After Yang intentionally subverts sci-fi’s fetishistic ‘hollow Asian’ trope

polygon.com:

Kogonada’s melancholy sci-fi feature After Yang is many things: a testament on loss, an examination of our reliance on technology, and a deeply human story about care. One thing it isn’t, however, is conventional. Most sci-fi films paint their futurescapes in metallic sheens, but After Yang wraps viewers in soft domestic scenes and gentle forests. Sci-fi narratives are so often expansive, addressing discovery, adventure, or conquest, but After Yang turns inward, with a story about family, grief, and memory. Kogonada deliberately subverts the tropes and mechanics we’ve come to expect, using them as jumping-off points to respond to the sci-fi genre’s dark legacy of Orientalism and the dehumanization of Asian people.

The story itself is deceptively simple. Yang (Justin H. Min) is a “technosapien,” an android-like bot purchased by Jake (Colin Farrell) and Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) to care for their adoptive daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) and teach her about her Chinese heritage. Early in the film, Yang malfunctions, forcing Jake to shuttle him around, looking for someone who can fix him. While getting a diagnostic, Jake learns that Yang has a memory bank that’s stored a few seconds of footage a day. The rest of the film follows Jake’s journey through Yang’s memories, uncovering a past and life he realizes he knew nothing about, as he seeks to make sense of the loss and deal with the family tensions that Yang’s “death” has revealed.

By making Yang a robot whose function is so explicitly bound to Chinese culture — and outfitting the film with East Asian-inflected details, ranging from the kimono-like clothing everyone wears to Jake’s career running a tea shop — Kogonada explicitly situates his story among the vast