Beyond Generations: What It Truly Means to Be “Chinese” in Lulu Wang’s The Farewell

In Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, Billi Wang is tasked with maintaining a difficult secret from her grandmother: She has cancer and has weeks to live. Her entire family partakes in this lie, adhering to the Chinese tradition that it’s better for dying individuals to not know. However, Billi adamantly believes that it’s better to be honest, debating with relatives this deceitful practice, and in the process, explores the differences between the two cultural worlds she lives in, along with the friction between her and her elders’ beliefs.

However, what seems like a movie about generational divide goes far beyond this reprocessed narrative. In fact, it’s a necessary move, as Lisa Lowe in her piece “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Asian American Differences” cites that Asian American culture in film has historically been centered around “generational conflict” and “filial relation,” which “essentializes Asian American culture” (Lowe 63). But scenes such as the dinner table scene between Billi and her relatives shows that The Farewell doesn’t just explore the protagonist’s identity from an old-versus-young perspective, but one that dives deep into the diversity of Asian American identities. For instance, the dinner table scene between Billi’s family and her relatives points out several key complexities about being “Chinese” versus “American,” such as the technicality in holding an American passport, the insistence upon choosing one nationality or the other, and the hypocrisy of sending their children to America for college even though it would take “less time to get richer in China.” Clearly, each individual at that dinner table comes from a unique path in life, showing that there is no true standard for a “Chinese,” “American,” or “Chinese American” identity, and that it could shift and evolve.

Therefore, I will argue that Lulu Wang’s The Farewell goes beyond the generational conflict narrative that represents much of the current Asian American narratives depicted in film, proving that there is no pure Asian American identity and culture, and that its inherent hybridity and multiplicity as defined from Lisa Lowe’s “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity” allows each individual character to shape their own definition (and struggles) of what it means to be truly “Chinese” or “American.” Lowe specifically defines hybridity as the exchange and adaptation of cultural practices and objects while defining multiplicity as an individual’s place in a system of power and how it might produce different life chances based on these powers (such as capitalism and patriarchy). By utilizing these terms and analyzing the relationships between Billi and her relatives, we can see how The Farewell transcends the limited generational conflict storytelling arc and produces a Chinese American identity that is uniquely Billi’s.

Analyzing the Diversity of Identities from the Immigrant Lens

To understand how The Farewell fits into Asian American film representation, it’s important to see 1) the need for hybridity and multiplicity in dominant and universal film narratives and 2) the historical context that proves the diverse existence of immigrant Asian American identities. As noted in Lowe’s piece “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity,” much of the current representations of Asian Americans in film are reduced to first-generation/second-generation struggles that center around the so-called “privatized familial oppositions.” These reductions “contribute to the aestheticizing commodification of Asian American cultural differences, while denying the immigrant histories of material exclusion and differentiation” (Lowe 63). Essentially, Lowe points out that the representation of Asian American immigrant storytelling is centered between those who immigrated and the children of the immigrants, and that we cannot limit our representations to this because these narratives eventually become the universal depiction of how Asian Americans are viewed. Moreover, it sends a message to viewers of films that the Asian American identity is fixed, which “suppresses differences–of national origin, generation, gender, sexuality” and also underestimates “the differences and hybridities among Asians” along with supporting the “racist discourse that constructs Asians as a homogenous group, that implies Asians are ‘all alike’ and conform to ‘types’” (Lowe 71). However, The Farewell, although showing conflicts between Billi and her parents, creates characters that defy the immigrant storytelling mold that Lowe deems destructive. It shows scenes where Billi wholeheartedly embraces her Chinese origins, wanting to stay with her grandmother. It shows that her cousin has immigrated to Japan and is dating a Japanese woman for the wedding. And it shows a relative intending to send her son to study in America for college. Each of Billi’s extended family members is complex, representing a different facet of what it means to be Chinese, American, both, and beyond.

