Lie and let die: what Lulu Wang's "The Farewell" teaches us about lies, family, and love.

Artikkel - Matei Norbert Balan

Lulu Wang’s 2019 “The Farewell” tells a compelling story about the power we have over others and the implications of how we choose to use it. It brings into focus uncomfortable questions about tradition, morality and ultimately about how far we would go for the ones we love.

Tzi Ma, Shuzhen Zhao, Han Chen, Aoi Mizuhara, Hong Lu, Diana Lin, Awkwafina, and Yongbo Jiang in The Farewell (2019) /Foto: IMDb

Warning: this article contains spoilers for the movie “The Farewell”.

Would you lie to those you love in order to protect them?

“The Farewell”, Lulu Wang’s 2019 movie, asks this question in a manner so straight forward at times that the viewer has no time to shy away from immediately pondering on it. Starting with the opening sequence, we are met with lies born out of love. So we meet Billi (Awkwafina), the movie’s main protagonist and daughter of two Chinese immigrants who have settled in the United States, her beloved grandmother, Nai Nai (Shuzhen Zhao), and her great-aunt, who are both back in China. A triangle of lies that will define the entire theme of the movie is immediately established. Every one of these first three characters tells a lie meant to protect the other one.

When her grandmother asks over the phone if she is wearing a hat to protect herself from the cold, Billi lies and says that she does, even though she appears on-screen walking the streets of New York without one. She doesn’t want her grandmother to worry. At the same time, the grandmother doesn’t wish the granddaughter to worry either. That is why Nai Nai lies about her current location when Billi asks her where she is. Nai Nai says she’s at her sister’s house, then changes the subject. We can see that she is in the waiting room of a hospital. But Nai Nai’s lie is not a complete fabrication. She is there with her sister, who already had to make a difficult decision: hide Nai Nai’s stage four lung cancer diagnosis from her. This is the core lie of the story, and it will hurt, puzzle, and move both its characters and the audience.

But what would be the implications of this? And is there such a thing as a good lie?

Grandma on the roof

One of the things that set such a powerful tone for the dramatic story that is about to unfold is the joke Billi’s father, Haiyan (Tzi Ma), tells in the opening act, during a family dinner. A wife goes out of town, and when she returns her husband tells her that their cat is dead. The wife feels hurt by the bluntness with which the news was delivered. She suggests to her husband that he should have started by first saying that the cat got on the roof. Then, a few months later, the husband comes with bad news again. He begins by saying that his mother-in-law got on the roof.

It’s a dry dad joke that here doubles as a Chekhov’s gun. It goes off only a few scenes later when Billi arrives at her parents’ house, only to feel like they’re hiding something from her. She presses the matter, and the truth is revealed. Her grandmother has was diagnosed with cancer, and she has three months left to live, maybe less. When Billi asks how they could have let her find out like that, her mother, Lu Jian (Diana Lin), sarcastically asks if she would have preferred to hear that grandma got on the roof. The punchline of a joke becomes a hard conclusion: there is no such thing as easing someone into such terrible news.

Tzi Ma and Awkwafina in The Farewell (2019) /Foto: IMDb

But coming to terms with her grandmother’s illness is not Billi’s only problem. She also finds out that she can not talk to her grandmother about this, nor visit her. The reason? Nai Nai doesn’t know. The family has decided not to tell her, as that will not change anything. As the mother explains it, in China, they believe that it’s not cancer that kills the patient, but the fear. Billi is therefore confronted with a situation that’s double difficult. Her life is changing radically in front of her eyes, and her family is treating the problem in accordance with a tradition that she can not begin to understand, let alone identify with - a situation that will hit close to home for most children from immigrant families. Furthermore, a fake wedding has been put into place, that of Billi’s cousin and his girlfriend, so that everyone may have a pretext to go and see Nai Nai. If Billi will choose to follow her parent’s lead, this is the staged spectacle she will have to put up with.

The anatomy of a lie

The philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that lying is always morally wrong since it means harming one’s human dignity and autonomy. This idea is what Billi is touching upon when she tells her parents that Nai Nai should know. We don’t lie to cancer patients. A dying person deserves to know that the end is near.

But the argument for this particular kind of lie is a strong one. Billi hears a couple of times about how this is a burden that the family has to carry on behalf of Nai Nai. Billi’s uncle, in a heartfelt one on one conversation he has with her, even attributes this impulse of hers to warn Nai Nai about her condition to the Western way of thinking. In his opinion, in the West, people are thought that their lives are their own, but what’s characteristic to the East is that one’s life belongs to a bigger whole, like a family. This is not to say that they, as Nai Nai’s family, have ownership over her life, but that they can treat the burden of a cancer diagnosis as it was their own. This separation between cultures, which has been made clear since the beginning of the story is an important one. We are asked to suspend disbelief when it comes to our Western convictions and consider that maybe, in the Chinese society, at least the version presented to us on screen, lying to someone isn’t always an affront to their human dignity and autonomy.

According to another perspective on lying, utilitarian ethics, the only test necessary to judge the morality of a lie is to balance the harms and the benefits of its consequences, which is what all the characters of “The Farewell” seem to be doing. We can not argue with the fact that telling a cancer patient that they’re about to die is not going to magic the disease somehow out of them. So in this regard, Billi’s family is right. This lie seems to be good. It may not save a life, but it will give a loved one as many happy moments as they have left.

The problem with this lie is that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and while it may create the illusion that it buys Nai Nai some time, the lie has a side effect of taking a severe toll on the ones who participate in it.

Awkwafina in The Farewell (2019) /Foto: IMDb

Too big of a burden

In one of the scenes where Billi argues that what happens is not right, she finds out that Nai Nai herself participated in something similar. When she found out that her husband was close to his end, she kept it from him until the truth couldn’t be hidden anymore. But Billi’s memory of her grandfather’s passing is a problem. That’s because she has none. One of Billi’s most significant reproach aimed at her parents is that they did not talk at all about her grandfather being sick. They didn’t even allow her to attend the funeral, something which her mother argues was necessary to protect her progress in school. This has obviously scarred Billi.

It is at this moment that the story presents us with the dark side of a tradition which employs carrying burdens in the name of others. Those who subscribe to this approach risk committing the sin Kant warned us about - treating human beings as if they had no autonomy. Billi’s parents may have thought that they were protecting their daughter by keeping her away from her grandfather’s funeral, but in the long term, they ended up doing the opposite. This can also be observed in the story of Billi’s great-aunt, whose role as Nai Nai primary caretaker has kept her from her husband for the past years. Now that Nai Nai will be gone, she hopes she will get the chance to travel with him. The burden of keeping the diagnosis a secret from his mother also takes a toll on Haiyan, whom we understand has flirted with alcoholism in the past, and now starts to drink again. Lu Jian’s past tensions with Nai Nai are also brought back into focus by the events. And then there’s the cousin, Hao Hao, who has to play the role of a groom-to-be while struggling to come to terms with what is actually happening.

Based on an actual lie

As the movie informs us from the beginning, this story is “based on an actual lie.” Nai Nai’s story is the story of Lulu Wang’s grandmother. We find out, at the end of the movie, that Nai Nai went on to live longer than three months. But what does this mean for our story and for the questions it asks? Did lying cure cancer? Was this conspiracy a good conspiracy that saved a life? Of course it didn’t, and of course it wasn’t. As far as medicine goes, cancer can’t be treated like this. As far as moral philosophy goes, we can only pause and balance the pros and cons. The lie that “The Farewell” tells is ultimately the expression of a tradition that can, in no circumstances, be flawless. And no matter how honorable the intention behind a lie is, the lie will always have a life of its own.