30 pages • 1 hour read
Alexander WeinsteinSaying Goodbye to Yang
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Jim
Jim is the protagonist of “Saying Goodbye to Yang,” and the story is written from his point of view in first-person. Jim’s journey through the story is to come to terms with the loss of Yang, the robot babysitter for his daughter Mika, who has become an integral part of the family. While, as narrator, Jim comes to voice his feelings, to others, Jim minimizes the emotional impact of Yang’s death. Jim is established as white and middle-class, with the privilege those statuses connote. However, financial concerns permeate his arc, and even when he inwardly acknowledges the emotional toll of Yang’s loss, the cost is a focal point of his reaction: e.g., “There goes eight thousand dollars” (6). Jim seems to be in quiet distress throughout the story, working double shifts at Whole Foods to stay afloat.
Jim’s role as a husband and father is paramount to his view of himself and to the world around him. He remarks on the good relationship he has with wife Kyra because of their openness, but his grief is not reciprocated, and he minimizes his feelings about Yang even to her. When Yang is gone, he reads to Mika for the first time in a long time, which connotes how reliant he was on Yang as a caretaker for his daughter.
Though he keeps both Mika and Yang at a distance, he shows interest in bonding with Yang, as shown in his idealization of fatherhood and masculinity. After raking leaves with Yang, he says, “This is what men do for the family” (14), which indicates both that Jim adheres to traditional gender roles, and that he considered Yang his son. However, there is a distance between Yang and Jim, as Yang does not show interest in Jim’s stereotypical attempts at bonding. While Jim desires a closeness to Yang, the distance between them indicates an emotional disconnect and guilt on Jim’s part. He distinguishes himself from George, a physically imposing sports fan, and decides not to confide in him because of the type of masculinity he represents. Jim, despite valuing traditional gender roles, has a particular ideal for what fatherhood and masculinity should look like. Jim is ultimately taken aback by George’s kindness, which leads him to an epiphany that he knows less about the world than he thought.
Jim has a core set of beliefs, shaped by his experiences as the father of Mika and Yang, and quickly comes to distrust Russ because of xenophobic propaganda in his workshop. Jim says, “Russ is the type of person I’ve made a point to avoid in my life” (9), which is possible for him because he is white and middle class and has been able to select his own group of peers. Only in public places like the airport or on the street does Jim perceive the bigotry toward Mika and Yang. Unlike Kyra, who becomes flexible to inviting clones to babysit Mika in Yang’s absence, Jim does not bend when Russ offers to remove Yang’s voice box for free. Despite the bind he’s in, Jim’s ethics are not malleable in the face of views he finds abhorrent. It is notable that Jim desires to separate himself from others based on class differences, highlighting his own prejudices. He assumes the worst of both George and Russ immediately, and only Russ ends up confirming his biases. Jim also does not like that George has cloned children, while he finds no issue with Yang being both a surrogate son and a robot. Jim has preconceived notions of what “correct” behavior looks like and his lack of malleability highlights his prejudices, despite his judgment of others’ prejudices.
Yang
When “Saying Goodbye to Yang” begins, the titular robot is malfunctioning. Readers get glimpses of who Yang was, and who he could have been, through Jim’s recollections. His personality, both programmed and otherwise, emerges as the story progresses. Yang is a Big Brother to Mika, purchased to teach her facts about her native China and also to babysit while her parents are working. Yang resembles a teenaged Chinese boy with bioplastic artificial skin and lights under his cheeks to replicate blushing. Perhaps because of this, Jim explains he sometimes slipped into thinking Yang was a real person, as he ate, drank, slept, and spoke like a human being. However, like the knowledge he espoused, these mechanisms were programmed into Yang, who emptied a stomach canister each day to mimic human digestion.
