I wrote a couple essays back that the rest of the film belongs to Yang-Yang, but that was getting a bit ahead of myself … these next two segments are mostly about Ting-Ting. In fact, they are the most typically dramatic elements of the film.

It’s interesting that “Yi Yi” can include a murder, with some very lurid plot elements, but dispatch the action very quickly — and off-camera — returning immediately to the emotional impact of the event on characters not directly involved.

It begins with police sirens in the early morning hours, activity enough to rouse Yang-Yang from his sleep. He looks outside to see what is happening, but apparently doesn’t spy very much, because he immediately goes back to sleep.

With the lights of the police cars filling up the dark room, Ting-Ting is at that moment in her grandmother’s room crying, talking to her about the events that no adult has taken the time to ask her about. She’s wonders why she was treated so badly by Fatty and declares that she’s done nothing wrong.

But she immediately switched to a rationale: what if her grandmother has not forgiven her for leaving the garbage bag behind, leading to her stroke and coma. The assumption here is that if her grandmother could forgive her, all of this would go away. It should be pointed out that Ting-Ting mentioned earlier in the film that she hasn’t been able to sleep ever since her grandmother went into the coma, which also accounts for the middle-of-the-night talk.

We next hear police officers ring the doorbell to the apartment, declare that no one is home, then make plans to send an officers to Ting-Ting’s school.

We see her taken into the police office and asked to sit in the waiting room — we still have no idea what this is about.

If Ting-Ting is told what has happened, we are not privy to that conversation. Instead, we observe Ting-Ting as she watches the local news and hears about a murder that took place the night before.

And now we get the lurid fact: Fatty murdered the teacher from Lily’s school who we saw earlier slept with Lily’s mother. Except the newscast is reporting that, in addition to that affair, the teacher was also sleeping with Lily. This is what enraged Fatty and led him to stab the teacher outside of the apartment building.

To drive home the sensational nature of the news report, Yang has the report include a video game recreation of the crime, looking very much like the old Mortal Combat game.

In retrospect, it is interesting to reconsider the earlier scene in the film where we saw Lily freaking out when she discovered her teacher with her mom. From the looks of that scene, it did not appear that Lily was involved with the teacher at that time — so perhaps she had her own affair with him later as a way of getting back at her mother, not thinking of how Fatty might react to it.

The irony that Yang is presenting us with is the heavy drama of the Jiang family, happening right next door. He could have made a far more standard, lurid, family drama movie closely following that family, but instead chose to focus on the neighbors with far more interiority and suspended desires.

It is one more reminder from Yang that much of life consists of choosing where to focus our attention.