The Farewell (2019)

directed by Lulu Wang

Giuliana Mortimer

Based on an actual lie.

When going to the movies, it is common to see posters and trailers with the tagline “Based on a true story.” These movies are usually about great figures of history or the sports team that overcame great odds to win the big game. Often, there is also some sort of controversy about how true these stories really are and how much of the truth was bent to make a more dramatic narrative. Lulu Wang’s 2019 film, The Farewell, on the other hand, is none of those things.

The story of the “actual lie” began as a piece for This American Life, in which Wang told listeners about how her grandmother got diagnosed with cancer and the family decided not to tell her. Instead, they threw a wedding banquet for one of the cousins as an excuse to bring all the family together to say goodbye. When she adapted the story for the screen, the premise and plot details remained mostly the same, even Wang’s own aunt played herself on screen.

I was instantly drawn to the film due to a series of coincidences in my own life. In January of 2019, I had gone to my cousin’s wedding, which was the last time the full extended family was together, before my grandmother was diagnosed with cancer. And just as press was coming out for a film about a woman in her twenties from a blended immigrant family dealing with the impending death of her grandmother, I was working on writing a play about a woman in her twenties from a blended immigrant family dealing with the impending death of her grandmother.

The Farewell opens with a conversation between Billi, the based-on-a-true-story version of Wang, and her Nai Nai. In quick succession, Nai Nai makes comments on the weather where she is, asks about the weather where Billi is, asks if she’s warm enough, and then pointedly asks if she’s wearing a hat.

“I’m wearing one,” Billi says. She is not. “Don’t worry about me, Nai Nai,” she adds. Though the entire conversation is conducted in Chinese, I’ve had this conversation before.

My own Nai Nai—or Nonna, in my case—used to walk me to the school bus stop every day, even when I thought I was old enough to walk to the end of the block by myself. She wanted to make sure I got on the bus on time, scolding me for wearing a skirt or shorts in October.

“Brrr! Your legs make me so cold!” she would say.

I remember how she would insist I wear my passamontagna—a gaudy pink-and-green plaid knit ski mask complete with a matching tassel—when the first snow hadn’t even hit Virginia yet. In Italian, passare means “to pass,” montagna “mountain.” Even in the dead of winter, passing the one block to my bus stop is nothing like the montagni of Northern Italy my Nonna grew up with. There, a mountain-passing hat made sense.

She always loved words and names. When I was little, we would play school and she wanted me to help her with her English. As a four-year-old, this never interested me and I would insist we switch. When she was the teacher, she taught me Italian.

“Everything in Italian is spelled exactly as it sounds,” she told me.

She never taught me much past the alphabet and numbers, but I still remember the Italian she would speak to me—though sometimes I have to bounce back and forth on Google translate to match the sounds I remember to real words. She was always nonna, never grandma or granny. And I was rarely just “Giuliana” to her. I was stella bella, “beautiful star,” or bella mia visoetta cara, “my beautiful dear little face.” She loved how chubby my cheeks were (and are), one of my least favorite features about myself. I was always told to mangia mangia my food. We never said “kiss kiss, goodbye” on the phone, always ciao, bacini bacini. Always in twos. Something I never noticed until now.

Unlike Billi, I didn’t learn from reluctant parents that Nonna was sick. Billi’s parents don’t want her to come to China with them since they don’t think she can keep the secret. My aunt texted me and got me on a flight to Boston so I’d be there to see her by the next morning, a flight I couldn’t have afforded on my own. Billi gets herself to China anyway.

While Nai Nai stayed in China, my Nonna left her home country for America. She was born in Albona, Istria, a city that redirects to another city when you look it up nowadays. Not long before she was born, it had been part of Austria, while she was growing up it was part of Italy, and now is part of neither. In the original piece for This American Life, Wang talks about how her grandmother marched across China with the People’s Liberation Army, and in the film, Billi learns Nai Nai had even been shot, which led to her meeting Billi’s grandfather. Around the same time, Nonna was living through World War II.

When Germany had surrendered and the maps were being redrawn, her homeland was being given away to the newly created Yugoslavia. She told me her family had always planned to go to Trieste to her aunt and uncle’s. She said she wasn’t afraid. Her sister was teaching in Southern Italy and her father had gone ahead on special medical papers. When the time came, she and her mother left for the Free Territory of Trieste, hiding papers for the communists in one shoe and papers for the fascists in the other.

My grandfather had been stationed in Trieste as part of the UN Security Council occupation. Despite being raised an ocean apart, the two of them were more alike than different. He grew up on a farm in Arkansas during the Great Depression, while Nonna once told me a story about how she and her friend went around to nearby farms and traded some winter coats that their fathers no longer needed for a chicken and a bag of beans.

When they first met, she spoke no English, and he barely spoke Italian, but somehow they wrote to each other for years. She told me her friend or her sister must have been the ones helping her translate the letters until her English was better, or his Italian. She told me about how he used to go visit her parents almost every Sunday while she was gone*, sitting in the kitchen and chatting with her mother.

Then, after a few years, with the war in Europe long over, he proposed.

“When they had to send him back to the United States, he said to me, ‘How’s about we get married?’ so that I could come back with him. I said ‘okay’.”

She told me this the day of his funeral. The proposal wasn’t exceptionally romantic, but I could picture my plain spoken American grandfather saying it. It wasn’t until her funeral that I learned that he wrote a rather stern letter to his parents saying that he wouldn’t stand for any prejudices against his new Catholic Italian wife. Their wedding was simple. No white dress or tux, just her in a grey traveling suit and him in his army uniform.

At her cousin’s wedding banquet, Billi meets some of Nai Nai’s old friends from her days in the army. One asks Billi if she’s married.

