With the current state of our world and our distanced learning I have been keeping up with the Office of International Affairs online by attending virtual Global Engagement Nights and following along with the weekly emails. One of the recurring events that the OIA has been able to maintain at a distance was the International Film series; with countless films being made available to Ohio State students via Kanopy, the frequency of the film viewing has increased from once a month at Gateway Film Center to once every week on your couch.
The scheduled film for this week was The Farewell, and a live virtual discussion and interactive chat was to be held on Thursday, April 30 at 6 p.m. via CarmenZoom. The film follows a Chinese-American family who, upon learning their grandmother has only a short while left to live, decide not to tell her and schedule a family gathering before she dies. It is based in part on director Lulu Wang’s life experiences, and the film opened with the words: “Based On An Actual Lie.” I found this to be very interesting as we typically see the words “Based On A True Story” at the beginning of films pertaining to real world events.
As I continued to watch, though, the more I understood; a big part of what set this film apart from the typical ones “based on a true story” were its roots in Chinese culture and tradition. While slightly comedic, the storyline was dramatic and suspenseful, culminating in the mystery of Nai Nai’s fate. Nai Nai was the grandmother at the center of the lie, being protected from the truth of her stage four lung cancer by her family and her granddaughter, Billi, who, after living in the United States for twenty-five of her thirty years of life, could not wrap her head or her heart around the family’s bid to shelter Nai Nai from the truth.
Struggling to keep the secret whilst spending her last time on earth with her Nai Nai, Billi’s uncle had to explain to her, “There are things you must understand… You guys moved to the West long ago. You think one’s life belongs to oneself. But that’s the difference between the East and West. In the East, a person’s life is part of a whole. Family. Society.” While helping to explain the family’s actions and justify Billi’s pain, her uncle acknowledged one of the many ways in which culture in the East differs from that in the West, specifically in the United States.
I really appreciated this point in the film, the crux for me, because of this distinction and explanation, rooted in love and in culture. I studied Mandarin in high school, and I was pleasantly surprised to remember a few phrases here and there. This scene especially made me miss my teachers and the lessons wherein we learned about Chinese culture that I found to be so unique and enriching in a course where such was about as important as learning the language itself. I am so glad I chose to watch this film, and I loved the sentiments that it involved, the values that Billi’s family held. And while it was “based on an actual lie,” it was so awesome to see at the conclusion of the film that Lulu Wang’s Nai Nai had still been living for six years after her diagnosis. “It is not about what you do in life. It is about how you do it.”