A Personal Letter to the ‘The Farewell’
Or: how Lulu Wang’s small treasure taught me to rediscover love in my own loss.
I lost my grandfather two months ago — not to his sudden heart attack, but to the long weeks of medically-induced comas, slight amnesia, and series of blood transfusions afterwards. We had not seen each other for over three years at that point, and I never visited him in the hospital. His funeral was a three day affair, and for those three days I kept looking at his thin face in that open casket, so different from what I remembered: his eyebrows no longer knotted together, his wrinkles smoothed away, his greying skin peeking through painted foundation.
I never felt overwhelmed by grief at the news of his death, and it never came after his burial either. Though in times when I thought about his sunken face, there was a tang of regret in my mouth, a small something that felt off about myself and how I moved about the world, as if it was slightly tipped off its axis.
Much like Billi and Nai Nai, the two central characters of Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, my Ong Ngoai and I were separated by distance and by language. The few memories of him that I held dear to my heart were moments from years ago, when I was a child that could still easily invite him to the dinner table in our native tongue. Those times are not reflective of us a near two decades later, where that easy fluency in Vietnamese has slipped away from me, turning every conversation into something sparse and transactional. It is an unwanted reminder that follows every time a warm memory resurfaces.
Of course, familial estrangement is an unfortunate tale that many can tell regardless of heritage. But for many others like Billi and I, daughters of immigrants or refugees from war, there is a different sense of sorrow; that lost intergenerational connection to our elders seems inevitable as we are forced to assimilate as best we can to our new lands.
We trade in our languages and customs — degrees of identity — for opportunity, and it comes with the slow transformation of becoming unfamiliar to our clan. We can nod and smile at one another, simple gestures of communication. We can speak in broken sentences and quickly ask “how do you say that word again?”
Yet it will never equate to an intrinsic understanding of each other. Those severed lines of communication leave a similarly inescapable yearning and bitterness for moments left unfulfilled and to never be fulfilled.
Angered for that very same denied bond to her deceased grandpa, Billi goes against her parents’ wishes and travels across oceans to see her Nai Nai for what may be the last time. Though I had similarly lost touch with my grandfather, I did not feel that same desperation to fly a mere few states over, a short 2 hour flight, to visit him. I ask myself, if I could at least speak to him beyond a formal greeting, would I have been more desperate to properly say goodbye? Would I have suffered more from my absence at his deathbed?
Going into The Farewell, I wanted certain things from it. I wanted to find some sense of emotional release and direction of how I should feel about my recent loss. I wanted an excuse to have a heaving cry, forcibly untangle my sticky and frustrating yarn of thoughts, and get over with it.
It’s healing, sometimes, to be denied our desires in the spirit of something better. With a soothing patience, Lulu Wang held onto that ugly, knotty mess, unwound it, and returned it to me as a lovingly hand-wrapped gift. It was akin to the warmth that a cup of tea brings after being soaked to the bone in the rain, or the exhale that comes with a slight gust of wind while under a burning sun.
A packet of tissues brought with the intention to wipe away any tears was instead used to hide my smiles and muffle my laughter. It is easier to find footing in this current unsteadiness, with the knowledge that some goodbyes aren’t meant for tears and heartbreak.
There is a scene where Nai Nai pulls Billi into a morning tai chi lesson, teaching the movements for a longer and healthier life. She shyly follows along, teasing her grandmother, mirroring the movements out of love. For a precious few minutes, we see them laughing without care and cheerfully yelling “Hah!”, expelling their negative energies out of their bodies and into thin air. Near the end of the film, miles away back in New York, a somber and quiet Billi walks through the streets — then, slowly, she looks up to the sky and shouts, as her grandmother taught her, “Hah!”
Lost time is never regained, nor is the anguish of her missing ties ever fully healed, but Billi returns with comforting memories to help brace for what is to come and what will be left after. With each “Hah!”, she carries on the contagious love imparted by her grandmother in those tai chi movements, giving it life beyond the limits of death.
I look at the small jewelry box sitting on my end table now, given to me from my Ong Ngoai’s possessions. It is a beautiful piece, though perhaps not quite my taste, but it is a reminder of my grandfather’s love for heirlooms… and his absolute hopelessness in how he was continuously scammed at antique markets.
We carry the spirits of our loved ones into the future with us and through us, long after they have passed. It is a connection that does not need to be properly verbalized for understanding.
It’s lovely how Lulu Wang has re-aligned my worldview with a soft guiding hand and an open heart— it is the same moving world, but it comes a little slower, a little warmer, a little steadier now.
