Awkwafina as Billi surrounded by family including Tzi Ma and Diana Lin as her parents. Source: Courtesy of Big Beach/Allied Global Marketing/The Farewell Note: I’ve written the “Memoirs of a Superfan” (MOSF) blog for the Center for Asian American Media for 14 years, covering the CAAMFest experience. This post is an offshoot of that effort. MOSF has always been a blend of reflective, intimate memoir and film review focused on psychology, spirituality, culture, and identity.
I am a happy person, eager to help others, eager to share joy, and getting better at it. I am grateful and appreciative for the bounty and beauty in my life, the people who make the world with each day’s dawn. Yet there are things I think about, when I stare at my phone with unreturned messages, as I’ve tried to commune with ghosts; things I think about when I walk my lonely San Francisco streets, fishing for smiles and glances with a warm but suspended heart, coming home with my starving, empty net. I wonder what everyone’s so afraid of, or what they think they see in me, in each other, in their peripheral view, as we pass. We so often say farewell before we’ve even met. There’s a pit of rejection in me that I circle from time to time, a black hole that I must carefully anchor myself against to prevent the petit oblivion of personal despair. One anchor is knowing that being alone in our skin is part of our human condition. And CAAMFest is not only an anchor but the giant sun this Superfan orbits, a giver of life, love, knowledge, and community, even more, precious each passing year. In my imagination, we are twin suns, each illuminating the other, creating matter and meaning as we make our yearly passages. ‘Til death do us part. And our sun is about to rise again.
Still, the pit of rejection comes calling. I felt it rise in me when I found out that Lulu Wang’s breakout Sundance hit, The Farewell, starring Awkwafina (that’s AHK-wuh-FEE-nah for those of you still new to the game, or Nora Lum for those really in the deep know) would have its San Francisco premiere as Centerpiece at SFFilm (as the San Francisco International Film Festival has rebranded itself) – and wouldn’t be Opening Night at CAAMFest, as I’d hoped and prayed for all winter. It took a day of meditation on benevolence (wishing well for all involved), uncertainty (recognizing that I didn’t know all the factors involved in the decision), and acceptance, to pull me away from the black hole. The mind being what it is, this totally impersonal “rejection” spontaneously evoked all the more personal rejections I’ve experienced – from romantic to creative – and required the steadying practice of mindful self-compassion. No wonder I’ve become a teacher of these skills. Just like that guy at the Hair Club for Men – “I’m not just a customer – I’m the president.” Still, I immediately bought several tickets to the SFFilm event and was quickly pleased to learn that CAAMFest would be staying true to its roots in the community, choosing Harry and Josh Chuck’s CHINATOWN RISING for Opening Night, showcasing over four decades of archival footage of our Asian American community in the activist making. CAAMFest promises to be epic, even if I’ll still carry the twinge of somethings and someones missing…
"The Farewell was incredible, and Awkwafina displays powerful acting chops, from her hangdog slouch, making her shorter and able to lean into the fold of her mother’s neck for comfort, to stridently and loudly leaning into the family for answers and affirmation."
The Farewell was incredible, and Awkwafina displays powerful acting chops, from her hangdog slouch, making her shorter and able to lean into the fold of her mother’s neck for comfort, to stridently and loudly leaning into the family for answers and affirmation. The Castro Theater was packed, 1400 strong – even as I imagined how it would have felt filled with a predominantly Asian American crowd. I made up for it by sitting between my friends, two Mandarin speakers, who fed me, like their baby bird, with translations and interpretations from the opening scenes on. (“That sounds like a hospital overhead speaker…”; “that sounds like a Shanghai dialect…”; “that is SOO Chinese!”) The onscreen words opening the film – “Based on an actual lie” – caused some in the audience to titter knowingly, possibly having heard Lulu Wang tell her family’s story on This American Life in 2016. Family secrets, even bombshell family secrets, are common to Asian and Asian American families, perhaps to all families. We press and prod for truths about “what really happened, back then,” “what happened before we came to America,” or “why are you always quiet when I ask about …” How many of us have heard, outright or tacitly, “do not speak of this”? I have. Secrets can hurt, can cause shame, but they can also bind us together in a body of unspoken knowledge.
