Finding Yingying
MTVIt’s a common tenet in chaos theory that ‘It has been said that something as small as the flutter of a butterfly's wing can ultimately cause a typhoon halfway around the world.’ The same could be said of Jiayan Jenny Shi’s Finding Yingying which begins with the tiniest germ of an idea, taking root in the mind of one individual. Its outcome spreads from an American campus to crowded districts in China and eventually expands to international media, potentially affecting the relationship between the two countries.
On June 9, 2017, international student, Yingying Zhang went missing while on her way to see an off-campus apartment. She had been in the United States for only six weeks. Shi’s documentary captures the fallout of her disappearance, beginning when her family travels from China look for her, literally scouring through brush and searching nearby forests. There is her stoic father who smokes even though he has been asked to quit. There is her patient and pragmatic boyfriend who she planned to marry the following October. There is her grief-stricken mother who can hardly stand during press conferences and dissolves into tears. There is also her soft-spoken brother, her aunt, her colleagues and Shi herself, who never met her subject but is the same age and graduated from the same university in Peking. Shi narrates Yingying’s thoughts while looking over childhood photographs and the handwriting in her journals, bringing a semblance of this woman to life.
Deviating from the usual ‘missing person’ tropes is extremely effective. Finding Yingying captures heartbreaking examples of cause and effect, both for better and for worse. The Zhang family’s loss and uncertainty continues to play out for them upon returning to China, resulting in arguments and alienation. At the same time, a stranger to the family puts herself on the line in order to gather information about what happened to Yingying. One of the most affecting sequences is when she addresses them with a letter she wrote in Mandarin, explaining why she had chosen to take part in the case. Likewise, the film captures moments that could have dramatically changed events:a missed bus, a counseling session, an unsearched dumpster, all of which could have left many tragic ‘what if’ moments in their wake.
However, most of Finding Yingying is less about a potential crime as it is about Yingying and the people who knew her. She is obviously the pride of her family and held a lot of promise among her neighbors, and that is where the strength (and agony) of the film lies. The Zhang family is unmoored and shaken by their uncertainty towards the future, and their lives teeter on emotional collapse. Now that Yingying is missing, ‘they all look down on us,’ her father reflects, ‘especially in small villages.’
Shi also manages to capture the culture clash between the U.S. and China as well as the shock of arriving in a completely different country. Most of its subjects don’t fully know the language or American customs, let alone its judicial system, which leads to some clear-eyed indictments from the family. After all, why is it so complicated to find out what happened to her? Where has she gone, and will she ever be able to return home?
There are elements of mystery and true crime to the proceedings, but ultimately the film is a portrait of loss and injustice as those affected by Yingying’s disappearance struggle to move forward. ‘The media is likely to focus on the crime,’ Shi explained in an interview. ‘They forget about the people left behind in the tragedy, and the person labeled only as the ‘victim’ becomes dehumanized.’
By placing the family and loved ones at the centre of the film, Yingying couldn’t seem more alive or human to audiences, in spite of the reasons that brought her to the world’s attention. Most missing persons cases aren’t all that different, but the love and loss left in their wake is likely the same. Shi has managed to shift the narrative in that direction and, overall, her film is stronger because of that choice.