CWANA

One of the most memorable moments in Edward Yang’s Yi Yi is when the little boy Yang Yang asks his father this question: “Daddy, I can’t see what you see and you can’t see what I see. How can I know what you know?” A seemingly innocent question in fact points out the underlying problems that run through the entire film: the struggle of the individual to perceive the totality of himself/herself as an autonomous being in relation to his/her family and community in specific and to a society saturated with commercialism in general. In other words, it is a struggle for identity and selfhood in the postmodern condition.
What Edward Yang investigates in this film is not the possibility of individual autonomy as defined by self-sufficient independence based on rational thoughts. Yang’s vision of autonomy relies heavily on a network of relations – personal, familial, social, and gender. This vision also entails a cultivation of interpersonal ethics in the contemporary Taiwan society where substance of life is lost to the materialism of living. This paper will use recent feminist theories on relational autonomy to discuss how identity and selfhood are explored in the film. What is an authentic self and how does one attain it? In relational autonomy theories such as the one articulated by Diana Meyers, it is necessary that one integrates oneself with one’s social variants (family, community, gender, society, etc.) in order to achieve self-discovery and self-definition which are fundamental in establishing autonomous identity.
In this paper, I will look closely how relational autonomy is attempted through the metaphor of “seeing” – what we can or cannot “see” of ourselves in relation to our surroundings bears significant consequence in our construction of autonomous identity. Every main character in the film embarks on a different journey of self-discovery. Collectively these tales do tell the ways in which Edward Yang reflects on how the individual can better position himself/herself in contemporary (Taiwan) society’s entrenchment in materialism and increasing alienation.

