‘A-Yi’ explores friendship between East Van hipsters and elderly Chinese gardener
A-Yi was filmed months before COVID-19 turned the world upside down and sideways, and yet in many ways, it perfectly sums up what’s so hard – and so beautiful – about this particular moment in history.
The short documentary – which was directed by Martyna Czaplak and produced through CBC Short Docs – tells the story of the years-long friendship between a motley crew of East Vancouver roommates and an elderly Chinese woman who doesn’t speak a word of English but has nonetheless transformed the hipsters’ modest yard into a thriving vegetable garden.
Czaplak lived in the house (known as the Whale House) for three years, and for all of that time, she wondered about the old woman who’d appear in the garden throughout the day to weed and dig and somehow conjure perfectly plump vegetables out of the urban soil.
“We saw her more than we saw each other some days, because she was there every day,” recalls Czaplak. It wasn’t until Czaplak had moved out of the Whale House and begun to work with a documentary organization that she realized that she could pursue her long-held questions about A-Yi (Cantonese for Aunty) through film – and she had a lot of questions. Says Czaplak: “The first question I wanted to answer was, ‘Why is she here? How did this whole thing come about? Where does she live?’ We knew she had a home somewhere, but we didn’t know where.”
Questions about home and making connections across cultures are particularly meaningful to Czaplak, who is herself an immigrant from Germany. “The one thing I thought was so beautiful about Canada was how multicultural it was, and how many different cultures live so closely together, and here are these different types of people living together and knowing nothing about each other and yet being so respectful and so kind,” says Czaplak.
Like Czaplak, co-producer Nicolas Ayerbe Barona was drawn to the A-Yi story because of his immigration story. “It’s amazing that a person who doesn’t speak English can hang out with a group of young people in East Vancouver, and build a life with them,” says Ayerbe Barona, who hails from Colombia. “It just crosses the boundaries. It’s a micro story with macro implications, and it feels very Canadian.”
The CBC agreed that it was a beautiful starting point for a film, and stepped up with funding through its Short Docs program. Usually securing funding is the hard part, but in this case, that part was relatively easy. The hard part was making contact with A-Yi and explaining to her that they wanted to tell this story.
“For us, the biggest challenge was speaking with her,” says Czaplak. A-Yi didn’t speak a word of English; the roommates and filmmakers didn’t speak Cantonese. It wasn’t until they brought on a cultural advisor to speak with A-Yi that they realized that “she speaks such a unique dialect of Cantonese, and not every Cantonese speaking person can understand her. She comes from a very tiny town, and her dialect of Cantonese is mixed with Mandarin. She also Cantonese-ifies English words.”
The other challenge was making this film on A-Yi’s terms and unpredictable gardening schedule.
“A-Yi doesn’t have a telephone, and she doesn’t want to involve her family, which we totally respected,” says Czaplak. Besides a single planned meeting of minds that occurs towards the end of the film (during which the roommates must find a way to tell A-Yi that they are moving out of the house and she’ll have to make arrangements for her garden with the new tenants), every other shot happened by chance.
“She runs on her own schedule,” says Czaplak. “We knew she’d show up two or three times per day, but we never knew when, so it would be a whole day of sitting in the garden, hoping we’d catch her, and she’d come around and wave at us and she’d be excited. But it was a waiting game. We never knew if we’d get that nice shot on a sunny day and we’d be sitting there for nothing, and then the next two weeks would be rain.”
But that planned sit-down over snacks and tea – during which the remaining roommates and A-Yi meaningfully communicated with each other through a translator for the first time in eight years – was revelatory for all involved.
“The biggest surprise for me was that she actually showed up and was willing to sit down,” says Czaplak. “She’s a very private person. There were three cameras pointed at her at all times and all these people were there and she was strong and funny and comfortable and I was so happy because I thought we were going to spook her with the amount of camera gear that was.”
A-Yi sits down with the roommates and shares her story. Still courtesy of the filmmakers
The whole conversation took around two hours, according to Czaplak, who notes that her favourite moment occurred when A-Yi said she “thought we were all siblings because she didn’t understand how adults could live together in a house without their own families.”
“We also learned that, if A-Yi is tired of chatting with you, she’ll tell you she has soup on the boil, which may or may not be true – but either way, she’s got to go,” adds co-producer Gregory Czaplak, chuckling.
The film – which is at once charming and poignant and funny – is viewable on CBC Gem and YouTube and is available in Cantonese and English. “It was important for me from the get-go to make a film that A-Yi and her family could watch and anyone who speaks Cantonese can watch,” explains Czaplak. “The story is told from both sides, and people on both sides of the language divide can watch it.” To date, the English version of A-Yi has been viewed on YouTube more than 235,000 times.
“We’ve been watching the comments [online], and there’s a lot of pride about being Canadian and the diversity of our communities, and in the fact that you have these young guys who are raucous, hipster beer drinkers who also want to garden with an old lady and learn things that are beyond what the world is about nowadays,” says Ayerbe Barona. “And now that we’re in quarantine, gardening is one of those things that a lot of people are doing: getting back to things that remind us of the simple things of life. This is why people are baking sourdough.”
Adds Ayerbe Barona: “I think the primary question the film addresses is, ‘How do we become more human again, and less separated?’ That’s the question of the film, and the question of the moment.”
