market or the bourgeois family” and were viewed as “tireless (and sexless) drones.”[9] The general anti-Chinese sentiment pushed Congress to sign the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 into law and banned all Chinese immigrants, who were instrumental to the California Gold Rush and the building of the transcontinental railroad.
Yet, as the “Orientals” are raced as a people of dull but diligent workers, Japan’s rising automobile and tech industry between the ‘70s and ‘80s fueled the xenophobia which gave birth to the cyberpunk genre. However, Japan’s innovative enterprise did not emancipate itself from the model machine myth; rather, the rhetorical tool of colonial subjugation is simply retooled. Japan’s cutting-edge development of robotics feeds into the anxiety of losing jobs to automation, and Japan’s mastery from heavy industries to consumer electronics “did little to change views of this country as an evil empire,” as the US trade deficit to Japan was referred to as the “economic Pearl Harbor.”[10] In a similar vein, cyberpunk as a genre operates in the language of colonial conquest, but now it is the “Occident” that is being invaded by the “Orient.” The trope of the rainy street scene filled with neon light signs is a hallmark of the cyberpunk genre, and while the Asianness is appropriated to signify the future, according to Thomas Foster, the depiction of cyberpunk’s cityscape contains “the ideological and often specifically racist subtext that informs the language of urban ‘ruin,’ ‘decay,’ or ‘blight,’ language more often used to describe racialized ‘inner-city’ ghettoes than cities in general.”[11]
For cyberpunk, time and location—the “2019” and “Los Angeles” in Blade Runner—are vital in conveying the logic of conquest. The homogenous time, as theorized by Bliss Cua Lim, is “epitomized by the ideology of progress, served as a temporal justification for imperialist expansion.”[12] The teleologic of homogenous time conceives the past and the future as the logical extension of the present, and the fixed temporal setting of “2019” or “2049” collapses all potential imaginaries into an inevitable singularity. Similarly, the name “Neo-Tokyo”—simultaneously denoting the progress of a new world and the decay of the old one—is often invoked in many cyberpunk media, including Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and as one of electronic music artist Perturbator’s songs, whose naming scheme for his cyberpunk concept albums fringes on pastiche. In Sarah Ahmed’s “Affect Economies” essay that connects affect to objects, Ahmed argues that “borders are constructed and indeed policed in the very feeling that they have already been transgressed: the other has to get too close, in order to be recognized as an object of fear, and in order for the object to be displaced.”[13] For the cyberpunk genre, anxiety and xenophobia are mapped onto Asiatic signifiers on US soil—what renders Los Angeles dystopic is the cacophony of foreign tongues spoken by pedestrians and vendors and displayed on neon signs in the streets. Rick Deckard flying his spinner then becomes Blade Runner’s way of surveying the route of conquest from Tokyo to Los Angeles as indexed by the city itself.
The depiction of the environment in After Yang is a drastic departure from the logic of the cyberpunk genre. The setting of the film is seemingly unmoored from teleological space and time; besides the advent of robotics, nothing else in After Yang necessarily places the film in the future. The mise-en-scène in the film may contain elements of Asian culture—particularly in clothing and décor—but their existence does not emphasize cultural differences and appear woven into the overall design of the world. The queer topography of the unnamed city in After Yang is largely inscrutable; the large, futuristic structures that would normally be treated as landmarks are often shot with foliage as the foreground, which obscures any relationality between the landmarks and the rest of the city. Even as Jake embarks on the odyssey to get Yang the help he needs, the film refuses to elucidate how places such as Yang’s family home, the technician’s shop, the Museum of Technology, etc., connect to each other. Traversal in After Yang is done through a moving pod in underground tunnels (whether it is part of a public transportation network is unclear), but the lack of establishing shots in general makes imposing direction on the city impossible. The shot/reverse shot employed for the scenes taking place in the pod further confuses the directionality of the travel, as the passengers are seated face-to-face. Narratively, Jake’s odyssey is not unlike Homer’s—the quest to repair Yang is winding and frustrating.
