Opinion | How The Farewell’s theme of ‘a good lie’ is a metaphor for living in China

Similar to the hype surrounding the release last year of Crazy Rich Asians – the first Hollywood romcom to feature an all-Asian cast – a great wave of goodwill has been generated by Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, made for a far more modest US$3 million, since its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

The Farewell is a welcome addition to a new canon that depicts the contemporary Asian-American experience. As a mixed-race woman who was not born or raised in her parents’ home country or culture, I found the depiction of the complex East-West family dynamics highly resonant, particularly around the themes of belonging and not belonging. I also shed quite a few tears in the process.

The Farewell reaches cinemas as the US-China trade war continues to send shock waves through the global economy, and is far more political than I could have imagined.

It stars Crazy Rich Asians alum Awkwafina as Billi, a Chinese-American woman who discovers her grandmother, or nai nai in Mandarin, has terminal lung cancer and has only a few months left to live. However, her family have wrongly, in Billi’s opinion, withheld the truth from her grandmother – a common practice in China, as well as in Japan and Singapore.