On Ellie’s father
Near the end of first scene between Ellie and her father, Ellie notices the lights flicker and asks whether her father has called the power company. Barely looking away from the film he’s rewatching on the TV, he replies that they “don’t understand his accent”:
To which Ellie retorts, “Did you try?” It is implied that he could theoretically communicate with the power company successfully, but is too exhausted to try to make them understand him, and so relies on Ellie instead.
Even in his choice of entertainment, we get the sense of his limiting himself to things he can understand and connect with fully – all of the films he watches are old, and he is familiar with them to the point of being able to recite lines verbatim. Because he does not engage with anything new to him, he is able to protect himself from the risk of misunderstanding – but this leaves him in a position where he is effectively stagnating, unwilling to adapt or change (without Ellie to communicate with the power company on his behalf, the electricity would just eventually run out).
Later on, we learn that Ellie’s father is in charge of managing the train station, the duties of which include manning the switch for trains passing through, and more relevantly, signalling them – another form of communication. Yet even here, Ellie’s father leaves it to Ellie to communicate, with her being required to run with the handheld signal lamps twice every day. Once again, he has the option to communicate himself – through the railway signals that can be controlled from the booth – but does not choose to do so, shying away from the possibility of malfunction and miscommunication, as he “doesn’t trust them”:
In fact, it is only much later that he even so much as tries to communicate with somebody other than Ellie, when he asks Paul whether he has “broken up” with Ellie – notably, it is his love and concern for his daughter that motivates him into making this first step (it is highly possible that he taught Paul the recipe for braised pork without ever speaking, leading only by demonstration). This conversation also revisits the idea of communication and change, first brought up with the railway signals, as he laments the idea of him not “seeing” Ellie and thus not understanding or connecting with her because of his resistance to change, asking Paul whether he has “ever loved someone so much that you don’t want anything about her to change“.
Significantly, although a portion of his speech to Paul about his wife and Ellie is in Chinese, he makes the effort to ask this question in English, specifically so that Paul can understand him. This is his turning point, when he acknowledges that his own stubbornness still resulted in miscommunication, and in trying to connect with others, he can help them connect with Ellie.
This change in Mr. Chu’s outlook is confirmed in the last scene of the film, where Ellie is boarding a train, and he is using the railway signals. In the last shot we see of him, he is visible to outsiders, separated only by the glass panes of the booth’s windows rather than shut off from the world in his house, ready to engage with the outside world. In this moment, we are shown that he has finally embraced change and also the responsibility to communicate himself, without Ellie as his mouthpiece.