Cyberpunk as a genre depicts an Asian-dominated futurity, but as the genre moves into the twenty-first century, aesthetically it did not evolve far from the foundational works, such as William Gibson’s novels, Blade Runner, and Ghost in the Shell. Though Japan’s asset price bubble and the Asian financial crisis should have supposedly assuaged the West’s economic anxiety, the visual language of cyberpunk today still largely traffics the xenophobia of yesteryears. In between the thirty-five-year gap between Blade Runner and its sequel Blade Runner 2049, the sequel updates the Japanese and Chinese scripts seen in the first movie and adds Korean to signify the emergence of a new Asian power, yet the world of Blade Runner 2049 still uses microfilms and cathode-ray tube monitors. The coming of the “Asian Century” did not see the dissipation of the model machine myth. Rather, the international division of labor under global capitalism outsources labor and manufacturing to countries with lower labor costs, such as China and India, where the model machine myth takes on a second life. Mainstream Western press such as Time and Wired employ “the visual vocabulary of Asians as the cogs of hyperproduction . . . as mere simulacra and reinforces a prevailing sense of the inhumanity of Asian labor—the very antithesis of Western liberal humanism.”[14] which is reflected in the mainstream media’s prevalent use of “masked Asians” images in reports on COVID,[17] as well as the general American public’s rising distrust of Asian Americans.[18] The casting of Yang as a Chinese robot remains a timely commentary on being/feeling Asian in the twenty-first century.
Yang’s family bought him second hand in order to connect Mika to her Chinese heritage because while both Jake and Kyra (played by Jodie Turner-Smith) exhibit an affinity to Asian cultures, none of them could speak Mandarin. But what makes a robot Asian? Later on, Jake learns from Yang’s friend Ada (Haley Lu Richardson) that it is a question Yang asks himself. For a robot, physical appearance can be reoutfitted and language skills and cultural knowledge can be downloaded to a memory bank. Just as Asians are raced as robots, the reverse can also occur. In Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures, Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora write that robots and AI act as surrogates of (racialized) human labor, and they use the Massachusetts Institute of Technology robotic project Kismet to trace the programming of affect to Darwinian theories of emotive display. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin attempts to define the universal expressions by observing “primitive” ethnic groups “untouched by civilization,” since they reveal a baser and more primal version of emotional response compared to the “civilized” Europeans.[19] This racialized hierarchy of affectability is in turn transcribed onto robots that are designed to complement human users rather than to mirror them.[20] How Yang’s behaviors are programmed is then not just a reflection of the Western society’s expectation of how an Asian would act, but also his subservient position to the Western users. Therefore, Yang is polite, soft-spoken, and obedient. In the endlessly improvised language of racial subjugation, inscrutability and transparency are two sides of the same coin, where the Occidentals deny Orientals interiority—a requisite for Enlightenment. During a conversation, Yang says “May I be honest with you” to Kyra, and Kyra, surprised, asks, “Was not being honest an option for you?” “I don’t think so,” Yang replies.