“Not yet,” she says.

Nai Nai confidently says, “Career first, then marriage,” as if she knows that Billi is destined for something great.

When I saw Nonna for my cousin’s wedding, she said, “Your mama tells me you and your boyfriend aren’t going out anymore?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“That’s okay. You still have school. You go get that piece of paper so you can get a good job.”

She had gotten her piece of paper to become a teacher. She told me so many stories about those days. How proud she was to earn her own money. When I was little, she told me she thought I would be a good teacher, but like any rebellious child, I actively rejected teaching as a career option with no clear reason why I didn’t like it. I was beaming when I told her that I decided to go back to school to become a teacher. She knew.

Though we never learn what her day job is, Billi is the typical struggling millennial. She has debt, something her parents aren’t afraid to criticize her about. She wants to be a writer, applying for a prestigious fellowship that she does not end up getting. Billi ends up confessing this to Nai Nai, saying she didn’t tell her sooner because she didn’t want her to worry. Narratively, this scene is masterful. In a story based on lies—Billi saying she hasn’t heard back about the fellowship, the family telling Nai Nai that she’s fine, and everything surrounding the wedding—this confession feels like two conversations. Earlier, Billi tells her mother that she wants to stay and take care of Nai Nai, something her mother doesn’t take seriously. But when Billi says she doesn’t want to leave and tells Nai Nai the truth about the fellowship, it almost seems like she wants Nai Nai to invite her to stay. Whether Nai Nai sees this or not, she is ultimately the caretaker, reassuring Billi and giving sage advice.

The film mentions that Billi spent a lot of time with Nai Nai and Yeye (grandfather) when her parents had to work. Similarly, my earliest memories with my Nonna were from when I was little and my parents had to work. Those memories were some of her favorites. When I was little, we would re-enact memories of her childhood where I would play as her best friends, Romana or Nella. The same living room in my childhood home became the canals of Venice or the streets of a parade where we would march along to a song I still haven’t been able to find all the lyrics to. We would go ice-skating on the rug in the middle of July or go picking “cheeklameen” flowers from off the couch. Her Italian girlhood mixed in with my American one.

When I hit my early teens, I would pretend not to remember. When she would sing the march to me in front of my friends, I would pretend I had forgotten the words. Try to whisk my friends up to my room as quickly as possible before she could make some comment about my culetto.

“This little round butt hasn’t changed at all!” says Nai Nai after seeing Billi for the first time in many years. “I’ve always loved to touch this little round butt.”

Feeling that time is precious, Billi joins Nai Nai on her morning routine. Billi self-consciously follows Nai Nai’s stretches, motions, and sharp sounds that “clear out the bad toxins.” Billi goofs around to hide how silly she feels.

I knew that when I went to see her, it would be the last time. So I sang her all the songs I used to pretend I had forgotten, probably butchering the words in a language I don’t really speak. Or I just did my homework, sitting at the foot of her bed with my laptop and books. Working on a play she didn’t even know was about her.

One of the biggest conflicts in The Farewell is cultural differences between the American-raised grandchild and the rest of the family, who don't want to tell Nai Nai that she has cancer. In the piece for This American Life, Wang’s aunt tells her there’s a joke about a doctor who mixes up some paperwork and tells a well man that he is terminally ill, and the sick man that he is perfectly fine. The “punchline” (Wang didn’t get it either) is that the healthy man is the one who ends up dying suddenly, not the sick one. Lulu and Billi also get told that this practice is so normalized, that even Nai Nai didn’t tell her husband that he was dying of cancer. When Wang was interviewing her father for This American Life, he told her that it was true. “No one told him, but deep down, people can feel when they’re really dying… So did Nainai also know? Was she also lying to us?”

My aunt told Nonna about her cancer. Why she was coughing, where the pain in her back was coming from. All tumors. But in those last few days that I saw her, she would swear up and down that it was tuberculosis and that if only she could see her doctor back in Italy, he would be able to cure her of it.

I was in the living room working on homework when I heard her fluid-logged voice ask:

“Linda, I don’t know how to morire. What is going to happen?”

“God will take you up to heaven. And you’ll be with Dad and Nonna and Nonno.” I don’t know how my aunt knew exactly what to say to her at that moment.

Towards the end of the film, Nai Nai gives Billi a red envelope of money called a hongbao. Even though Billi knows she needs it, she tries to refuse it. But Nai Nai tells Billi to take it; it’s the only way she can help while living on the other side of the world.

In Italian, spiccioli means “small change.” Spending money. Every year, on my birthday and Christmas, I would get a card from Nonna with spiccioli. The last time I saw her, I felt bad taking the envelope from the bank. But I needed it. And it’s the only way she could help while living on the other side of the world.

While watching The Farewell, I didn’t feel like I was watching a foreign film. Sure, I had to read the subtitles, but I like to think that Lulu and I are more alike than we are different. In writing this piece, I have struggled to express how her film made me feel. Ultimately, it might be best to share what I saw. A woman, in her twenties, from a blended immigrant family, dealing with the impending death of her grandmother. I saw myself. I saw my grandmother.

At the end of the film, Billi is leaving for the airport. She doesn’t want to go. She’s positive it’ll be the last time she sees her Nai Nai. I don’t remember the last things my Nonna and I said to each other. Like Billi, probably an “I love you” with a wistful “See you soon.” As Nai Nai closes the door to Billi’s cab she says:

“Ciao. Bacini, bacini!”

* For the record, I misremembered this story and my aunt corrected me: every Sunday.

Giuliana Mortimer is currently a student at Christopher Newport University pursuing a career in education, as well as a part-time actress and sometimes writer. This is her first published work.