The scene opens in the hallway of the apartment building. The nurse looking after grandmother gets off the elevator and prepares to take out her key. We see Ting-Ting rushing to the door to open it for her — kind, but unnecessary. She has been in Lili’s apartment next door cooking. Together, they’ve planned a “health food feast” for all.

The phone then rings, it’s NJ. Ting-Ting is disappointed to find out that he’ll be missing her dinner that night, he needs to take the new client out instead.

Ting-Ting returns to the apartment and they continue with the meal — something that involves juicing quite a few vegetables. They run out of carrots and Ting-Ting offers to go back to her place to get more.

While she’s doing this, Lili’s mom arrives home with another man. Even though it seems to be early evening, the two of them are dressed as if they’d just been at a formal event. She tells Lili to call the man “uncle,” and expresses surprise that she’s cooking dinner. Ting-Ting then walks in and happily talks about the dinner they have planned — inviting her as well.

But Lili has caught the hint from her mother and declares that she and Ting-Ting are going out to the movies. This catches Ting-Ting by surprise, but she doesn’t raise an objection. In fact, Ting-Ting never seems to object to anything, she takes whatever life throws her way and rolls with it.

It’s not the worst attitude to have in life, but there’s a huge difference between a certain hard-earned passivity, where you decide that conflicts just aren’t worth the cost, and a people-pleasing imperative, where keeping everyone happy is the end goal at all times. Ting-Ting is clearly someone trapped in the latter.

So they’re now at the multiplex and Ting-Ting asks Lily what she wants to see. She doesn’t get an answer, so he asks if there’s something else she’d rather do instead. The film cuts to the exterior of a music store — an extremely impressive looking musical instrument shop that includes a couple harps in the window. There, we discover Lili’s boyfriend Fatty.

There appears to be a conflict between Lili and Fatty — he’s not happy that she keeps dropping by his place of business. He asks her to wait for him at “the usual place.”

That usual place is a shop called New York Bagels. They sit in window stools and Lili drinks a coke morosely. Ting-Ting, again going the extra mile to please, asks Lili if she’d prefer that she go home so she can wait for Fatty alone. Lili agrees to this and reassures Ting-Ting that he’ll be there soon. It’s interesting that she knows Ting-Ting well enough to know that the reassurance she’d need would be about her own safety and comfort, not her own.

Edward Yang makes a cute callback to his previous film “Mahjong” to close out this segment. Also in the bagel shop is a group of young people, the same actors who played a group of friends in that film. While he doesn’t specifically demonstrate that they are playing the same characters, the resemblance is close enough.

The segment closes with Lili telling the group to be quiet, that this isn’t their place, and then ignoring the boys as they try to harass her in response.

Lili is clearly someone who does and says what she wants and doesn’t care how people respond to it — making her an interesting friend for Ting-Ting. She could either learn something from her by acting a bit more like her, or she could be further exploited by folding to Lili’s every capricious demand.