This diversity in Chinese immigrant culture and multiplicity isn’t just represented in the film, but is historically proven as well. In Erika Lee’s piece “The Chinese Exclusion Example,” she writes about the history of Chinese immigrant groups, the policies that barred them from entering the United States, and how this paved the way to today’s immigrant exclusion policies for other racialized groups. Specifically, she writes that Chinese immigrants in the early 1900s experienced the Chinese Exclusion Act which “legalized and reinforced the need to restrict, exclude, and deport ‘undesirable’ and excludable immigrants” (Lee 37), which created an “immigrant paradigm mold” that offers “a different narrative highlighting the limits of American democracy” (Lee 40). For context, many of these Chinese immigrants at the time were agricultural and low-income workers. However, the historical trajectory of Chinese immigrants changed with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, where people with higher levels of education were encouraged to migrate to the United States, which institutionalized immigrant policies that required those coming in to be more educated. With this new policy in place, the representation of what a Chinese immigrant is shifted in response to institutional power. This shift in representation is historical proof of the diversity in Chinese American immigrant experiences, which can be reflected in Billi’s family makeup that consists of both native Chinese who reside in China and immigrant families who have migrated to different parts of the world at different times in history. Clearly, even history shows that the hybridity of Chinese immigrant culture has been influenced and merged with various systems of power, including immigrant policies, therefore proving that the narrative surrounding Chinese Americans cannot be homogenized (which is what The Farewell is able to disassemble).

Forms of Disidentification, Representation, and Hybridity in The Farewell

To further understand how The Farewell empowers the idea of hybridity and multiplicity in Chinese American identities, it’s important to also view Billi’s unique identity as a Chinese American from the lens of José Muñoz’s Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics and bell hooks “The Oppositional Gaze.” As Muñoz defines in his piece, to “disidentify is to read oneself and one’s own life narrative in a moment, object, or subject that is not culturally coded to ‘connect’ with the disidentifying subject” (Muñoz 12), which is a “strategy that tries to transform a cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact permanent structural change while at the same time valuing the importance of local or everyday struggles of resistance” (Muñoz 11). To disidentify here in the context of The Farewell poses the question of what happens when Chinese American audiences, and Billi, view consistently inaccurate images of themselves, specifically ones that portray the generational conflict narrative or ones that show the repurposed divide between Eastern and Western cultures. In the case of Billi, there are some instances where she forms a relationship that is neither identifying nor resistant to these portrayals, because she knows that this representation does not represent her, but also doesn’t completely reject it either. This allows her to create a hybridity of Eastern and Western traditions that form her own unique immigrant identity. For example, when Billi interacts with her relatives, she is viewed from her relatives’ lens as a representation of the West, an American identity assumed by her loved ones due to the stories they have heard about “how great America is.” However, Billi understands that this stereotyped image of her, although inaccurate and invalidating, is one of which she can still see herself in among her family. This allows her to form a complex relationship with the American images assumed by her relatives, where she doesn’t identify completely with this representation, but also doesn’t reject it either, as shown by her Western beliefs on how to treat death. Billi’s practice of disidentification goes hand-in-hand with Lowe’s definition of hybridity and multiplicity because it shows that an individual like Billi struggles to find connection with Chinese American immigrant images that are constructed by her relatives, but this is because her own unique identity is a synthesis of cultural practices. Therefore, she disidentifies with these images in the film while embodying a complex immigrant identity that is uniquely hers.

One can also argue that Billi doesn’t just try to disidentify with the images that her relatives constructed, but even tries to oppose some of them with a resistant viewing practice that contests these images. In bell hooks’s piece “The Oppositional Gaze,” hooks approaches this idea of interrogating images from a black woman’s perspective, noting that “critical black female spectators construct a theory of looking relations where cinematic visual delight is the pleasure of interrogation” (hooks 101) because most of the women that hooks talked with “felt that they consciously resisted identification with films - that this tension made moviegoing less than pleasurable” (hooks 98). Here, hooks argues that the images conceived in the media of black women are ones which black women find pleasure in criticizing the inaccurate portrayal. Billi (and viewers) of The Farewell has to deal with similar inaccurate images, specifically ones of which her relatives have constructed from an Eastern gaze to represent Billi’s Chinese American identity. For instance, in the debate between Billi and her uncle on keeping her grandmother’s illness a secret, she’s consistently told that her American principles on death would betray the collective Chinese principles, a generational conflict image that encompasses many films about Asian Americans. However, despite the film’s initial depiction of Billi as the Chinese American child, it goes on to show that Billi doesn’t (and probably can’t) choose the “Chinese way” or the “American way” to deal with death, as shown by each individual family member’s unique struggles in choosing to lie to the grandmother. Lulu Wang therefore produces through The Farewell a film that defies the issues brought up in “The Oppositional Gaze,” an image that Chinese American viewers would not find reductive of their identity and instead shows that there is no pure definition of what it means to be “Chinese American,” as represented by Lowe’s concept of hybridity. These forms of disidentification and rejection through The Farewell proves the claim that the film is more about the hybridity and complexity of being “Chinese American” than it being about another generational struggle.

