The Farewell and the Undefineable Face of Migration
Is it a thing of beauty when a film determines you to reconsider perspectives and re-evaluate what you know. It is truly humbling when it not only re-arranges the very fibers of your being, but it also takes you to a place where you recognise yourself so clearly it hurts.
And the after effects of watching The Farewell are probably even more of what makes this viewing a necessary hurricane to the human consciousness. Weeks after having watched it and I still discover new lights to it – like an essential lesson, it stays with you and unravels more of itself long after the credits have ended.
The experiences we have inform the way we read stories, watch films and what we take away from them. I watched The Farewell with my mother, and, while for her it was a bittersweet drama about a family reuniting to see the dying grandmother one last time while hiding the truth under the pretense of a family wedding instead – I think the layer of the social inadequacy of the immigrant protagonist simply did not land as hard as it did for me. I am a born and bred Romanian who has been living in the UK for the past six years; it’s where I went to university, where I continued my studies and my work afterwards and where a big part of my identity has been formed, in a way separately from what my identity at home used to be.
How, then, can a story about a Chinese-American revisiting her roots feel closer and more relevant to me, a Central-East European grown on Western media products, than most of the stories I’ve seen and consumed all these years?
There are some exceptional films about the migrant experience out there (just think Once Upon A Time in America, Dancer in the Dark or America America), but the most popular ones either look exclusively at these movements into the US at the beginning of the twentieth century or fail to bring into conversation an integral view of intersectionality (barring Persepolis). And even though sentiments such as the struggle for integration and making one’s way up through hard work are remarkably present across generations, immigration as it happens today, and especially for the millennial generation, has a distinct layer of seeding disillusionment rarely encountered on the big screen and almost never in American movies.
The Farewell speaks to me personally, from this point of view, and manages to grow, as it unfolds, into the most resonant account of modern-day immigrant experience. The way director Lulu Wang captures this through the character Billi is both discreet and poignant, and an exceptional Awkwafina simply embodies the entirety of it.
The cultural differences between the character’s world and my own couldn’t be more abrupt. As we learn in the movie, in Chinese culture, the family and community take the burden of one’s person’s impending death as their own, the emotional pain as well as all the affairs, duties and responsibilities of the person who is about to die are taken upon and adopted by the family circle instead.
In the Balkanic space, things have a different nuance. Sure, across cultures, death is viewed as a passing, a transition into a different state or place. While there is a common thread of having one’s life integrate within a bigger picture, re-take its place in the great cosmos, become once again one with nature - in Romanian culture it is an occasion for, a responsibility even, of the person who is about to go on their final journey, in sound mind, to settle all accounts with the living world. It is up to them to be aware of where they are in the cycle of life and death, to acknowledge it and make peace with it.
As encountered in our folklore, death is an integral part of life and is perceived in concordance with nature: in the archaic world, similar to farming and agricultural settlements across the world, people’s very lifestyles would be guided by the succession of the seasons, by meteorological phenomena and even by astral elements. It might seem a very rudimental explanation, but this symbiosis is very symbolic of the cycle of life and survives to this day in traditions pertaining major events in a person’s life (birth, baptism, wedding, funeral).
The best example in Romanian literature is the ballad Mioriţa. Symbolic of man’s relationship with nature and the cosmos, a shepherd converses with one of his sheep about his impending death, communicating his will and leaving her with the task to inform his mother and his fiancée of where and how to bury him. It is understood and expected that the person who is about to pass to also pass on responsibilities, duties to the family and close-knit community, and to communicate how they want them to handle both the funeral and the subsequent ceremonies, and personal affairs pertaining the household, the family or their work.
While in Lulu Wang’s movie the family’s farewell to Nai Nai is rather masked and undertaken solely by the family, full of meaning yet so contained, in its elegance - in my own culture it is an open act, an emotional as well as a very practical - almost clinical - rite.
So what is it that resonates so well, if the cultural ceremonies are so different in their complexity?