Relational Autonomy
The concept of autonomy as developed in the Western epistemological tradition has been premised on the assumptions that humans can attain self-sufficient independence and lead isolated, rational, and individualistic life. The ideal of autonomy assumes that persons can be lifted out of the society and his/her immediate community and live in an idealized existence in which s/he is capable of self-defining and self-determination without the need for the others. In other words, the self is able to arrive at a total harmony with itself in some sort of societal or communal vacuum. Stemming from postmodern feminist theories, relational autonomy challenges such Enlightenment rationalism and argues that, “persons are socially embedded and that agents’ identities are formed within the context of social relationships and shaped by a complex of intersecting social determinants, such as race, class, gender, and ethnicity.” The struggle and reflection the main characters go through in Yi Yi is a matter of defining and redefining one’s place in the familial and social networks. Min-min, Yang Yang’s mother, is looking for a new paradigm to help her understand who she really is – someone who is more than a professional woman, a wife, a daughter, and a mother. Both her career and family are no longer enough to represent who she is. However, by turning to religion by leaving her network of family and friends does not give her any answer or peace. When she has to talk to her unconscious mother everyday, she realizes how routine and tedious her existence is and how little she has – her day only takes a minute to summarize: “I have so little…. I live a blank. Everyday, everyday.” As her sobbing is juxtaposed with the couple fighting next door and these sounds fade into the background of the city lights glimmering against the darkness of the night, we cannot help but ask: how has Min Min failed? It is clear that her challenge is to find a balance between her social self, as determined by her professional persona, and her self identity. Leaving behind her career and family and retrieving into the temple is not the solution. Maintaining a sense of self-understanding and independence in the intersection of her many roles is Min-min’s only chance of achieving autonomy. Her awakening to her inner lack of self-understanding is the first step toward a meaningful independence. When she begins to critically reflect on her desires and aspirations and asks “Who am I?”, she is at the beginning of a journey of achieving a self-determined social self. The marked significance in this question, as Linda Barclay’s analysis of Michael Sandel’s theorization points out, is contrasted in another commonly asked question when the individual is confronted with the challenge: “What ends shall I choose?” Sandel argues that, when one embarks on the journey of self-discovery, one often reflects on what one wants or what one should do. As a result, what one discovers are “shared values partly constitutive of a common identity or form of life.” The question of “Who am I?”, on the other hand, leads to the answer by “looking inward and discovering one’s shared constitutive ends” (62). Combining her own analysis and her critique of Sandel’s theorization, Barclay concludes that “we are quite compatibly both autonomous agents and deeply social selves” (68). Autonomy and communitarian values are therefore able to coexist in one’s self knowledge.
Relational autonomy provides a new interpretation of how self identity can be better constructed without alienating other important relationships in one’s life. In a way, this new theorization of autonomy coincides with the spirit of hybridity theories in which difference is not only recognized, it is also incorporated into the ontology of one’s condition. As Diana Meyers states: “…we need a conception of identity that acknowledges inner heterogeneity….” Every character in the film is set in a role bestowed onto him or her by society and the tradition-ridden Chinese family structure. Their social, familial, and gender roles are already preprogrammed for them. Min Min finds emptiness in her life in spite of her many roles – wife, daughter, manager; Ting Ting tries hard to be a dutiful daughter and granddaughter, a responsible student, and a loyal friend; N. J. struggles between being an effective businessman who can bring in revenue for the company and an ethical individual who places trust, honesty, and friendship before profits and business calculation; Sherry is trapped in the memory of her idealistic love relationship with N. J. in which she envisioned a future for N. J. to be an engineer and she the wife by his side. None of these main characters has a sense of independence and self-awareness. Secondary characters such as A Di (Min Min’s brother), his wife Xiao Yan, and the neighboring teenager Lili, all are set in their roles who are only allowed to express themselves within the given social and gender parameters. Because of such limitations, they inevitably must struggle.
Among the theorizations of relational autonomy, one theory argues that, “each individual has a ‘multiple identity’, which reflects the multiple groups to which the individual belongs.” The immediate problem that arises from this statement would be that the individual might thereby suffer from incoherent sense of self, hence contradictory to the concept of autonomy. However, the diversity of one’s identity is precisely the way in which one can resist being absorbed into one group or another: “The resistance to seeing individuals as replicating the interests and identities of the groups to which they belong is congenial to an emphasis on individual autonomy.” Diana Meyers, who champions the diversity theory of autonomy, or intersectional identity, furthers illustrates how this theorization works for establishing an authentic sense of self: “understanding the impact of group memberships on one’s identity is necessary not only for personal autonomy but also for moral and political autonomy. . . . Thus, accepting intersectional identity as a feature of one’s authentic self does not entail clinging to a community of origin or capitulating to stereotypical group norms. Rather, it entails analyzing the social significance of one’s community of origin, disclosing to oneself the ways in which associated norms have become embedded in one’s own cognitive and motivational structure, appearing how entrenched they are, and assuming responsibility for the ways in which one may enact them” (159).
Yang Yang’s question about seeing and not seeing, about knowing only half of the truth, is precisely the metaphor for the importance of understanding how one is positioned in the intersection of one’s many roles and relationships in the larger community in which one lives. As the film presents life as a tapestry of relationships, roles, and everyday events, how to make sense of one’s place in this labyrinth of obligations, demands, and desires is the challenge facing every character in the film. Through Yang Yang’s curiosity about capturing what cannot be seen with our eyes in a camera, Edward Yang seems to be making an impossible proposition: that the only way to know the whole truth is to be able to see what is in front and what in behind us simultaneously. Of course we do not have eyes in the back of our head, nor can we have someone like Yang Yang who takes pictures of the back of our head to help us see – “You can’t see it yourself, so I help you.” The seeing angle of of Yang Yang’s shots of the backs of people’s heads is not from the camera’s view point, but from that of the object of the shot. What is intended in these photographs is to help people see how they look like from the back. Together with this rear view and the idea we already have of how we look from the front, we are able to have a total knowledge of how we look like, from both front and back.
The metaphor of seeing thus lies in the individual’s cultivation of a full range of self knowledge or autonomy skills. Here, we need to revisit Min Min’s case. After her retreat at the temple, Min Min returned with the same psychological distress before she left home. Following is what she said to N. J.:
Min Min: “Actually, it was much the same….
Just like talking to mother, but with the roles reversed.
I was mother, they were like me.
They took turns to talk to me, the same things every time.
. . . . I’ve come to realize things aren’t really that complicated.
Why did they ever seem so?”
If we continue the metaphor of Yang Yang’s camera work, it becomes clear why Min Min didn’t come away with new insights about her identity problems. Instead of seeing from the “back” of her head, that is the other (and new) perspective to see herself in relation to her surroundings, she simply changes her viewing position with the subject opposite to her – in this instance, the nuns who were supposed to “enlighten” her, and in another instance before she left home, her unconscious mother. No matter how many times she changes seats, she always ends up seeing the same things: those in front of her.
The experience of N. J., on the other hand, produces a different effect. The choice N. J. made at the end of his memory trip with Sherry to Tokyo to recapitulate, or in a way, to relive, their romance, along with the comment he made to Min Min after returning home, are telling examples of how changed perspectives can inspire new understandings about oneself. Here is what N. J. told Min Min:
N. J.: “When you were away, I had the chance to relive part of my youth.
My first thought was that I would make things turn out differently.
But they turned out the same, or not much different.
I suddenly realized that, even if I was given a second chance . . .
I wouldn’t need it. I really wouldn’t.”
Unlike Min Min who only switched the seat with the nuns with whom Min Min attempted to have a spiritual dialogue, N. J. actually had the chance to transform into his younger self, who figuratively speaking, represents his seeing eyes on the back of his head – hence, the “looking back” as in reminiscing about the past here becomes “looking from behind” of his own person sees what is ahead of (or rather, behind) him. On this trip, N. J. is like someone who walks backward and gets to see the view he normally wouldn’t be able to see. This is why he realizes that things wouldn’t have been much different even if he had the chance to do it all over again. It is clear that N. J. would never abandon his family and run away with Sherry. The crucial point here is not that if we get to live life all over again, we would make different decisions, but that because when we are able to face ourselves – knowing “who I am” – the essentials that we use to re/define our identity will not change. Therefore, getting a second chance is really not the point.

Conclusion: Confucianism and Relational Autonomy
It is not difficult to see the similarities shared by Confucianism and Relational Autonomy in which the individual is not set up in opposition to the others but rather s/he is in harmony with others. The key difference is that Confucianism sees the individual as part to whole and the human subject is never autonomous; relational autonomy recognizes the individual as the one and many but stressing equal importance on both. Individuality is never encouraged by Confucianism because it believes social harmony can only be achieved by situating the “subject in relation to another partial element of the larger context that the two formed when conjoined.” A commonly shared problem in this film is precisely that all characters feel trapped in their roles defined by Chinese long-running Confucian values of family, gender, and tradition. They feel stagnant being confined within these roles when the reality of contemporary Taiwan’s postmodern/post-industrial culture and society is hardly in accordance with old Confucian values. With this film and his other films such as A Confucian Confusion (“Duli shidai,” 1994), it has been Edward Yang’s continuous effort to negotiate a new possibility of autonomy without negating the values of Confucianism which have long been the cultural infrastructure for the Chinese societies.

Piczo