Based on Lulu Wang’s podcast story, The Farewell follows the return of Bili’s family to Changchun, China. Under the guise of a fake wedding, the family bids goodbye to Nai Nai, whose terminal lung cancer diagnosis has been hidden from her. The Farewell is an enunciative film; it produces the Chinese community it describes in the act of writing, recording, and mapping its voices, actions, and decisions. However, The Farewell traces not only collectivism but also heterogeneity. It impartially charts the treatment of race, morality, modernity, and tradition in different characters, as well as how the culture bar inhibits certain ethical liberties. Put simply, The Farewell maps collectivism and its limitations. In the following, I will argue that the film’s preoccupation with unity marks a preoccupation with Chinese culture, one that finally functions to query and problematize a straightforward reading of Chinese values that equates collectivism to homogeneity and upholding traditions to upholding patriarchy.
1. Surface and Depths & the Visibility of Heterogeneity
Lulu Wang avoids the homogenization of the Chinese as exclusively familial and unanimous. By deviating from a vertical model of collectivist culture to a more horizontal depiction of interpersonal dynamics, she contextualizes Lowe’s concepts of “cultural identity,” “heterogeneity,” and “multiplicity” within The Farewell. Lowe expresses that interpreting Chinese culture solely in terms of “master narratives of generational conflict and filial relation” essentializes Chinese culture and “obscures particularities and incommensurability of class, gender, and national diversities” (Lowe, 63). Rather, cultural practices and identity should be analyzed through both historical and material aspects.
The film connects the anthropology of food to the binary of individualism-collectivism; Wang marks the countdown to the wedding banquet through the motif of the dining table and presents the relationship-oriented cultural identity of the Chinese family. While courses are rigidly set apart in the comparatively individualistic West, communal dishes such as prawns, meat pies, and roasted duck are served all at the same time in The Farewell, alluding to values of abundance, prosperity, and community-mindedness. With chairs arranged in a neat circle, the round table mirrors the shape of a full moon, representing unity in Chinese culture and consequently symbolizing the family’s consensus on their elaborate lie.
On another hand, by framing narratives that unfold over meals as sites of internal struggle, Lulu Wang shatters the illusory binary of individualism-collectivism and displays heterogeneity within the family. Lowe refers to “heterogeneity” to indicate the “existence of different and differential relationships within a bounded category” (67). Particularly in the opening of the wedding banquet, a group of employees highlights the community’s collective celebration and chants “Make romance! Become history! Witness happiness!” It is important to recognize that Wang also maps the limitations of collectivism by meticulously documenting the numerous emotional conflicts characters encounter during the wedding, illuminating the diverse experience of the Chinese family and pushing back on the hegemonic, reductionist narrative of homogeneity. While giving his speech, Bili’s father chokes back his tears, wracked with guilt and shame for not being by Nai Nai’s side for the past years as her health deteriorates. In the middle of an opera performance, Hao Hao reaches his breaking point and bursts into gut-wrenching sobs. Although the sadness is explained away to Nai Nai as “tears of joy,” Wang effectively records individual emotional experiences and deconstructs the conventional association of collectivism with homogeneity, creating an authentic representation of Chinese communities.
2. Multiplicity: Barriers and Conduits in Communal and Transnational Relations
In The Farewell, “multiplicity” can be understood as designating how the characters located within social relations are determined by several axes of power and are multiplied by the contradictions of Chinese provincial origins, generational relations concerning globalization and immigration, economic conditions outside of the motherland, patriarchy, race relations, and capitalism (Lowe 67). The dinner table functions as a social place where idiosyncratic cultural values unravel and grapple with each other. In one dinner scene, the family debates over the topics of American passports, sending Chinese children to the US for college, and the significance of money over contentment, proposing the question of whether “raising a kid is like playing with the stock market.” As tension around the idea of ambitions versus stability bubbles to the surface over dinner, Wang allegorizes differences between “native” and “westernized” Chinese values, distinguishing the impression of different axes of power and values within the smaller sections of the family.
Bili’s quest for familiarity and the reconciliation of tradition and modernity further accentuates the theme of multiplicity in The Farewell. As Bili reminisces on her “favorite childhood memories of catching dragonflies with Ye Ye in the garden” and laments on how “Everything is gone. Our Beijing house is gone, Ye Ye is gone, and soon she’ll be gone too,” Wang elucidates her confusion in building an Asian American identity and postulates her displacement in America. In “The Chinese Exclusion Example,” Erika Lee describes the US’s representation of Chinese immigration as an evil, unarmed invasion, and analyses how the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 legalized and reinforced the need to restrict, exclude, and deport the "undesirable" (Lee, 37). Lee’s argument of how gatekeeping ideology perpetuates Asians to be always seen as the “foreigner within” illuminates why Bili answers “It’s different” with a hint of melancholy to the hotel host’s question of whether America is better than China—the myths of immigrant mobility in the US and the rhetoric of the Chinese as an inferior race perhaps govern Bili’s rejection from the fellowship. Through the juxtaposition of warm and cold tones in cinematography, Wang further alludes to different senses of psychological space. While the rustic scenes of skyscrapers and the depiction of symmetrical red, yellow, and peach buildings imply Bili’s emotional ties to her Chinese origins, the cold, harsh neon lighting of the scene with Bili sitting in her old room, red ribbon rattling against the air-conditioner, suggests her alienation from the Mandarin language and by extension her interiority as a site of perpetual alienation and dislocation from both hegemonic Eastern and Western narratives of culture.
