Yi Yi
Yi Yi
Each member of a family in Taipei asks hard questions about life's meaning as they live through everyday quandaries. NJ is morose: his brother owes him money, his mother-in-law is in a coma, his wife suffers a spiritual crisis when she finds her life a blank and his business partners make bad decisions.
CrossCutCritic reviewedMay 31, 2025
Yi Yi
To You, Who Carried the Ordinary Days Like They Mattered—Because They Did
“He has made everything beautiful in its time.” — Ecclesiastes 3:11
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I. To You, Who Woke Up in a Life You Didn’t Recognize and Chose to Pay Attention Anyway
You didn’t plan for any of this.
You were just trying to live—
to go to work,
to take care of your family,
to keep the wheels turning.
But then your wife fell silent.
Your daughter began to drift.
Your son asked questions
you didn’t know how to answer.
And suddenly,
your life—so ordinary, so stable—
felt like something foreign.
Like a room you walked into by mistake.
So you started to pay attention.
Not to solve it.
Not to fix it.
But to see it.
You noticed the way the light fell on your mother’s bed.
The way your son looked at the world
as if seeing it for the first time.
The way your past still lived in the present
like a wound no one else could see.
Yi Yi doesn’t begin with drama.
It begins with disorientation.
And the slow, sacred decision
to start noticing your own life
before it slips away.
If you’ve ever found yourself in the middle of a season
you didn’t understand—
and chose to open your eyes
rather than close your heart—
then you already know this turning.
It is not loud.
But it is holy.
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II. The Questions You Couldn’t Answer and the Love You Gave Anyway
They came slowly,
like rain on a still morning.
Why do people lie?
Why do we hurt each other?
Why do we stop loving the ones we promised to never leave?
Your son asked them out loud.
Your daughter carried them like weights.
You—
you felt them in your chest
every time you looked out the window and said nothing.
You didn’t have the answers.
And maybe that was the beginning of wisdom.
Because instead of pretending,
you started listening.
To the silence.
To the smallness of things.
To the moments that didn’t seem to matter
until you realized they were everything.
You took your son to see the world.
You remembered what it meant to dream.
You reached for kindness
even when it felt too late.
Yi Yi doesn’t offer resolution.
It offers presence.
It tells the truth:
That sometimes the best we can do
is to walk beside the people we love
without knowing where the road leads.
If you’ve ever felt helpless to fix what was breaking—
and still stayed close,
still listened,
still loved—
then you already know this kind of grace.
It is not heroic.
But it is enough.
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III. The Things You Remember Too Late and the Ones You Learn Just in Time
You thought there would be more time.
To say the thing you meant to say.
To call someone back.
To explain yourself.
To take one more photo before the moment passed.
But life does not always give warnings.
It moves slowly—until it doesn’t.
And suddenly, someone is gone.
A door is closed.
The silence becomes permanent.
So you remembered.
Not as penance—
but as a way of staying faithful
to what was once alive in you.
The old heartbreak.
The unfinished sentence.
The love you once gave up on.
You let it surface.
And it softened you.
Meanwhile,
your son was learning to see.
To ask.
To frame the world through his lens
so he could show people the half they were missing.
Yi Yi is full of these mirrors.
The old watching the young.
The young becoming old.
Everyone missing something,
and everyone teaching someone else what they cannot see themselves.
If you’ve ever carried grief and wisdom in the same hand—
if you’ve ever passed on a small light
because someone once gave it to you too late—
then you already know this love.
It is not perfect.
But it is how the soul survives.
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IV. The Ordinary Day That Became the Way You Said Goodbye
No one told you it would be the last time.
There was no crescendo, no curtain.
Just an ordinary afternoon.
A wedding. A hospital room. A child’s voice.
And then—
absence.
The mother who never woke.
The friend who never called.
The girl who walked away
because her heart had grown too quiet to stay.
You didn’t get to prepare.
You only got to respond.
And in that,
you found something sacred.
Because sometimes goodbye
is not an event.
It’s a look.
A letter.
A quiet act of love
offered without knowing it will be the final one.
Yi Yi understands this:
that our deepest farewells often happen
when no one is watching.
That grace is not always spoken.
That the soul says goodbye
by staying present
just a few minutes longer than it needed to.
If you’ve ever let someone go
not with words,
but with a gesture—
if you’ve ever marked an ending
without ceremony,
because life simply moved on—
then you already know this stillness.
It is not an answer.
It is a benediction.
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V. The Life You Lived While No One Was Paying Attention
You didn’t become famous.
You didn’t solve the mystery.
You didn’t heal the ones you loved.
You just lived.
You brought lunch to your mother’s bedside.
You repaired what broke,
when you could.
You asked questions.
You listened.
You grieved without spectacle.
You were not remarkable—
but you were faithful.
And when your son handed you his photographs,
you saw something holy in them:
a mirror of the world you had almost forgotten to see.
This is how Yi Yi leaves us—
not with resolution,
but with vision.
The kind of vision that is born
not in triumph,
but in attention.
If you’ve ever lived a quiet life
and wondered if it mattered—
if you’ve ever whispered prayers no one else heard,
and loved without applause—
then you already know this story.
It is not the story of someone who changed the world.
It is the story of someone who saw it—
clearly,
once,
and passed that clarity along.
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Postscript
Yi Yi is a symphony of small moments.
It is a prayer made of traffic lights,
of elevator silences,
of school recitals and hospital halls.
It believes the sacred is not hidden in heaven—
it’s in the dishes,
the mistakes,
the chance to begin again
each morning
with the same people
who have seen us fail.
There is no climax.
No miracle.
Only this:
A boy with a camera.
A father who begins to look again.
And a world that keeps breaking—
but still holds beauty
in the cracks.
There is a God who lives in these details.
Not the God of thunder.
But the God who listens
when you say:
“I don’t know what I’m doing. But I’m still here.”
And He answers:
“I know. That is enough.”
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