Sure, the sense of imminent loss is something we can all recognise and relate to. But what Wang masters so well in her storytelling is interweaving the threads of the two cultures, the Chinese and the American one, in a structure that is simple as is complex, sensitive as it is cutting right through the depth of Billi’s (Awkwafina) broken cultural identity; it is a story that is tender yet irreversible in its sadness.
The alienation Billi feels, coming from a Western country where she spent most of her life – is inevitable. That is the first note that carries us through a journey of contradictory feelings, which I couldn’t help but recognise as my own, as well. There is the separation of the social, professional identity and of the aspects of one’s personality that develop in a new culture – and the identity back home, as part of the family, of the friendships you’ve had for longer than half of your life. What struck me the most was perhaps the sense of grief not only for losing someone the character loves so dearly, but for the parts of her identity back home that have dimmed out throughout the years and will eventually fade away completely once her grandmother is no more.
The grandmother represents here Billi’s only connection to a country she feels estranged from, the only anchor into a culture she feels she is not fully integrated in.
What it is that ties us and what is it that breaks us apart? Immigration is an accepted phenomenon in Romania. It is not disapproved of, it is not glorified - it’s just something that happens, as difficult as it may be, and in mass, lately. People go outside to study, to seek a better paid job, to make a living. They might return for good, they might return just for the holidays and major events. It’s neither this nor that, but it is everything in between. There is always the anxiety, the inquisitive attitudes, the inability to fully explain to someone or help them understand what your other life is like. There is always a rift, always a need to want to reach out more but the inability to do so, sometimes with your own family. The sentiment that maybe you can’t comprehend anymore your old way of living and the guilt that you don’t deserve to be fully accepted back. That your current political, social, cultural views are to be kept in check, and your right to express opinions of such nature is questionable, as they might not be in accordance with the reality of the people who actually live and work there every minute of their every day. That you don’t have the right to demand something else of your political leaders, because you will not be there to endure the consequences, good but most likely bad, of those choices. These are things that the Diaspora has been confronted with since forever.
Billi’s extended family argues how it is much easier to gather a financial wealth in China than it is in the States, mentality that Billi doesn’t align with, as she is still struggling to get a break in her own career at the age of thirty. The conception of my own people back home is that you go to a different country with the purpose of making money – when the reality is that you get integrated into a culture and lifestyle that endures compromises on a daily basis for the sake of pursuing a job in an industry you want to work in, if you want to pursue a passion that is of a more creative nature and not just keep it on the side as a hobby, how you’d be advised to do back home - because one must choose practically and responsibly and with a view to the future and to the future family you are expected to have. In a patriarchal society with plenty of matriarchal family units, it is accepted that a young woman should want to carve out her own life, her own career, her own future. That she should want to be independent – but not single, successful professionally – but not so much so as to priorities that over being a mother. Sounds pretty universal, doesn’t it?
In this whirlwind of dissonances, it is Nai Nai’s remarks about Billi’s future and eventual wedding that lighten the mood and remind me of my own grandparents and their not-so-subtle hints about marriage (and by that I mean them flat-out asking me when they will be dancing at my wedding!). And moreover, it’s what reminds me of the more gentle and endearing side of interacting with elements of my life back home.
Besides the protagonist’s struggle to make sense of her identity we recognise a pulsating instinct for protection towards family, especially towards the grandmother – and a sense of duty and responsibility to honour these relationships and respond adequately to the value they have for us.
If I learned something from The Farewell, it is that immigrant identity is not something that can be clearly defined – there is always going to be a fractured sense of belonging that one cannot find a clear answer to or solution for.
Which bears the question – can we ever bring all the pieces together and have a whole? Or is there always a gram of sadness, of loss, of confusion and trying to be as functional as we can with the parts we are comfortable and able to show? What is it we’re trying so desperately to define? The need for trying to define is the need for assurance, for control. And to be stripped of that is to exist and act from a place of uncertainty, of vulnerability. Maybe the key is to let these so called separate parts exist in their own, and when they can, when the circumstances allow it, to breathe into one another.