I recently watched the new movie, The Farewell, and it got me to thinking.
Starring the versatile and talented actress Awkwafina as the main character, Billi, The Farewell is, on the surface anyway, about a family saying goodbye to their matriarch. Billi's grandmother, known as Nai Nai, has been diagnosed with cancer and given months to live. The entire family (Billi's parents, cousins, aunts and uncles) stage a hasty wedding as an excuse to get everyone together. Billi and her family are originally from China, and the film's conceit is that, in Chinese culture, sometimes a family will shield a loved one from news of their own mortality. Nai Nai's family have done this with her. Billi (and others) struggle with this.
The Farewell is a fine bit of cinema, and what struck me most about it wasn't the aspect of hiding Nai Nai's illness from her, but the notions of time and place that run as a current -- both verbally and unspoken -- throughout the movie. Billi's mom and dad moved from China to the United States when she was two-years-old. She is now 26. It sounds as though she's visited China a fair amount during her life, enough to bemoan how much things have changed. In a touching scene, Billi laments how so many of the people and structures she knew when younger are now gone. Her Nai Nai will soon join them.
All of this gave me pause. The thought occurs that our perception of what once was, of how things should be, is temporal. We often base our center of gravity on the way things were when we were young. The early years become the epicenter of our lives. Once family members begin to age and pass away, once the familiar structures of our youth begin to vanish or change, we feel as though something is off-kilter. Something isn't quite right. At times, this will manifest as a protest to save an old building, or sinking into a funk when a favorite restaurant closes or a loved one dies. We yearn for through lines. Sometimes, they are there. Often, they are a pipe dream.
We share our brief time on this earth with others who -- some of them -- become important to us, either by blood or by chance. We don't complete the journey together. Sometimes, we arrive a little (or a lot) before someone who grows close to us, and we may leave in just the same way. Later this month, it will be twenty-two years since my father died. He has not been a part of my life for longer than he was in it. Same goes for a few other close relatives and friends, some of whom I've written about within these online pages. Our journeys together are sometimes brief, sometimes long, but never permanent. At some point, we got off the train.
Our surroundings change, too. The Farewell's Billi, along with ourselves, would do well to remember Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again. The places we live are not always as we remember them. When we move away and then come back, their changes are often more startling. When we continue to live in a community, the changes become less obvious. Sometimes we prompt the changes, other times we adapt to them with ease. Should humanity survive us, so will the constant of change, until we become a part of someone's childhood equilibrium. One day, if we're lucky, they will lament our passing, as well.
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