I closed the last section by noting how the family crisis affected members of the family, but did not include Yang-Yang. The crisis actually doesn’t affect Yang-Yang terribly, at least not at first, and this short segment is devoted entirely to him.

Yang-Yang is the most philosophical character in the film, which seems funny to say about a small eight year old whose experiences are typical of childhood. Yet, Yang-Yang reacts to everything in a highly stoic manner and always returns the predicament he’s in to fundamental questions of human experience.

The scene starts with a bunch of children playing at school. If Yang-Yang is upset about his grandmother’s health, we don’t see it now. Instead, we see him putting a balloon under his shirt and saying that this is how his auntie looked at her wedding. He tells his friends that she isn’t fat and to guess why she looked that way.

But as he does that, a girl working as a hall monitor walks by. Some of the children start calling her The Concubine … which is an awful thing to say about a girl who can’t be older than 10.

The girl is excessively serious, which isn’t helping her cause. She bosses around a couple boys, then asks Yang-Yang what he has in his hands. He shows her an empty hand and says “nothing.” She tells him to watch himself … and as she’s walking off, one boy says “she likes you Yang-Yang” and another says “Yeah, her old man might get jealous.” Yang-Yang replies “who’s her old man”? This elicits laughter.

We find out right away. Back in class, the highly authoritarian (and rather idiotic) teacher says that someone brought a condom to class and he wants the person who did so to admit it. No one does, so he directly accuses Yang-Yang.

Yang-Yang stands, but remains completely calm, first asking “what’s a condom?” This only makes the teacher more upset, which leads Yang-Yang to say “why is someone telling lies about me?” He then returns to his perspectivism by stating “you are only going by what you’ve heard, you didn’t see anything.”

When finally prompted to remove the object from his left pocket, Yang-Yang empties it — and when questioned what the object is, says “a balloon.” Everyone in the class laughs and the teacher backs down.

Edward Yang could have cut the scene here. But he extends the whole concubine-old man connection a little bit by showing them in the hallway, with the teacher giving the girl a drink and a straw, then patting her on the back.

What is Yang getting at in this scene? I don’t believe he’s trying to insinuate that something truly disturbing is going on. The teacher is probably just happy to have a snitch on his side and is rewarding her.

But I should point out that a similar relationship dynamic exists in Yang’s earlier film “A Brighter Summer Day” between a teenaged girl and a doctor. Even in that case, there’s no sign of a sexual relationship between the older man and the girl, but Yang makes clear that there is some kind of admiration and affection from the professional towards the girl.

In “Yi Yi,” I believe Yang is making a broader point about the journey to manhood for a young boy, especially a small one like Yang-Yang. The early male-female struggle for someone like Yang-Yang is being picked on by socially adept girls who are bigger than him and hang together.

He finds ways to challenge and fight back from these girls — but then he discovers sexual attraction, and new challenges arise. Specifically, boys as they grow need to find ways to become bigger.

This means finding various ways to stick out and prove they are worthy of the girls they find attractive. Sometimes that literally means growing larger and stronger. But it can also mean learning unique talents, performing well in school, becoming the class clown — whatever works for the girl he’s trying to attract.

Since I’ve been circling around the Epstein scandals already, I might as well go there: the inevitable end point of this kind of male behavior is … no end point. Men might spend their entire lives “getting bigger,” which eventually takes the form of accumulating excessive riches and power.

As the Epstein files show, what these grown boys desire once they do become these rich and powerful creatures is no different than what the school boys want. Everything they do is in service of sexual conquest of the women they want.

For certain truly depraved individuals, those wants are literally the same as when they were boys. And they are willing to leverage everything to get what they want.

“Yi Yi” doesn’t approach this subject directly, but it hints at it in various ways. At this point in the film, Yang-Yang has not yet felt those kinds of desires, but when he does, his crisis moment will arrive.