Seeing Hybridity and Multiplicity in Other Immigrant Film Narratives

Finally, we can see how hybridity and multiplicity play in other films about immigrants, showing that there are diverse representations within racialized immigrant groups that are conveyed similar to how The Farewell does it. In Wayne Wang’s Chan Is Missing, both Jo and Steve search for Chan after his disappearance but receive multiple interpretations and clues from various sources. In essence, Chan’s character refuses to be represented, and the concept of him is only represented through what we hear about the character and stories pieced together by different characters who have different impressions of Chan. As stated by Jo himself at the end of the film, “What bothers me is that I no longer know who Chan Hung is...Jenny thinks that her father is honest and trustworthy. Mrs. Chan thinks her husband is a failure because he isn't rich. Amy thinks he’s a hard-headed political activist,” and goes on about the multitude of other characters who had different perceptions of Chan Hung. However, these different character anecdotes emphasize the diversity of San Francisco’s Chinatown, as all come from different birthplaces, ages, education, political beliefs, and more, and like The Farewell, shows that the Chinese American experience cannot be confined to just a generational struggle.

Meanwhile, in Cherien Dabis’s Amreeka, we see how Muna and Fadi’s immigration to the United States also reflects the diversity within the Palestinian immigrant community that goes beyond the generational conflict narrative. It doesn’t just show how a Palestinian family is struggling to adapt, but also what it means to be Palestinian through Lowe’s defined multiplicity in a variety of different contexts, situations, and settings. For example, Muna’s niece states that Fadi cannot wear clothes that make him look “fresh off the boat” from Palestine. Even though both are from immigrant families, their own narratives are starkly different. Even Muna herself, an Arab Christian who previously worked in banking, represents an aspect of the Palestinian community that deviates from the Arab Muslim immigrant that many films would typically portray.

Both Chan Is Missing and Amreeka are similar to The Farewell because they both divert from placing a racialized group in a homogenous narrative. They don’t silo what it means to be “Asian American” or “Arab American” in one storyline (especially the generational conflict one), and they each use its characters to create multiple representations of their racialized communities that are a product of hybridity and multiplicity, producing identities that are fluid and go beyond filial relations.

It’s About How You Do It

“Life is not just about what you do, it’s more about how you do it” says Billi’s grandmother to Billi herself. This mindset on life—its complexities, its changes, its open possibilities—applies to constructing narratives surrounding identity within Asian American immigrant communities. History shows that immigrant narratives have shifted based on institutionalized power structures such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, meaning that the immigrant stories produced have also evolved over time. Writers like Lisa Lowe, José Muñoz, and bell hooks show that film narratives surrounding generational conflict homogenizes Asian American immigrants, producing images that viewers and characters such as Billi will disidentify or starkly oppose and criticize. Films like Chan Is Missing and Amreeka show that hybridity and multiplicity hold true in immigrant narratives, and that its diversity is limitless. And The Farewell, in its entirety, encompasses all of these thoughts and points, proving that Asian American narratives, in a world driven by institutionalized power, cultural crossover, and intersectionality, can, and should, go far beyond just a fight between immigrant parents and their children.

Works Cited

Dabis, Cherien, director. Amreeka. 2009.

hooks, bell. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators.” Black Looks: Race and Representation, 1992, pp. 115–131.

Lee, Erika. “The Chinese Exclusion Example: Race, Immigration, and American Gatekeeping, 1882-1924.” Journal of American Ethnic History, vol. 21, no. 3, 2002, pp. 36-62.

Lowe, Lisa. “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Asian American Differences.” Immigrant Acts, 1996, pp. 60–83.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Wang, Lulu, director. The Farewell. 2019.

Wang, Wayne, director. Chan Is Missing. 1982.