The film’s lens is simultaneously critical and appreciative of Chinese culture, addressing the perception of America while strengthening a realistic, multi-dimensional perception of China. In response to Bili’s ethical dilemma, her father says, “You think one’s life belongs to oneself. But in the East, a person’s life is part of a whole.” Blurring the orthodox lines of right and wrong, The Farewell evokes the grey spaces between the diametrically opposed West and East, bad truths and “good lies,” choice and duty, and utilitarian and Kantian ethics. The dinner table, the crux around which the family is oriented, is the site of dynamic fluctuation—while family members literally swallow their grief as they eat, Bili wrestles with “carrying the burden of death” and the legal and ethical implications of the lie. Here, she serves as a conduit for the bounded and impenetrable dichotomy of Western and Eastern values and symbolizes possibilities for the reinvention of identities within multiplicities. Capturing different extents of criticism on individualism and patriotism over the family’s mealtimes, The Farewell functions to erase the conflation of community with homogeneity and to project the fragmented heterogeneity and discontinuous, episodic origins within Asian families, breaking away from the dominant vertical narrative of mere generational conflict.
In “The Cultural Politics of East-West Encounter in Crazy Rich Asians,” Jing Yang and Jin Zhang discuss how “regardless of the marginalization of Asian Americans in the US,” the film Crazy Rich Asians “manages to celebrate the metaphorical gesture of ‘striking back’ at the Western powers” (Yang & Zhang, 606). While Crazy Rich Asians risks reproducing misrepresentations of the ‘China threat’ discourse and the model minority myth, the similarly Asian-centric film, The Farewell, does not intend to acquire moments of racial “revenge.” The Farewell does not focus attention on the concept of more and more Chinese inhabiting and conquering global spaces of capitalism. Instead, it outlines a tender, incommensurable immigrant story that necessarily stretches across generational consciousnesses within Bili’s family. Near the film’s end, Bili’s mother, Lu Jian, says to her, “Water means talent, so a lot of talent. But my water is long and flowing—a river, so I cannot keep any of it. But my daughter… She is also water but she is big ocean water. So my river will flow into her.” Here, Wang intervenes with social assumptions produced by US media and avoids misrepresentations of the Chinese as Sino-centric, intimidating, hostile, or racially competitive. Alternatively, she underscores the intergenerational search, self-defence, and self-creation for immigrant identity and comfort.
3. Simplified Complex Representation, Disidentification, & Feminism
In The Farewell, the process of mapping Chinese representation revolves around Nai Nai, the matriarch of the family and by extension the enunciation of her Chinese community. I contend that the representative quality of Nai Nai is best analyzed through the film’s rejection of a “simplified complex representation.” Evelyn Alsultany defines simplified complex representations as “strategies used by television producers, writers, and directors to give the impression that the representations they are producing are complex, yet… in a simplified way” (Alsultany, 162). She gives the example of the depiction of Arab and Muslim characters in the aftermath of 9/11 and pinpoints how the seemingly anti-racist representations serve as a point of comparison to target individuals perceived as behaving outside the parameters of ostensibly “positive” behaviors.
On the surface, The Farewell presents Nai Nai as a domineering, overbearing matriarch. In one scene, Lu Jian says to Bili: “[Nai Nai] enjoys bossing everyone around. Makes her feel important. Makes her feel in control. That’s why she hates America, because she cannot tell anyone what to do.” In another scene, Nai Nai dominates the tomb-sweeping ritual, leading the family through the customs of food offering, bowing, and verbal blessings. Yet, the understanding of Nai Nai’s representation requires not only a recognition of the mechanisms of Chinese traditions but further demands mindful consideration of its interests and rules. In charting the Chinese matriarch alongside the dualities of her values, Lulu Wang makes visible and legible a representation of Chinese culture that, as a multifaceted, diffuse network of cultural and private practices, evades the trope of simplified complex representations.