In addition to being a “cultural techno” as the museum specialist Cleo (Sarita Choudhury) calls Yang, he also provides childcare, even though neither Jake nor Kyra mentions it in the film. It is not until Yang malfunctions that this part of his functions is made evident. The family’s daily routine consists of Kyra working full time as a businesswoman and Jake shopkeeping at his struggling , and when Yang’s malfunction disrupts that schedule, it falls on Jake to take Mika to school since Kyra is the breadwinner of the two parents. The outsourcing of reproductive labor in global capitalism is first alluded to by the name of the shop that sold Yang: Second Siblings. Jake travels to the shop and finds out it has closed down and the location is now an aquarium. Jake tells the owner: “This used to be a store where you could buy an older sibling for Chinese adoptions.” Parents buy from Second Siblings specifically for the companionship the robots offer to Chinese adoptees and not for the robots’ own companionship, since the robots do not possess any reproductive future like the adoptees do. On the other hand, Mika is also figured into the global reproductive supply chain. Since the inception of China’s international adoption program, it has put 152,000 children up for adoption between 1992 and 2018, with the United States—which alone accounts for two-thirds of the adoptions—and European countries as top adopters.[21] Peter Selman attributes the initial popularity of Chinese adoptions to “a preference for older parents and an acceptance of single women as suitable to adopt” compared to other countries and the ample supply of “abandoned” babies under the One Child Policy “was cited as a positive by some United States [adoption] agencies.”[22] At the same time, human-trafficking rings emerged to meet the global demand for Chinese children; though the Chinese government reported that most of the abducted children (20,000 per year) were adopted domestically, some American adoptive parents have found out the adoption paperwork was illegitimate.[23][24]
The morning after Yang becomes unconscious, Jake’s neighbor George stops by and recommends a technician by the name of Russ that would fix Yang for “a third of the cost.” As Mika quietly waits at the shop while Jake and Russ discuss the next course of action, the camera cuts to a bulletin board in the room. On the board are a “Yellow Peril” poster, a newspaper clipping of an article titled “The U.S. and the Chinese Naval Forces Clash in the Pacific,” and a print of the American flag with the words “THERE AIN’T NO YELLOW IN THE RED WHITE AND BLUE.” Under the global division of labor, China, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea become the leading manufacturer of computer chips and other technologies, but as the cyberpunk genre shows, the Asian technē is to be feared. Under the Trump administration the US government engaged in trade/sanction war with China to prevent it from “surpass[ing] the West’s technological prowess.”[25] The politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic as a “Yellow Peril” rhetoric by President Trump and the rest of the Republican party led to a sharp increase in anti-Asian hate crimes[26]—a 339% jump in 2021.[27] Subsequently, the global supply chain shortage only heightens the tension between the US and the People’s Republic of China, as the latter renews its imperialist ambition over Taiwan, the leading semiconductor manufacturer of the world in quantity as well as cutting-edge manufacturing process.
Orientalism homogenizes and flattens Asians, and as an inscrutable surface—also how some racists have historically described Asian facial features—the inscrutability is grounds for suspicion. At times of conflict, the monolithic view of Asians conflates individuals with their (home) states, and citizens become suspected state actors or even enemy combatants. During World War II, the US government displaced 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans and interned them in camps because they possess “the face of the enemy.”[28] Russ, as it turns out, is a conspiracy theorist who believes that the robots are spying on the users. Russ hacks open Yang’s abdomen and produces an inaccessible “black box” as proof of his claim. To Russ, Yang is inscrutable. The “black box” is only a black box to Russ; Cleo, the museum specialist who studies techno sapiens is able to identify the black box as Yang’s memory bank and teaches Jake how to access it, and for the first time, Jake gets a glimpse of Yang’s interiority. The visual representation of the Yang archive via Jake’s virtual reality glasses shows Yang’s mind as a cosmos with individual memories in neatly arranged constellations. Since the storage space of a robot’s memory bank is limited, they only selectively record memories, and according to Cleo, the museum dedicates its research to uncovering what a robot deems important enough to remember. To Jake, the memories are seemingly organized in no apparent order—breaching Yang’s “surface” after his passing does not give Jake any explicit insight. Where legibility is used to benchmark racial hierarchy, Yang’s subjectivity is maintained.
Jake and Kyra each have an extensive scene recalling their conversation with Yang. Yang asks Jake what he likes about tea. Jake explains that he enjoys the process of making tea, which holds its own significance in the film because the convenience of “tea crystal” is the reason why his tea shop sees very few customers. As the two discuss the enjoyment of tea-making vs tea-tasting, the film overlaps Yang’s recorded memory and Jake’s recollection. The gestures and dialogues repeat themselves from slightly different camera angles, and the editing does not attribute a particular moment to either Jake or Yang; two subjectivities intermingle without one giving way to the other. The scene where Kyra discusses with Yang his growing butterfly collection operates in a similar manner, but towards the end of the conversation, two different versions of the conclusion play out consecutively. Kyra asks Yang if it makes him feel sad that he may be programmed to feel accepting of his own end; in one version, Yang says “There is no something without nothing” with tears streaming down his cheeks, and in the other version, Yang says the line without crying.
