Part of a Whole

~ The Farewell, a film by Lulu Wang ~

A smart, touching film about diaspora and culture, The Farewell features Awkwafina in a wonderful starring role as Billi: Chinese-American, living in New York, with a grandmother in Changchun, China.

Billi’s grandmother is dying of cancer, but the family decides not to tell her so. For her own good, of course: what could be accomplished by letting the patient know of their impending death? “Most families in China would choose not to tell her”, says a doctor. Instead, they gather together in Changchun on the pretext of the wedding of Billi’s cousin Hao Hao to his Japanese girlfriend. Billi herself, the family agrees, should not be present because she “can’t hide her emotions. If you go, Nai Nai will find out right away.” But Billi, impoverished, just having received a fellowship rejection, decides to go anyway. Her beloved Nai Nai is the last remaining link to her childhood in China.

A film about a dying grandmother sounds grim on the face of it, but The Farewell is darkly funny in both situation and dialogue (not at all slapstick, though). In the hotel, the desk clerk has infinite nosey questions about America for Billi. In the hospital, the doctor turns out to have studied in England, and Nai Nai immediately checks out his marital status. The scene at the grave of Billi’s grandfather is hilarious, framed by paid mourners.

The most vivid character is Nai Nai herself, played by Zhao Shuzhen. She is lively, infinitely affectionate to her family, adores her grandchildren, is sharply critical of the Japanese girlfriend behind her back, and has a fascinating past that is only briefly touched on. She has great lines and delivers them with charm. (One wonders, occasionally, how someone so smart could really be taken in by the central pretense, even when people are bursting into tears around her for no apparent reason.)

Nai Nai’s family is diasporic: one son went to America with his wife and little Billi, the other went to Japan. Nai Nai’s sister lives with her and looks after her (at, it later emerges, enormous cost to her own life: she has not been able to live with her husband for many years.) The family is charmingly, honestly realistic. A dinner-table conversation turns into mildly competitive commentary on China and America: in China, “making a million dollars is easy”, says niece Yu Ping, but in America, says Billi’s mother, someone just gave her the keys to a building so Billi could practice on a piano. (Even the complacent Yu Ping, however, wants to send her son — Bao, nose perpetually buried in his phone — to America to study, for reasons that were not altogether clear to me.)

While the story is very specific, the cultural differences are common to any diasporic family. After you migrated, are you still Chinese (Indian/Nigerian/Guatemalan….), or are you now American? The film avoids simplistic black-and-white answers by displaying the range of responses to this complex question in just this one family.

Awkwafina is excellent: her body language is confident New Yorker at the beginning of the film, but often slumped in despair in Changchun. Her parents seem worn down, both by the secret and their lives in America. They don’t seem to worry about whether they made the right choice in migrating, but they are very aware of what they gave up to do so. Billi is the central figure, but other relationships are also delineated in sweet but sharp scenes. Billi’s mother and her mother-in-law (Nai Nai) have never quite got along. The two sons share their sorrow by drinking. Billi’s uncle tells her not to lecture her father about smoking: it is inappropriate.

The wedding couple, Hao Hao and Aiko, have been dating for just three months, and they both seem to be completely agreeable to having a rush marriage as a pretext to bring the family to Changchun. It is implied that they both understand the Asian family imperatives, but how did the forced marriage affect their relationship? I wish the film had developed their personalities a little more beyond the completely obliging pair they seemed to be. The Chinese/American culture clash is extensively on display, but it would have been interesting to see more about the Chinese/Japanese cultural differences as well.

Says Billi’s uncle:

In the East, a person’s life is part of a whole.

Worth seeing, for sure.

The Farewell, a film by Lulu Wang. 2019