The Mirror Onscreen

There is a scene in the 2019 film The Farewell where Billi, played by actress Awkwafina, decides to tell her mother, Jian, that she’d like to move to China to take care of her grandmother. They’re in Changchun to see her, as she’s been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, but under the false guise that

Billi’s cousin is to marry. The wedding they’ve set up is only an excuse for the extended family to say goodbye, as the family has decided not to inform the grandmother, referred to in the film as Nai Nai and played by actress Zhao Shu-zhen, of her diagnosis. The weight to bear such information, Billi’s uncle tells her, lies on the family, and not Nai Nai, who cannot spare the energy of worrying. When Billi tells Jian of her plan however, Jian is dismissive.

“You stay? For what?” She asks, “You can’t cook, you can’t clean. You barely speak Chinese!” This is when Billi begins to cry. They moved from China when she was six, she reminds her mother, and she had no idea what was going on. When her grandfather died, her parents decided not to return for the funeral, and so now as she returns more than twenty years later, everything is different. Her ye ye is gone, their house is gone, Nai

Nai’s old neighborhood in Changchun is gone; paved over to build skyscrapers. Soon, Billi realizes, Nai Nai will be gone too.

My dad and his family escaped Vietnam in 1980, settling in a small majority-white college town in eastern Washington. While applying to medical schools, he met my mom at a party. She was an ESL teacher, and gave him her number because she had Vietnamese students of her own and wanted him to come in to speak to them. When he introduced her to his parents, my bà nội cried, not because my mom was white, but because she wasn’t Catholic. After medical school, my parents moved to Minneapolis for my dad’s residency, where I was born. Two years later, they moved to Portland and had my brother. We continued to move—San Francisco, then Seattle, then Baltimore. My brother and I grew up away from my bà nội and ông nội, or any of my dad’s relatives. When we did see my grandparents, a sort of crash-course in culture occurred. It was mostly through my bà nội’s cooking—we’d wake up every morning to her cooking bánh bao and bánh tiêu, and as we sat with her at dinner she’d scoop whatever dish she had cooked that we had strategically avoided due to its appearance and encourage us to try it (it always turned out good, because it was Bà nội who cooked it)—but it was also in other ways. We attended midnight mass with them, and listened in as they spoke with my dad, catching the small scraps of English my dad would toss in if he didn’t know a word. That, combined, was what I saw as my Vietnamese experience.

The summer before my seventh grade, my family flew to Orange County for a wedding of one of my dad’s cousins. There were to be two ceremonies—a

traditional Vietnamese wedding at a rental house and then an exchange of vows at the church nearby. At the rental house, I found myself crammed between relatives I had never met before, watching as the couple made their way through the house to an altar. I remember my ông nội handing me an iPad and telling me to film the ceremony, and me waving the iPad around wildly with no idea what to focus on.

In The Farewell, based on director and writer Lulu Wang’s own experience, Billi comes to understand that lying to her grandmother to spare her the pain of knowing she is dying is something she’ll never fully get, and yet it’s not her place to say her family cannot do so. This realization, perhaps, is a culmination of her trip to Changchun where she’s been confronted at every turn with reminders that this former home is not hers. That sort of comprehension—of knowing there’s a tradition, a culture, a language, a way of life you’re a part of yet will never fully understand—is one I had never before seen expressed, and yet it was something I had come to understand early on, and subsequently felt shame for. For me, watching The Farewell was like looking into a mirror on-screen. And as Billi reached her moment of catharsis, I felt something settle in me too. There was something so achingly specific in the film, for any immigrants or children of immigrants, about the question of belonging.