The Farewell is ripped from the headlines of Wang’s real-life drama. Wang’s family decided to keep their matriarch’s terminal lung cancer diagnosis from her – and staged an engagement banquet in her hometown in China as an excuse to bring together their globally dispersed family to say goodbye. (The Chinese name of the film is “Don’t Tell Her!”). This is the “actual lie” the movie stays true to. But there are “white lies” – love lies? – deliciously scattered end-to-end throughout The Farewell. Lies told to preserve a family member’s feelings, lies told to prevent others from worrying, lies told to avoid uncomfortable questions and reactions, to save face, or even to get a banquet contract. (“Sure, we can serve lobster...”) I read about Asian cultures keeping diagnoses from patients way back in my medical school days and had seen that happen in Asian and non-Asian families. Wang’s family justified their camouflage with their certainty that “telling someone they have cancer will kill them!” But the effect of these lies is to maintain connection, a connection that is implied in every frame. Wang’s wide-angle direction keeps many people and layers in view, background and foreground, reminding viewers of the interdependence that is our Asian heritage and lifeblood. As she said in the Q and A, when Awkwafina (as Billi, the matriarch’s granddaughter, and the conveyor of Asian American sentiment) is centered and alone in the frame, we feel an absence of the other family members; we are dismembered. And when Billi or another family member is absent, you feel that sense of someone… missing. As I wrote in “Crazy Rich Asians and the Asian American Psyche,” as Asians, we feel that just as the mind is not separate from the body, so is the self not separate from other selves. Is it Billi against her family, as she questions their decisions and complains, or sets out on her artist’s path? Is it Nai Nai against or more deeply with the others? Is it the family urging Billi to comply, as they comment about her weight, feed her, and try to direct her behavior? What about when the family coyly presses one another about America vs. China? These pulls, of individual identity and family collective, the submerged anguishes of separation across oceans, but with the underlying joy and heartache of belonging, are marvelously displayed in Wang’s wondrous, living, breathing film, end to joyous end. We feel what it’s like to be bereft of kin and to be uncertain of place and identity, as Billi tells of her childhood emotions upon immigration. These never really leave us. They are present when we see Billi come home alone to an empty apartment – as many of us do, every day, here in America. We often feel we don't fit in, don't belong, and so can feel an extra layer of loneliness. Throughout the film, Wang hints at how birds symbolically allow emotion to take flight beyond our bodies, carry us aloft, and are symbols of the soul. Our souls are, ultimately, global. Universal. And perhaps a bit broken, cracks repaired with the gold of films such as these, like a Japanese or Chinese bowl.
Actually, a little birdie – AKA Lulu Wang herself – told me just before the film that CAAM audiences might soon have a special reason to love her film even more: The Farewell will have its wide release beginning July 12, so the whole world is in for a treat! (The Farewell was the Audience Award runner-up at this year’s SFFilm.)
All in all, I found a lot to celebrate at SFFILM this year. Every day has been steeped in a diversity of voices and visions, from Boots Riley to Madeline Anderson to Kahlil Joseph to Stanley Kwan, Ritesh Batra and Lulu Wang. I enjoyed films about young African Americans in love (Premature), candidates for Congress like AOC aiming to Knock Down the House, government whistleblowers telling Official Secrets, and political prisoners including Ai Weiwei (Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly). In all, I attended over 25 outstanding programs in 2 weeks, and there wasn’t a single dropped beat. It was the best SFFilm I’ve ever attended. I am left with the slightest of wishes that the featured conversations with directors of color were all conducted by people of color – but I suppose that this is a potential trade-off when diversity goes mainstream, as it must, here in San Francisco and beyond. I did sometimes learn more, though, from the questions posed by African American audience members in one of these conversations, than I did from what I considered “insider baseball” conversation onstage. But there’s so much to learn about each other and the world, from so many different angles and perspectives.
At this politically and environmentally tenuous point in 2019, I sometimes feel that as a community and people, as Asian Americans and as Americans, we don’t know yet whether we will live or die. We have not yet grasped our fate. We are in process. What is our diagnosis? So much hangs in the balance. We have not yet decided on reunion, or farewell.
Our CAAMFest sun is shining, though. I’ll pin my hopes on reunion, and re-imagining of our possibility.
Here are some great film picks at CAAMFest:
- Chinatown Rising. Documentary featuring 40-plus years of archival footage in San Francisco.
- 140 lbs: How Beauty Killed My Mother. Susan Lieu’s live one-woman show about her mother’s tragic death due to medical negligence during plastic surgery when Susan was 11.
- When We Walk. Jason DaSilva’s doc about his struggles as a father with multiple sclerosis.
- Yellow Rose. Narrative feature about an aspiring Filipina country singer in the heart of Texas
- Babysplitters. Comedy featuring Danny Pudi and Emily Chang, about a couple trying to take the sharing economy to childbirth and rearing.
- Love Boat: Taiwan. Valerie Soe’s doc about the Taiwan summer language program which was a first experience in culture and identity for many Taiwanese Americans.
- Geographies of Kinship. Emmy-winning director Deann Borshay Liem’s doc about transnational Korean adoption.