“Saying Goodbye to Yang” is a short story by author Alexander Weinstein found in his collection titled Children of the New World. The story is the opening tale in that 2016 volume and takes place in a futuristic America where both ultra-sophisticated androids and clones have been integrated into everyday life. The neighbor of the protagonist has two cloned children while the narrative itself is about how the titular robot designed to look and act like an 18-year-old Chinese boy bought to act as big brother/babysitter for three-year-old human child adopted from China by American parents breaks down and “dies.” The thematic thrust of the story is about what constitutes humanity in a world populated by robots actually capable of eating and drinking the same things clones eat and drink. Not to mention the same things non-cloned humans eat and drink.
The primary issue at hand is how the father/husband of the story comes to terms with the emotions he feels toward Yang and whether those emotions are appropriate for what is, after all, a machine. The impetus for the story occurred one fateful night when the author’s laptop crashed, taking much of the work the author had produced with it into the impenetrable abyss of its “death.” So emotionally attached to this particular computer had the author become that his response at one point to its loss was a tearful breakdown which led to the personal epiphany of just how it easy it is in this day and age to become attached to our electronics not just in terms of an addictive dependence upon them, but framed as honestly emotional relationships in which we may actually experience genuine grief when break down. The logical result of such an emotional connection is expressed in the conflicting whirlwind experienced by the narrator subsequent to Yang’s “death.”
In 2021, the rather constricted and relatively thing narrative of “Saying Goodbye to Yang” was fleshed out and adapted into a full-length feature film released under the title After Yang. The film, which had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, stars Colin Farrell as the narrator and protagonist of the story whose name has inexplicably been changed from Jim to Jake. The film went on to earn the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. It is perhaps worth nothing that in the film Yang the robot is performed by the very human actor, Justin H. Min, instead of the filmmakers opting for some sort of special effects alternative.
