It’s difficult for me to process The Farewell, a film so acute in its approximation of the shape of my life while appearing, in bare narrative detail, nothing like it. I have never, unlike The Farewell’s protagonist Billi, been asked to participate in a family conspiracy to ensure my grandmother doesn’t find out about her own late-stage cancer diagnosis. I have never, as a result, left New York for China to attend a wedding between my cousin and his casual girlfriend that is really, without her knowing it, a final familial send-off for my grandmother. Nor have I ever sat with my great aunt in the small, overflowing broom cupboard of a print shop in Changchun, instructing the bemused shop owner to tweak a diagnosis report so that late-stage cancer, three months left to live instead reads benign shadows. Yet I find myself crying for almost the whole duration of the film. This feels embarrassing, as though I’m capitulating to a culture in which ‘representation’ is spoken with a capital R. I find myself as a twenty-something Chinese woman in the diaspora weeping while watching a film about another twenty-something Chinese woman in the diaspora – the most obvious and unremarkable thing in the world.
None of the above is intended to make the film seem more melodramatic than it is. The Farewell does not want to pull at your heartstrings but rather presents life as it is for Billi’s family, a family that closely resembles my own. I cry because I am able to steep in an active, gorgeous presence that has so rarely been given the tools to be one (The Farewell, for one, almost didn’t get made.) The East Asian diasporic experience is often spoken through the lens of absence, inadequacy, guilt, and melancholia. And understandably so when your life involves a constant battle against minimisation, infantilisation and idealisation. You don’t feel fully American but don’t belong where your parents grew up, either. Your life is a magnificent debt to your parents that will never be repaid. These statements might sound dramatic, but for many they simply describe life. Some have spoken of the universal relatability of The Farewell as an ode to all families that express love in bizarre ways. But my heart, still too frenetic to join up with my mind, wants to double down on the specificity of the film’s depiction of Chinese familial life. What does this mean? I have hoarded in my notebook small details in the film that, when assembled together, mark out the contours of something resembling a coherent cultural experience. In Changchun, her family’s hometown, we see Billi at a family dinner at a round table topped with a lazy susan, watching her mother and aunt have a charged conversation about who has the more filial offspring. She attends a wedding photoshoot between bride and groom in a studio with pink fuzzy photo frames, and joins her grandmother Nai Nai for morning exercises behind her apartment block. These scenes are all presented with a breezy, matter-of-factness. We experience them as Billi experiences them. At a time when ‘culture’ (commonly shorthand for non-white cultures) is often treated like a decorative object to be unveiled and explained for an unfamiliar audience, this simple self-presentation that answers to no one is refreshing. It also challenges me as a viewer, tethered as I am is to the immigrant child’s proclivity to translate, to couch, to save people from grappling with the subtleties of my culture by repackaging it in a cute, self-abnegating form. The Farewell says instead: live the world as you are. Let others work to understand you.
This apparent simplicity also contains emotional depth. Each frame of the family in The Farewell carries heaviness and lightness at once, indicative of the pain hidden behind everybody’s performative happiness. A celebratory wedding speech becomes a thinly-disguised eulogy; the groom is buzzed from alcohol, but one shot too many and he begins to cry. The only thing stronger than the all-consuming directive to maintain mianzi are the emotions leaking out from its grip. As she watches this unfold, Billi’s diminutive posture accentuates the vibrant largeness of the world around her. Comfortable and open in America, in Changchun she is small, overwhelmed by her new surroundings. Events happen around her: she becomes a witness, rather than an agent. When Billi arrives at her modest hotel room, guided by an eager receptionist, he asks her where she prefers: America or China? Her pained, evasive response – they’re different – is a go-to utterance for an entire diasporic generation, keen to skirt around the real question: So you live in a void. Which nationality would you prefer pull to you out of it? I, like the characters on-screen, also fail to contain the confusing mixture of emotions in my head. I devour details that remind me of my own life – family banquets with chain-smoking uncles downing baijiu; harshly-lit living rooms with furniture draped in dust-repellent cloth; relatives vigorously piling on food onto my plate, mistaking my protests for encouragement. Seeing Billi’s family in full, uninhibited glory on-screen reminds me of how much time I have wasted translating, negotiating, hedging this world – explaining it for others at the cost of truly attending to it myself.
The Farewell invites the audience to engage with the granular specificity of Billi’s day-to-day family life. Yet this was what felt unsatisfactory to the early American and Chinese investors who rejected it. Was this an American film, they seemed to be asking, or a Chinese one? That the film was inspired by her real-life experiences seemed irrelevant to the question of whether this depiction of a culture would be ‘convincing’ enough to be marketable. In the end, she fought to make it her way, without compromising her vision. The resulting subtlety, her belief in looking to the everyday, is what makes the film beautiful. It is impossible to list all the moments that made my eyes well up, but I remember one more keenly than others. It is a blue-toned wide shot, near the end, of Billi walking down the street, flanked by her family. They are all looking towards the camera, their failed attempts to repress their grief visible in their faces – and they are looking at you, the viewer. It is one thing for me to see a Chinese person in an American film framed with such effusive, centralised humanity; to see an entire group at once made my head spin. Released from the compulsion to translate this world for an imagined other and given the freedom to sit with it as it is and really look, I felt a deep love for everyone on-screen; and, unnaturally, a self-love. Where to put all this emotion? I wish I could feed it back, back to my own Nai Nais, Ye Yes, aunties and uncles, and to my long-suffering parents, confused about why their only child is spending her life writing fancified versions of school papers they can’t read for a literary world dominated by wealthy white people. But I have more things in common with Billi than I’d necessarily like: my broken, clipped Mandarin can only communicate so much.
Rebecca Liu is a staff writer at Another Gaze
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