A True Goodbye: A Critical Approach to The Farewell

The Farewell (2019) by director Lulu Wang is a tale based “on an actual lie” but displays the beautiful truths of human nature. The storytelling follows Billi (Awkwafina) and her family as they discover that her grandmother, Nai Nai, is dying. They return to China under the guise of a wedding, but in reality, it is a final goodbye because the family decides to keep Nai Nai’s condition a secret. Billi deals with the internal struggle between her Westernized morals and her family’s Eastern principles. Contrary to many “prominent” depictions of Asian and Asian Americans, this movie sparingly touches on its characters’ generational differences. Instead, the primary focus of the film is differing moral standpoints and contrasting cultural experiences. The Farewell displays the heterogeneity within an often homogeneously perceived community. I maintain that the Farewell is best analyzed in contrast to Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts and the topic of “heterogeneity” and the term “racialization” from Natalia Molina and Daniel Martinez HoSang’s Relational Formations of Race. Heterogeneity is a way of thinking about differences across diverse communities of people. Racialization is the process of instilling a person with a consciousness of race distinctions or giving racial character to someone. Through heterogeneity and racialization, The Farewell allows viewers to understand the cultural dynamics and moral ideologies of a Chinese family dealing with loss.

The Farewell spotlights a massive shift in the depictions of Chinese and Chinese Americans in film. The portrayal of Asians in Western films has a complicated history. Much of this complexity has to do with developing immigration laws and constructing the “model minority” in the United States. Writer Erika Lee’s “The Chinese Exclusion Example” discusses the Chinese Exclusion Act and how it “marked a ‘watershed’ in U.S. history because it was not only the country’s first significant restrictive immigration law, it was also the first to restrict a group of immigrants based on their race and class…” (Lee 36). The act developed race-based immigration in the U.S. during the twentieth century. The act prevented Chinese immigrants’ naturalization and barred Chinese laborers from immigrating to the U.S. This is not the first example of the anti-Chinese movement making its mark in America. However, it was a gigantic marker for developing the more discriminatory depictions of Asians in the media...

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