Saying Goodbye to Yang Literary Elements

Speculative science fiction

American suburbia at some indeterminate point in the future

First-person POV from the perspective of Jim, a youngish new parent of an adopted Chinese daughter.

The tone is regretful and elegiac, but overall the mood is uplifting and cautiously optimistic.

Protagonist: Jim, the narrator. Antagonist: Xenophobic, racist, narrow-minded thought primarily exemplified in the character of Russ Goodman.

Interestingly, the conflict at the heart of the story is not between Jim and Russ or even between Jim and the antagonistic theme of reactionary ideology, but between Jim and himself. The conflict driving the story is Jim’s regretful realization that he treated Yang as simply a technological babysitter while overlooking the positive characteristics defining humanity embedded within Yang.

The story climaxes with the burial of Yang’s body parts, but arguably the real climax is the emotional realization by the narrator that he was also overlooking the humanity embedded in his neighbor, George, whom he had underestimated until he was able to compare him to Russ Goodman and his more extremist ilk.

When the narrator early on that he and his wife chose to adopt rather than engage in cloning because they considered it “the progressive thing to do” the meaning is a bit mysterious. This understatement foreshadows the revelations of cloning as a metaphor for racism.

The pro-cloning bumper sticker which is implicitly indicated to be a widely utilized trope among pro-cloning minds--WE CLONE OUR OWN—is an understated reference to the virulent racist undertones of the cloning process.

That a thrift story called Stacy’s Seconds sells old iPods alongside its rifles and steel bear traps alludes to the time frame of the story. While it is not explicitly stated when the story takes places, both the fact that a store would sell old iPods and that people would desire to buy them strongly indicates that the story is intended to be set in the near future.

The imagery describing the interior of Russ Goodman’s repair shop subtly implies the degree to which xenophobic racism has taken hold among some groups of Americans: “Along the wall hang disjointed arms, a couple of knees, legs of different sizes, and the head of a young girl, about seventeen, with long red hair…patches of skin and a Pyrex box full of female hands. All the skin tones are Caucasian.”

The central paradox is that the machine, Yang, is a greater exemplar of what we like to think of as the fundamental attributes of humanity than the human, Russ.

N/A

“You brought a Korean.” Russ is literally wrong; Yang was constructed in China. But his dismissive lack of knowledge is really a metonymic metaphor, in this case, for anti-Asian xenophobia in which “Korean” stands for anything having to do with any Asian nation.

The entire story revolves around the personification of the machine, Yang.