In the same tomb-sweeping scene, Nai Nai expresses: “When my time comes, just spread my ashes in the ocean. No one’s ever home anyways. Then you won’t have to travel back and forth all the time.” Here, she subverts the conventional image of a totalitarian Chinese matriarch preoccupied with orderliness, physical groundedness, and the idea of control over death. By presenting the relative who states that “humans must return to the earth to find peace and comfort in death” as a foil to Nai Nai, Lulu Wang constructs the matriarch in a way that does not passively record material cultural traditions but actively inflects dualistic values of tradition, freedom, and letting go. Thus, The Farewell dismantles the positive-negative binary of the simplified complex representation—the character of Nai Nai astutely represents how Chinese customs do not act as an all-encompassing mode of discipline but also refuses to flatly dismiss Chinese practices of honoring ancestry and death.
The question emerges, then: what is the solution Wang offers in producing productive models of representation? I contend that the answer lies in José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of “disidentification” (Muñoz, 4). He defines disidentification as “descriptive of the survival strategies the minority subject practices to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship.” In The Farewell, Wang sets up the Chinese phantasm of normative citizenship as one entrenched in a hierarchical and patriarchal order based on a conservative Confucian superstructure. Nai Nai obsesses over the family’s “mianzi,” or “face”—she emphasizes “My only grandson’s getting married. We can’t look cheap!” and that the children “should loudly say ‘Hello uncle! Hello auntie!” when greeting friends and relatives during the wedding. In the tomb-sweeping scene, she blesses the men in the family with fortune and success in their businesses, while constantly wishing that Bili finds happiness in marriage rather than in her writing career. By upholding the concept of “face” and group harmony, Nai Nai integrates visions of the family with nepotism, male chauvinism, female purity, materialism, filial piety, and reverence.
Yet, Muñoz stresses that “disidentification is not an apolitical middle ground”—it negotiates tactics of resistance within fluxes of discourse and power (18). While Nai Nai’s words seem to legitimize and sustain the masculinist ideologies and misogyny of the Chinese status quo on the surface, it is in fact Nai Nai, the matriarch of the family, who proves a functional agent of feminism in The Farewell. The production design of the Nai Nai’s framed portrait, with her dressed in revolutionary attire, subtly alludes to her adventurous, non-conformist nature. Rather than explicitly challenging problems of gender inequality in her culture, Nai Nai advocates for independence in managing her health and hospital visits. Ironically, it is Nai Nai’s attachment to seemingly mundane details and the concept of “face,” such as insisting on serving lobster instead of crab for the wedding, that allows her commanding presence and self-determinism to glue the family together, and in turn, become an effective model of feminism within Chinese practicalities and gender politics.
In other words, while her character appears fixed and static in traditions, it is Nai Nai who, acknowledging and understanding the language of Chinese patriarchy, instigates disidentification in the future generation. At the heart of the film is the relationship between a grandmother and her granddaughter—Nai Nai gently reassures Bili by saying “Your mind is powerful” and “You’ll be fine, child. I’ve walked the path of life and I must tell you, you’ll encounter difficulties, but you have to look past the noise. Don’t be the bull endlessly ramming its horns into the corner of the room.” Perhaps, this is commentary on how one must attend to the innumerable confinements within the dominant Chinese culture of patriarchy to adapt it to their own interests and rules. Nai Nai promotes gentle, purposeful strength as a powerful reaction against narratives of misogyny, reminding the audience of the consonance between observation, revisionary self-creation, and the feminist movement. Nai Nai’s disidentification neither opts to assimilate nor strictly dispel, but rather, “like a melancholic subject holding onto a lost object, works to hold the object and invest it with new life”—Bili is influenced by Nai Nai’s self-sufficiency as she practices Tai Chi exercise at the end of the film like her grandmother did in an earlier scene. Thus, Nai Nai’s silent repudiation of the repressive imprisonment and diminution of the female body transforms into Bili’s reconstruction of dreams, visions, and binaries within her Chinese identity.
In conclusion, The Farewell is a drama of the Chinese community, or more accurately, a comedic tragedy, of the collisions of heterogeneity, multiplicity, and disidentification with the dominant narrative of the Chinese collectivist patriarchy. Tracing Bili’s journey of sorrow and nostalgia and the family’s bittersweet celebrations and somber guilt, the film’s universal tale of love and grief is dualistic at its core. Although the family members act in silent accordance to their prescribed roles and individuals merge as collective atoms fixed in a crystal, Wang illuminates each individual with the multi-colored lights of a prismatic jewel.
Works Cited
Alsultany, Evelyn. “Arabs and Muslims in the Media after 9/11: Representational Strategies for a ‘Postrace’ Era.” American Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 1, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013, pp. 161–69.
Lee, Erika. “The Chinese Exclusion Example: Race, Immigration, and American Gatekeeping, 1882-1924.” Journal of American ethnic history 21.3 (2002): 36–62.
Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: on Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Wang, Lulu, director. The Farewell, 2019.
Yang, Jing, and Jin Zhang. “The Cultural Politics of East-West Encounter in Crazy Rich Asians.” Continuum (Mount Lawley, W.A.) 35, no. 4 (2021): 600–613.
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