Later in the film, it is revealed that Yang is much older than previously thought. Second Siblings sold Yang to Jake as a “certified refurbished” whose prior service only lasted for five days. If one database is worth a lifetime of memories, then Yang has lived three lifetimes. Jake complains in the film that Yang only teaches Mika “Chinese fun facts” but not Mandarin, but it is also possible that he might have deleted his knowledge of the Chinese language to make room for newer memories, making Yang resemble more of the Chinese adoptee he is supposed to mentor. Jake’s investigation of Yang’s past brings him to Ada, a clone whose visage has a constant presence in Yang’s memories. In one of Yang’s past lives, he became close to Ada’s original (the great aunt of the clone) until her sudden passing from a traffic accident. It is unclear whether Yang could access his past lives that were compressed to preserve storage space, but he eventually meets and befriends the new Ada. Jake asks after the Ada clone the nature of their relationship, but Ada is elusive. The queerness—as opposed to the heteronormativity of nation-building—of this relationship is double. On the one hand, Vivian L. Huang writes that “The figures of the inscrutable Asiatic and the closeted queer both obstruct a modern will to know through public spectacle, through ‘staying in’ as opposed to ‘being out.’”[29] On the other hand, Yang’s identity as a male Chinese robot simultaneously embodies the “emasculated and asexualized Asian American men”[30] and the non-personhood which disqualifies him from legally forming a family—real-life anti-immigration and segregation laws come into in mind—and contributing to the nation’s reproductive future. After Mika tells Yang that her classmates’ comments about her as an adoptee made her question her place in the family, Yang brings Mika to an orchard and introduces her to the grafting technique. “You’re connected to Mom and Dad just like this branch. You’re part of the family tree. For real,” says Yang. “Then, so are you,” Mika replies. Yang smiles but does not answer, because the “fruitful” future is closed to him.
The director Kogonada explained his decision for the science fiction setting in an interview with The Washington Post: “There was something about the indirectness of a robot malfunctioning and [Jake] processing loss, or almost catching up to grief, that felt enticing.”[31] The mundaneness of technology in such a setting allows Jake to go from treating Yang as a household appliance to eventually seeing Yang as his son; “He really has to come to that knowledge.”[32] What does Yang consider worth remembering that leads the family to view him in a new light? Nothing spectacular. For Yang, what is important to him are the everyday moments. In envisioning a distinctively Asian futurity that stands apart from Asian neoliberal (financial) speculation, Aimee Bahng proposes routes to an alternative futurity that “upend conceptions of wasted time,” highlights “the waste of capitalist overproduction” and refuses “the seduction of neoliberal ascension and individualism in favor of cultivating extended practices of care and more inclusive notions of family and collective responsibility.”[33] Yang’s passing causes the family to reorient itself; Jake and Kyra decide to spend more time with Mika, and Mika teaches herself Mandarin to say a final farewell to Yang. The perfect albeit incomplete record of the Yang archive does not leave him frozen in time. The memory of Yang moves forward in time with the family and comes to life in every possible mundane moment—triggered by the sight of a family photograph or by the making of tea.
Where does Asian futurity lie? Orientalism and its technological-minded offshoot function as epistemological and temporal containment of Asians and Asian cultures. As such, they are not a factual survey of real cultures and people—they only serve to complement the Occident and affirm the Occident’s superiority. Edward Said writes of Lord Arthur Balfour’s justification for occupying Egypt: “To have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it. And authority here means for ‘us’ to deny autonomy to ‘it’—the Oriental country—since we know it and it exists, in a sense, as we know it.”[34] And since the dominant race “knows [the subject race] and what is good for them better than they could possibly know themselves,”[35] the Occident assumes custody of the Orient at the end of history. Defying Orientalism requires the reclamation of agency. Here, After Yang eschews positive neoliberal media representation—which favors individual empowerment—and the teleological construction of time for a radical imagining of futurity and different modes of kinship. The film makes clear the queer possibilities alternative to heteronormative nation-building and neoliberal (financial) speculation after Yang’s death. In Yang’s absence, his impact is diffused and felt across his community. The memories of Yang—now carried by his loved ones—can be endlessly sampled and considered, but Yang continues to evade definitive characterization. Embodying Asian futurity is thusly not who one is but how one is. Underneath the film’s serene atmosphere and the near-post-scarcity Sci-Fi setting, Kogonada confronts the contemporary realities of being/feeling Asian in America: alienated from dominant social schema and faced with whispers of racial violence. Vivian L. Huang reappropriates “inscrutability” for Asian “lifeworlds;” in the same vein, Kogonada creates a wealth of interiority outside of the confines of Orientalist rhetoric.
