by Brian Hioe
語言:
English
Photo Credit: Film Poster
This is a No Man is an Island film review written in collaboration with Cinema Escapist. Keep an eye out for more!
YU & ME FOLLOWS a Manhattan Chinatown bookstore of the same name, as it struggles to survive following a fire that destroyed its first location. While brief, with its 25-minute runtime, the documentary is a timely and sensitive look at the community that has emerged around the bookstore.
In many ways, the documentary is the story of Lucy Yu, who founded the bookstore after departing from her previous corporate job. Though fiercely independent, Yu learns to rely on others in the process of coming together to relocate Yu & Me Books. First, the community that Yu has brought together to run the bookstore comes together to help clear out debris from the fire. Then, it assists in setting up a temporary location, and finally renovating and moving to a new location.
In the process, Yu becomes increasingly burnt out from the workload, and eventually takes a step back from the bookstore. While the bookstore remains intimately associated with Yu,her distancing compels the community around Yu & Me Books to set up a system to ensure the bookstore can still function without her. . To this extent, Yu comes to reflect on her own journey–and how that has changed her, in that many different versions of herself were part of the process of setting up the bookstore.
Yu & Me, then, rings true for anyone who has helped to run a community space, in that such spaces are often dependent on the lonesome and tiresome labor of a small number of people–or even just a single individual, often the founder, keeping the space afloat. It may not be surprising, then, that such establishments and their lifespan may depend on if that individual eventually burns out.
Granted, Yu & Me is not long enough to detail the different practical aspects of running a community space, or how its eponymous bookstore fits within a broader context of Asian American politics. Given its runtime, the documentary necessarily compresses together Yu’s personal journey and an exploration of Yu & Me Books’ concept. Likewise, the documentary also assumes some familiarity with how Yu & Me Books came to exist, and discourse around carving out dedicated literary spaces for Asian Americans. If the documentary was longer, perhaps it could have developed its themes and fleshed out its subjects further.
At the same time, Yu & Me is clearly heartfelt, with a great deal of affection and warmth for its subjects. The fact that one wants the documentary to be longer speaks to how well it is able to tell the story of a space and its founder.