Yang’s consciousness, or lack thereof, is ambiguous in “Saying Goodbye to Yang.” Though Jim considers him his child at times, he notes that there was nothing he could introduce him to, undercutting their dynamic as father and son. Yang dispassionately relayed facts for Mika, who responded with kisses and hugs, but it’s unclear if he could reciprocate her affection. While Yang seems to just go through the motions to bond with Jim, mimicking his actions without apparent joy, his attachment to the baseball glove, dead insects, and matchboxes belies a personality beyond his programming. Yang’s purchase of the baseball glove after the game with Jim indicates a deeper connection than Jim thought possible. The reader only views Yang through Jim, but through his acknowledged interest in insects and pauses when he asks where he is once his body is dead, it’s worth considering Yang as a protagonist with hopes and fears just like his flesh and blood counterparts. The extent of Yang’s sentience, however, is unknown because of the limitations of Jim’s point of view. Jim notably keeps Yang at a distance, valuing Yang for his caretaking abilities and for fulfilling the idea of a son.
Kyra and Mika
Kyra and Mika are secondary characters, encountered through Jim’s eyes as the narrator of “Saying Goodbye to Yang.” Jim’s wife Kyra works at Crate & Barrel, an upscale home goods store, to help make ends meet. Like Jim, she is white and opposed to cloning herself, a fashionable practice for parents in the futuristic setting of the story, which they deem egocentric. Also like Jim, Kyra views herself as privileged and progressive, and had the idea to adopt Mika from China after a devastating earthquake as a way to give back. Her anxiety concerning the gap in understanding of Mika’s heritage and long work hours induced Kyra and Jim to purchase Yang. Between the couple—which Jim calls “communicative and caring” (2)—Kyra seems to be more clinical in her relationship to Yang and suffers less anguish than Jim in the wake of his death. Yang’s death does change Kyra, as she acknowledges they may need to seek help from acquaintances’ cloned children to pick up the slack in his absence. Kyra thus is the more malleable and practical of the pair, willing to reconsider an ethical stance in the face of urgent challenges.
Mika is three years old, and she is less articulate about Yang’s demise than Jim, so readers have a limited understanding of his death’s impact on her. She exhibits an appropriately childlike reaction to both Yang’s malfunction via laughing as well as expressing sadness in his absence. Mika is also the one who interacts the most with Yang and the only one who hugs and kisses Yang. Adopted by a white couple, Mika is from China, perhaps experiencing a devastating earthquake, and has Yang to help fill in her cultural background. Due to her age, readers don’t have a sense of her identity other than through Jim’s eyes. She is important to the story because her need for care throws Jim and Kyra into disarray once Yang is gone.
George and Russ Goodman
Next-door neighbor George is a secondary character whose interactions with Jim lend insight into the protagonist. Jim’s remarks about how different they are fill in his own attributes; George is a large man whose presence sparks concern over violence (17), so it follows that Jim differs in stature. Jim assumes that George lacks depth because of preconceived notions of masculinity and his own sense of self. George surprises Jim throughout “Saying Goodbye to Yang,” proving to be more considerate and gentler than the narrator expected. George offers his and wife Dana’s help with Mika and leaves orchids on their doorstep during Yang’s funeral. George seems to be ideologically different than Jim since his twins are clones and he is friends with Russ, which leads Jim to be reductive in his appraisal of his neighbor. However, contemplating George’s flowers at the end of the story induces a quiet epiphany in Jim—that he clearly doesn’t understand the world in full and their family may have more support than he originally thought.
However, there could be a prejudiced side to George that Jim notices, due to his friendship with Russ Goodman, a mechanic who is outwardly extreme in his noxious views. The nature of Russ and George’s relationship can be presumed to be deep, as the former is willing to do a favor for Jim, a stranger, for free off George’s referral. Russ is not the type of person Jim gravitates to, until necessity forces him to. The first thing Russ says is racist, and Jim notes xenophobic propaganda in his shop, which adds tension to an already fraught situation. George’s relationship with Russ indicates a connection to this racism.