In attempting to get The Farewell financed, director Lulu Wang noted that she came across pushback from both American and Chinese financiers, who wanted her to add a white character with a large supporting role to her script. In an interview with The New York Times, Jon M. Chu, the director of Crazy Rich Asians, revealed that an early suggestion from a producer was to make the main character and audience surrogate of the film, Rachel Chu, a white woman. The goal with both sets of requests is painfully clear— these financiers believed audiences would be unable to re- late to the stories on screen if there was not a white character present that everything could be easily explained to. And while these concerns per- haps had little faith in white audiences, they are even more marked in their disregard for Asian audiences. Adding a white character as the audience surrogate inevitably changes stories like The Farewell and Crazy Rich Asians from observations on what it means to be Asian American to examinations and dissection on our culture from the outside looking in. In The

Farewell, Billi, acting as the audience surrogate, is able to learn about the reasons her family have for lying to her nai nai and process her own emotions as a member of the community. Thus, the angle for the story never skews into demonizing or exoticizing the situation at hand as it might have done had there been a white character standing in for the audience and reacting to the conundrum.

Furthermore, having a white character stand in for the audience invalidates the central conflict of both Crazy Rich Asians and The Farewell, two films that investigate the feeling of alienation that being a member of a diaspora can bring. These inner turmoils are

disregarded if instead the story is retooled to focus on explaining Asian and Asian American life to an outsider. All in all, in suggesting that a white audience surrogate is needed for the films’ success, these financiers are showing both their view of Asian Americans as the other, as people who need to be explained to general crowds, as well as their mistrust in Asian creators like Wang and Chu in their ability to tell their story on their own.

The Farewell has faced criticism itself for its portrayal of China. (Having no Chinese ancestry or relation to China, I feel I cannot speak on this aspect, but found the article by Qin Chen in Inkstone News, “Is ‘The Farewell’ problematic? For some in China, the answer is yes” helpful in breaking down another perspective on the film.) Similar to Crazy Rich Asians, which faced criticism for its failure to include aspects of Singaporean culture beyond the upper-class, this issue brings to light the dearth of Asian and Asian American films being produced and screened in America. When only one or two make it to general audiences a year, this itself only being a recent phenomenon, pressure is added for them to act not only as films but the Asian films. Crazy Rich Asians goes from a fun, glittery rom-com to a movie that stands for the entire Asian population and diaspora. The Farewell is lifted from a small independent feature about a personal history to a representation of Asians everywhere because it is the only film out that year with an entirely Asian cast, telling an Asian story. Not only are these films supposed to act for the entire, diverse Asian community, the chances for future projects getting greenlit and produced then hinge on their success and their ability to get audiences to come out. And when film producers, financiers, or distributors either can’t relate to the stories being told or doubt audiences’ ability to relate, either the artistic integrity of the story or the story’s chances at ever getting told are hampered. And in no way does the blame lie on the films themselves, but rather the situations And yet, perhaps the watershed moment for Asian and Asian-American stories in Hollywood is already here. Parasite’s win marks a new Oscars, one where foreign-language films are now in consideration (the fact it took 91 years is perhaps less of a celebratory fact). Recently, a group of

Asian-American film and media veterans founded AUM Group, a fund dedicated to telling diverse stories. Four days before AUM’s announcement, producer Mary Lee announced her new production company A-Major Media, which is set to focus on producing film and television content centered on Asian-American experiences.

At the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, Minari, a film by Korean-American director

Lee Isaac Chung based on his own experience growing up in rural Arkansas, picked up both the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize and the Dramatic Audience Award. Tigertail, Alan Yang’s fictionalized retelling of how his father came to

America from Taiwan, was recently released on

Netflix. More stories are coming, highlighting more backgrounds and more perspectives, from our own storytellers.

On a website set up by The Farewell’s distributor A24, www.mynainai.com, users could upload a photo of their grandmother and what they learned from them, which they could then share to their Instagram story or post. On The

Farewell’s Instagram page you can still see them. Grandmothers, grandmamas, bubbies, abuelitas—these images prove that The Farewell isn’t just relatable from an Asian perspective. The love for family is universal, and despite the financiers’ worries about Lulu Wang’s story, there was a large audience receptive to it. So perhaps these financiers were wrong in assuming a white character was needed for the audience to relate, as it is only crystal clear in many ways that these stories, while being slices of Asian and Asian American life, don’t need any reframing to be understood and enjoyed by all.