The Farewell, in my opinion, is a story about "love under a lie."

The film tells the story of Billie, the heroine who immigrated to the United States as a child. She is worried about her messy life. She has failed to get a scholarship and is several months behind on rent. Then, she is informed that her grandmother in China has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. To Billie's bewilderment, the whole family is not going to tell Grandma; instead, they make up a big lie, on the pretext of a cousin’s marriage, to have all the families get together to see Grandma for the last time. Although there is a lie in this movie, it represents love, and the hero chooses to overcome the differences between Chinese and Western cultures because of love.

The Chinese title of the movie translates to "Don't Tell Her." The name isn't hard to understand — it means “don't tell Grandma it's terminal cancer.” What we, as viewers, need to understand is the love and difference behind this lie. The Chinese emphasize blood ties, believing that family affection is the root that can never be cut down, no matter where you are. In The Farewell, Billie's grandmother has two sons, one sent to Japan and the other to the US. They have made their homes in foreign countries and have not been reunited in China for 25 years.

Billie, who moved to the US with her parents when she was six and has lived there for 25 years, has a strong attachment to her grandmother. Billie can’t understand why the family has kept her grandmother's illness a secret. She doesn’t think it is right. In stark contrast, her uncle's family in Japan accepts the concealment. Japan is deeply influenced by Chinese culture, while the US, on the other side of the ocean, is another culture, and this difference between Eastern and Western cultures is thus brought to the table by the director. In the movie, the cultural difference between the East and the West is reflected in that the Eastern culture values a person's emotions more, while the West is more rational and values a person's authenticity and sincerity. The film’s heroine is from the Western culture and believes that she should not hide the illness from her grandmother, while her family is from the Eastern culture, which accepts telling white lies to make her grandmother happy. The different ways of doing things because of their different cultures lead to conflicts.

In the beginning, I thought: in the face of family love, is life collective or individual? For some people, life is seen as individual and independent, but for others, life is collective. The reason why the family chooses to hide the illness is to help Grandma share the mental pressure. It is not a special event in Chinese people's minds to tell an old man what disease he has. When a major disease is detected, our first thought is to not let the old man bear the fear of dying alone at the last moment of his life.

Billie does not understand at the beginning, but then she takes the initiative to help conceal her grandmother’s illness. Behind this change is the power of love and blood. It is Billie's love and affection for her grandmother that makes her choose to give up the values she has received in the West and follow her parents' values and comfort “her grandmother with lies." When she returns to her Chinese hometown from the US, she feels warmth instead of loneliness, and the noise she could not imagine when she was alone in the US. At the wedding, watching everyone eat and drink, she wonders if others know about Grandma's illness. Some do. Those who know still choose to face happy events with laughter, and those who know will choose to face funerals with crying.

When portraying the funeral, the director presents a meaningful portrait of Confucius, obviously attributing the tradition of "mourning" to "ethics." This is one of the reasons why the film is not so profound. The director puts everything on the table, and a statue and a scene of weeping become the abuse of ethics, while the truth in the tears of the weeping person is ignored.

Love in the movie is not only reflected in white lies, but also in the cross-country love between the protagonist and her grandmother. Billie was brought up by her grandmother when she was young, but her parents soon took her to the US. The two never met again. Time and distance separated them, but the kinship between them did not break. The film starts with granddaughter and grandmother on either side of the ocean, telling each other their trivial daily activities to express their sincere love. Grandma, enthusiastic and persistent, teaches her granddaughter as an older person with many life experiences. In this way, Billie’s knowledge of her grandma also gradually deepens, and the affection between them dissolves their cultural differences so much that, by the end of the movie, Billie is on the streets of New York yelling, "Hey, ha,” just as her grandma shouted when practicing qigong.

Is it true that Billie truly believes in the efficacy of hiding her grandmother’s health status, an idea that she has never been exposed to before? Not necessarily. I understand her desire to get along with her family, lively and sincere. During her dispute with her father over whether to tell Grandma, Billie is more like an observer. She can feel others through the family relation and emotion. Just like a shot in the last part of the film, when Billie in New York and her family in China are walking on different streets, these people live in different parts of the world, but they experience different things. They accept completely different cultural environments, but, because they are family, they are walking together at that moment. So, I concluded after watching that, in the face of love, life should be collective. Relatives will choose to hide their sadness in order to make Grandma happy.

My rating for this movie is 4.5 out of 5 stars. To conclude, I would like to end with a line from "Come Healing," the film’s theme song:

“An undivided love, The heart beneath is teaching.
Come healing of the body, Come healing of the mind.
Love is the cure for all things.”