My grandma, The Farewell, and building cultural awareness
Everything is absurd the first time you encounter it
During the pandemic, I’ve had more time to watch films at home, and have been making a big dent in my re-watch list. In-between binging Wong Kar Wai and Tsai Ming-Liang to provoke my nostalgia for the neon worlds of the 90s that I never experienced firsthand, I’ve been catching up on the work of A24, an independent American entertainment company.
In 2012, A24 broke into the conservative and homogenous film distribution business. To those unfamiliar with the industry, distribution can be misunderstood to be the un-sexy part of the movie biz: the production company makes the movie and the distributor sells it.
A24’s founding vision was to back films with an authentic, independent voice. This was a big deal for distribution, because niche films attract smaller audiences and sell fewer tickets. That’s why there are fewer originals coming out today than ten years ago – sequels and remakes have an existing and dependable viewership base which studios can count on.
Credit to Spicer2 on reddit for this nifty chart.
Many of A24’s early films didn’t fit the mold of commercial success, but by respecting the creative freedom of the filmmaker, the company has curated an iconic, genre-spanning brand and become a megaphone for independent storytellers.
With every success, the company creates more space for itself to explore increasingly bold voices. One of these that came out in the last few years is The Farewell. To talk about The Farewell involves telling a story of my own. In the fall of 2018, my Grandma died.
Awkwafina and the rest of the gang.
In her final year, Grandma was diagnosed with colon cancer. Her children – my mom and her two older siblings – decided on her behalf to put her on palliative care instead of trying to fight the cancer.
Most of my extended family lives in Guangdong and it’s common in Chinese culture to keep the elderly in the dark about their illnesses, especially serious, potentially terminal ones. The rationale is that it’s the responsibility of the family to shoulder the burden of worry. “It’s not the cancer that kills [you], it’s the fear.”
This was my first experience with this particular cultural phenomenon. Grandma was already in her eighties, but she kept her mental faculties until the end. I might have supported the course of treatment if she had chosen it herself, but for it to have been decided without her input, and then kept from her! I had a tough time making peace with this, and found it hard to bring up, even with my closest friends. Before I could even have a conversation about it, I’d have to explain the underlying cultural rationale, something I wasn’t well-versed enough in to do. It felt like I could really only talk about it with friends who had been acquainted with this in the past. The first sentence from a journal entry at that point in time reads, “[My girlfriend] was shocked by how Chinese people handle matters of mortality.” My girlfriend is Lithuanian, and I don’t think I explained it very well to her, but at the time, how could I? It wasn’t explained very well to me, either.
A month before Grandma passed, I flew back to Guangzhou to see her for a final time. During the flight, I thought of all the times she had made this trip. Growing up, my parents were always busy and it was my grandparents who put in most of the work to raise me. In China, I spent weekdays at Grandma’s and weekends with my Dad’s parents. When we immigrated to Canada, they took turns flying out for months at a time to stay with us and look after me.
During my final visit, Grandma recounted stories from her youth. When she was a teenager, the rest of her family was killed in political turmoil, and she got by on her own until she met my Grandpa. Just two years earlier, during my last visit, she wouldn’t let me help with the groceries up the seven flights of stairs to her apartment. “Who’ll do it for me after you’ve gone home?” It was difficult to see the determination and strength in the face of the same woman who, after a lifetime of struggle, was now having a hard time with something as simple as drinking from a cup of water.
On my last day, in a scene that I will never forget, I carried Grandma in her wheelchair down the seven flights of stairs and into my Uncle’s car. She was going back to her ancestral home, where her family’s roots originate. The rest of my family was going with her, and after they drove off, I got into a cab and flew back to Canada by myself.
Not long after this happened, The Farewell came out. It’s basically a movie about the experience I described, except taken a level further: a fake wedding is planned around the family visits so the grandma doesn’t become suspicious of everybody coming home.
I remember reacting with frustration when I first read reviews that described the plot to be “absurd.” But then I remembered conversations from my own life I had about my Grandma’s situation, and I realized how easy it would be to dismiss the premise of the movie, having never been exposed to it before. Cultural awareness doesn’t create itself, and stories like these don’t come to light until somebody is willing to tell them. Watching a film about an experience you’ve had validates that there are others with a shared experience, and provides a starting point for the conversation. “Have you seen The Farewell?” is a lot easier than “In China, it’s a cultural norm to spare the elderly from knowledge of their terminal illnesses.”
There’s a scene in which one of the grandma’s children breaks down as he’s giving a speech during the wedding. He admits his guilt for emigrating to Japan and being absent all these years, and I couldn’t help but think of the guilt my parents carry for making the decision to move to Canada so that I could have a better life. I was disappointed in myself when I realized that this was something that I had never talked with them about before. The Farewell captured so many little cultural nuances like this one that I hadn't seen portrayed in cinema before, and opened up doors for conversations that I hadn’t had before.
This experience made me realize how important it is for these stories to be told. How many people have experienced something similar, but while watching Moonlight instead of The Farewell? What about Waves, The Florida Project, or Twentieth Century Woman? Movies contribute to the cultural fabric upon which we contextualize our experiences, and for everything that’s unfamiliar to our lived experiences, we rely on stories to act as signposts. When Moonlight came out, one of my friends joked that “he didn’t realize gangsters could be gay.” It was a dumb comment, but it also made me realize that I couldn’t think of another movie that explored the topic. Before watching Moonlight, this was not something I had ever thought about.
I’m glad that there are companies like A24 that are willing to build the platform for these stories. These glimpses into other, different (sometimes not so different) lives gives us windows into all that’s out there, and reminds us that we’re not alone.