[1] Long T. Bui, Model Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton, Asian American History and Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2022), 157.
[2] Betsy Huang, “Premodern Orientalist Science Fictions,” MELUS 33, no. 4 (2008): 25.
[3] Vivian L. Huang, Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022), 2–3.
[4] Long T. Bui, Model Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton, Asian American History and Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2022), 10.
[5] Bui, 13–14.
[6] Bui, 16–18.
[7] Bui, 20.
[8] Bui, 50.
[9] Bui, 56.
[10] Bui, 144.
[11] Julie Ha Tran, “Thinking about Bodies, Souls, and Race in Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy,” in Techno-Orientalism, ed. David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu (Rutgers University Press, 2015), 143.
[12] Bliss Cua Lim, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique, E-Duke Books Scholarly Collection. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 13.
[13] Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22, no. 2 (2004): 132.
[14] Bui, Model Machines, 166.
[16] Huang, Surface Relations, 7.
[17] Natasha Roy, “News Outlets Criticized for Using Chinatown Photos in Coronavirus Articles,” NBC News, March 6, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/news-outlets-criticized-using-chinatown-photos-coronavirus-articles-n1150626.
[18] Hope King and Shawna Chen, “Poll: Distrust of Asian Americans Is Rising,” Axios, May 4, 2022, https://www.axios.com/2022/05/04/asian-americans-covid-hate-survey.
[19] Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora, Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures, Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 122–25.
[20] Atanasoski and Vora, 128.
[21] Peter Selman, “International Adoption from China and India 1992–2018,” in Social Welfare in India and China, ed. Jian’guo Gao et al. (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2020), 395–96, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5648-7_22.
[22] Selman, 397.
[23] Charlie Custer, “Kidnapped and Sold: Inside the Dark World of Child Trafficking in China,” The Atlantic, July 25, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/07/kidnapped-and-sold-inside-the-dark-world-of-child-trafficking-in-china/278107/.
[24] John Leland, “For Adoptive Parents, Questions Without Answers,” The New York Times, September 17, 2011, sec. New York, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/nyregion/chinas-adoption-scandal-sends-chills-through-families-in-united-states.html.
[25] Emily Stewart, “The US Government’s Battle with Chinese Telecom Giant Huawei, Explained,” Vox, December 11, 2018, https://www.vox.com/technology/2018/12/11/18134440/huawei-executive-order-entity-list-china-trump.
[26] Yao Li and Harvey L. Nicholson Jr., “When ‘Model Minorities’ Become ‘Yellow Peril’—Othering and the Racialization of Asian Americans in the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Sociology Compass 15, no. 2 (2021): e12849, https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12849.
[27] Kimmy Yam, “Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Increased 339 Percent Nationwide Last Year, Report Says,” NBC News, February 14, 2022, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/anti-asian-hate-crimes-increased-339-percent-nationwide-last-year-repo-rcna14282.
[28] Emily Roxworthy, “Blackface Behind Barbed Wire: Gender and Racial Triangulation in the Japanese American Internment Camps,” TDR: The Drama Review 57, no. 2 (May 24, 2013): 123–24.
[29] Huang, Surface Relations, 10.
[30] Huang, 6.
[31] Sonia Rao, “‘After Yang’ Director Kogonada on His New Sci-Fi Film, the ‘Pachinko’ Adaptation and the Imperfection of Memory,” Washington Post, March 4, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/03/04/kogonada-after-yang-pachinko-interview/.
[32] Rao.
[33] Aimee Bahng, Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 133–38.
[34] Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 1st Vintage Books ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 32.
[35] Said, 35.