Edward Yang (1947-2007)
A scene from Edward Yang's first feature ON THAT DAY ON THE BEACH (7th AAIFF 1984).
By Daryl Chin
On Saturday night, June 30, 2007, an email from Norman Wang came announcing the death of Edward Yang at the age of 59. An immediate sense of sadness was my response, but soon that sadness became a general state of despair. Of all the major Chinese-language directors to emerge in the 1980s, Edward Yang had inadvertently become the director most closely associated with the Asian American International Film Festival.