When Lulu Wang’s grandmother, her Nai Nai, was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, Wang’s family kept it a secret — from Nai Nai. The doctor gave her three months to live. The family gathered in Changchun, China, to say goodbye to a woman who didn’t know they were saying goodbye to her. Wang flew in from her home in America, where she’d lived since she was 6.
The experience stuck with Wang, who turned it into a story for This American Life. Now that story is the basis for her second feature film, The Farewell, which premiered to acclaim at Sundance in January. It’s a lightly fictionalized account of the visit to Changchun, with Wang’s avatar Billi (played by rapper and actress Awkwafina, in her first dramatic lead role) grappling with the contradictions that live inside and around her: East and West, individual and part of a family, insider and outsider.
The result is a finely tuned drama that finds humor in the everyday absurdity that comes from belonging to a family. Grief and love coexist in The Farewell, as do truth and fiction, past and present, sorrow and joy. It’s an outstanding, quietly devastating, deeply personal story, and one that’s destined to put Wang firmly on the map.
The Farewell takes place at the nexus of celebration and sorrow
The family decides to keep Nai Nai (Shuzhen Zhao) in the dark about her illness in accordance with tradition; in China, families often keep terminal diagnoses secret, reasoning that it is the fear of dying that kills the patient, not the illness itself. Billi, who’s spent most of her life in New York City, isn’t convinced. Wouldn’t it be better for Nai Nai to know the end of her life is near, and have time to make peace with it in whatever ways she wants?
It’s not Billi’s choice to make, though. Nai Nai’s two sons — Billi’s father Haiyan (Tzi Ma) and his older brother Haibin (Jiang Yongbo) — moved away from China, to the US and Japan respectively, when their children were young, and so Nai Nai’s care is largely provided by her younger sister, whom Billi calls Little Nai Nai. (Little Nai Nai is played by Wang’s actual great-aunt and caretaker to the real-life Nai Nai, Lu Hong.)
So Billi heads to Changchun, ostensibly to celebrate the wedding of her cousin Hao Hao (Chen Han), Haibin’s son, to his Japanese girlfriend Aiko (Aoi Mizuhara). They’ve only been dating a few months, but the wedding provides an excuse for the family to gather, and so the bewildered Hao Hao and Aiko (who does not speak Chinese) comply with the family’s hastily hatched plan to have the wedding.
With the family preparing for the wedding, Nai Nai jumps into action, booking a banquet hall and planning the wedding feast. She is delighted, but the rest of the family struggles to share in it, arguing behind Nai Nai’s back about how best to navigate these choppy waters while experiencing their own grief.
And for Billi, the stay revives old feelings she hasn’t experienced in years, since she settled into her life in New York. She and Nai Nai are close, talking on the phone often, but they are always fudging the truth to save each other’s feelings. And the longer she spends in Changchun, the more Billi recalls old memories from her pre-America childhood — hours spent in her grandparents’ garden, her carefree days, her late grandfather. Remembering how discombobulated she felt when the family first moved to the US, she begins to chafe against her relationship to her mother Jian (Diana Lin) for going along with the move in the first place. Billi also feels out of place in China — she feels American, and she’s been away from family for so long. Is there anything she can do to recapture the years she didn’t spend with Nai Nai?
Both specific and universal, The Farewell captures the unease of belonging to a family
The Farewell, in its own way, is a universal story. Nearly everyone’s been dropped into an awkward family situation; even in a loving and healthy family, just being around your relatives can produce a jarring sense of dislocation. None of us are exactly the people we were when we were children, but the behaviors we fall into when we’re around family can feel alien to our adult selves. It’s funny, and a little painful, for us to recall those moments as The Farewell’s characters do.
But The Farewell is also highly specific to a very particular experience: Billi’s. She is both Chinese and American, an autonomous adult as well as a daughter and a granddaughter. She speaks Chinese competently enough, but she knows that her American accent and merely rudimentary command of the language mark her as an outsider even within her own family. She is comfortable in Changchun, but not too comfortable. It is her home, and yet it is not at all her home.
That tension lies at the heart of The Farewell, and it’s a relatable one. But Wang isn’t shy about plunging the audience into the heart of Billi’s family and Chinese culture. Much of the film is in Chinese and subtitled. Certain traditions that take place in graveyards, or at wedding banquet halls, are not explained for the non-Chinese viewer; we’re left to experience them alongside a similarly out-of-place Billi, picking up on what’s going on through contextual clues. The Farewell will draw inevitable comparisons to other recent films about Asian Americans, such as Crazy Rich Asians and Always Be My Maybe, but it goes about its story without self-consciously pointing out its Asianness. This is just who Billi and her family are.
The Farewell also employs a recognizably Asian visual style far more than either of those two films. Wang (with cinematographer Anna Franquesa Solano) frequently chooses to frame the drama in static wide-angle shots, meaning many actors can appear onscreen at once, a choice that feels reminiscent of filmmakers like Yasujirō Ozu, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Edward Yang. It’s also a choice that underlines one of the film’s main themes: the fault lines between community and individual. Often, the frame is filled with a big, buzzing group of people who are connected by a solid family structure in which tradition governs the actions of each individual. But when everyone is gone and Billi is alone, the now-empty space around her emphasizes her solitude.
Visually, the film is making a point: There’s a tension between the obligations we have to our families and to ourselves, and that tension is heightened when our culture starkly privileges the needs of many over those of one. That push and pull is the source of Billi’s uneasiness with her family’s choice to keep Nai Nai’s diagnosis from her; she feels it’s wrong, yet she can’t really articulate why the Western way is any better.
And in the end, there isn’t really a good answer. Neither option is perfect. The Farewell doesn’t try to resolve that balance, because it’s fundamentally unresolvable. It’s a cipher for the larger tension Billi feels, of belonging in two places, not eschewing either, and trying somehow to live in the middle. In the end, the best she can do is continue to try.
The Farewell opens in theaters on July 12.