Pi-ying Yang

Yang Pi-ying (Chinese: 楊碧瑩, also credited as Being Young) is a Taiwanese screenwriter, credited as writer across twelve episodes of Fragrance of the First Flower (第一次遇見花香的那刻), the Girls’ Love series carried by Netflix and GagaOOLala.

The same name is on the core filmography of Tsai Ming-liang.

Six films for one of world cinema’s most recognised directors

Six of the eight credits on this record are Tsai Ming-liang productions, running from the start of his career:

• Li-hsiang’s Love Line (麗香的感情線, 1990), 51 minutes, as writer
• Boys (小孩, 1991), 50 minutes, as assistant director
• Vive L’Amour (愛情萬歲, 1994), 118 minutes, screenplay
• The River (河流, 1997), 116 minutes, screenplay
• The Hole (洞, 1998), 95 minutes, a Taiwan and France co-production, screenplay
• What Time Is It There? (你那邊幾點, 2001), 116 minutes, France and Taiwan, screenplay

The only other credits are the Taiwanese feature Back to the Good Times (花甲大人轉男孩, 2018), directed by Qu You-ning, and the Girls’ Love series.

Queer credits from 1994 to 2025

Vive L’Amour carries male homosexuality among its classification keywords. The River carries gay parent and gay theme. Fragrance of the First Flower carries Girls’ Love. Thirty-one years separate the first of those from the last, and one writer is on all three.

BLGLFlix editorial view. This is, for our money, the most quietly remarkable record in this catalogue, and it dismantles a distinction that a site like ours is constantly tempted to make.

The usual framing puts art cinema on one side and genre romance on the other. Serious queer film over here, with its festivals and its long takes and its critical literature. Boys’ Love and Girls’ Love over there, with its fandom and its episode counts. The two get discussed by different people in different vocabularies, and the second is routinely treated as the lesser thing.

Then you read a credit list like this one and the wall turns out not to exist. Whoever wrote The River in 1997, a film about a family that cannot say what it knows, went on to write a streaming Girls’ Love series in the 2020s. Not as a favour, not slumming, not under a different name. It is the same writer doing the same job, which is putting people in rooms and deciding what they are unable to say to each other.

Our own read is that this should change how the genre is read, not how the art films are read. Everything Boys’ Love and Girls’ Love get accused of being, small, repetitive, obsessed with unspoken feeling between two people in a confined space, is an accurate description of Vive L’Amour. The difference between the two forms is distribution, budget and who is permitted to take them seriously. It was never the writing, and this page is the proof we would point at.