What Are We Saying When We Grant a Movie ‘Universal’ Status?

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a critic praising Lulu Wang’s The Farewell must describe it as “universal.” A close cousin to “accessible,” “anyone,” “everybody,” and “all families,” the word “universal” is used especially often to applaud the wide reach of culturally specific films like The Farewell, in which a Chinese American woman grapples with her family’s decision to hide her Chinese grandmother’s terminal cancer diagnosis from the dying woman herself. What drives people to call such a film universal? What do they really mean?

One clue lies in the conjunctions. As in: “specific in its machinations yet universal in its takeaways.” Or: “very different, and yet so recognizable and universal.” The assumption being that the relationship between the specific and universal is one of opposition, and the ability to bridge the two is the achievement.

In other words, the particularities of The Farewell—how the grandmother’s family falsifies her MRI exam results, calls her cancer medication “vitamins,” and stages an impromptu wedding as an excuse to bring everyone together—should speak to a grander truth that “lifts” the film, in the words of one reviewer, “above its absurd premise.”

I can’t help but to wonder if films set in North America, centering characters that look more like their reviewers, would be praised in this way, for their ability to resolve the reviewer’s discomfort. Take for example these lines from the New York Post: “Most of the film is in Chinese with English subtitles, though it goes back and forth. But it’s a universal, well-told story any audience will adore.” When I saw The Farewell, the first thing that caught my eye was indeed the English subtitles. I had arrived late, in the middle of the first scene, and for a few seconds didn’t think of the words on the screen as “English subtitles” so much as “subtitles.”

As in: wait, does this theater offer captions for all their movies now? It took me a beat to realize that Billi, the main character, and Nai Nai, her grandmother, were speaking to each other in my familiar Mandarin, and the subtitles were translations meant for people not like me, people who needed them (although considering my elementary-school-level vocabulary, they did help).

This mental rewiring wasn’t something I’d experienced walking into Chinese films such as the recent Long Day’s Journey into the Night, because I understood, even as someone who was born in China and has most of my family there, that I was seeing a “foreign” film in an American theater. Maybe I was conditioned to think of The Farewell, which is produced by the American independent company A24, strictly as an American film, when in fact it’s also a kind of film I had never before seen in a theater, even more specific, nuanced, and, sure, “different” than many people including myself give it credit for: The Farewell is a Chinese American film.

What is a Chinese American film, exactly? We have precedents such as The Joy Luck Club and Saving Face, but no single work can encapsulate a population that stretches back two hundred-fifty years, presently carries four million people of varying ethnic groups, gender identities, socioeconomic classes, political and religious affiliations, not to mention finds its roots in a country over three thousand years old on the other side of the world. We can talk about themes in The Farewell such as cultural gaps and shifting allegiances and homes, but “Chinese American” can hardly stand on its own as a genre any more than “White American” can.

So I suppose when I call The Farewell a Chinese American film, I am saying that it was made by and features Chinese Americans, none of whom live the same lives, even if they share certain customs. Simple as that sounds, the fact that a film like this exists still feels revolutionary.

My family also did not tell my grandmother in China, who helped raise me, that she was dying. Like Billi, I was bewildered by this decision, only to gradually realize—with the aid of Wang’s This American Life segment that inspired her film—that they were acting out of love. As Billi’s uncle explains, they lie in order to carry Nai Nai’s “emotional burden” for her, a sacrifice that aches in all its tragicomic glory during the impromptu wedding scene, with shots of Nai Nai happy and carefree among loved ones, while the groom, her grandson, weeps for her in private.

At the end of The Farewell, Billi leaves Changchun for America, believing that she will probably never see her Nai Nai again. But then the movie’s epilogue reveals that the real-life Nai Nai, Wang’s grandmother on whom the character is based, is still alive and practicing tai chi six years after her initial diagnosis. This last dangling fact might suggest to any remaining skeptical viewer that the Chinese custom of the “good lie” has a practical benefit as well. As Wang states on This American Life, “What my family did was kind, and it worked—maybe.”

As for my grandmother, she passed away seven months after her diagnosis. Because she had to undergo chemotherapy, my family eventually told her she had cancer, but not that it was stage-four colon cancer. After the chemo stopped working, my aunts assured her that nothing was wrong, they were giving her a break and would march on with a cocktail of Western and Eastern medicine.

Shortly after that, my parents, sister, fiancée, and I flew to see my grandmother in Tianjin and say goodbye. We found her in bed, staring off with the power of someone resigned to her powerlessness but quietly furious about it. Her feet were swollen into the shape of potatoes. Swirls of black and white hair had grown back on her head, a sight I’d never thought to associate with loss. My grandmother continued sleeping the morning we left. She’d made it clear to First Aunt that we shouldn’t wake her, and that was when I knew she knew.

This is a version of The Farewell that isn’t told in the film. There are other untold versions of The Farewell within the film itself: a story from the perspective of the sons who left Nai Nai for America and Japan, or the daughter who stayed by her side in China, or the Japanese bride, or the daughter-in-law who harbors resentment toward her now dying mother-in-law, or the caretakers who only appear briefly on screen.

If a practice such as the one in The Farewell is treated by audiences with the complexity it deserves, it might very well acquire a kind of freedom usually granted to scandalous affairs and Spiderman iterations: to be told over and over, each version, at their best, specific and nuanced and different and similar. Maybe this is how we move beyond checklist diversity, as the writer Matthew Salesses argues, and toward diverse diversity. For stories to evolve, just like us: what could be more universal than that?