‘Farewell’ reminds us to call grandparents

Uncapping the bottle of pearscented lotion, I smoothed it onto my grandmother’s hands, small and sturdy and as familiar as my own.

Two decades ago, soon after I graduated from college, I took a reporting job in Southern California. My beloved grandmother, my wai po — who had tenderly cared for me, my brother and my sister while we were growing up — had moved there from the Bay Area to be closer to my aunt and uncles.

One weekend, when my aunt was going out of town, she asked me to come over to watch over Wai Po. I spoke limited Chinese, and Wai Po knew even less English, but we always managed to communicate with each other through pantomime, laughter and what felt like telepathy.

Wai Po had been orphaned as a girl, and raised by an uncle — that much I’d pieced together over the years. Trying to fill in what remained unspoken, I’d pictured her on a train, traveling to her new home in Guangzhou. Maybe she’d clutched a bundle of clothes, and a small, worn doll. Had she been terrified, or hopeful?

As I massaged her hands, as the television played in the background, I asked her how she’d met my grandfather. He went to school across the street from hers, she said. She’d once been a teenager who fell in love with the man with whom she’d have seven children, including my mother. Those children were each named after cities where they were born, the family on the move ahead of the front lines of war.

We paged through photo albums. She pointed at a picture of herself, her eyes bright, posed against bountiful flowers.

“Someday,” she told me in Mandarin, “when I die, I’d like to use this picture at my funeral.”

I shook my head. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye.

“Wai Po lao,” she said, matteroffactly. Grandmother is old.

She died in 2004, and in the decade and a half since, I’ve thought often about her, about her laugh, broad smile and her gentle spirit. I remember her floral housedresses, and the sound of the broom as she swept our deck; the stack of Chinese newspapers she read with a magnifying glass; the bottle of Oil of Olay on her nightstand; and her soy sauce chicken and hardboiled eggs, slippery clear mung bean noodles, and her chicken and tomato soup — all the flavors that taste like home and like love to me.

That’s why Lulu Wang’s “The Farewell” — which has been in limited release and opens nationwide on Friday, Aug. 2 — resonated with me. The Chronicle review called it a “standout of 2019,” and judging by the audible sighs, sobs and laughter throughout the showing I attended last week, audiences agree.

In the movie, the granddaughter Billi (played by Awkwafina), who immigrated to New York as a child, and her grandmother, Nai Nai, draw strength and pride from each other, even though they live a world apart. For its #myNaiNai campaign on Twitter, people have been sharing stories and photos about what they’ve learned from their grandmothers: how to love “relentlessly and selflessly,” “persevere with humor,” “not to live in fear,” “to save every food container,” “to value love and rice cookers” and that “it’s a blessing to be Irish.”

Based on an “actual lie,” the film’s premise is that when Nai Nai is diagnosed with cancer, the family withholds the truth from her, to spare her prolonged worry. The clan plans a quickie wedding, to gather everyone together and spend time with her before her condition worsens.

Some critics have questioned whether the ruse at the center of the movie is plausible, yet I’d argue such a stance is narrowminded, ignorant of the cultural context in which deceit could be a mechanism not only for harmony, but also for survival. It’s a theme I’ve explored frequently in my fiction. My characters, immigrants and the children of immigrants, attempt to fake it until they make it, to hold together their family and their identity.

In “The Farewell,” I could relate to many of the gestures large and small, spoken and silent. As much as we yearn to connect to blood ties, generational, cultural and language barriers can distance us even when we’re feasting together at a big round table.

I’m grateful for the time my sons get to spend with their grandparents. For the grandchild, grandparents are time machines, a portal and bridge to the past. For grandparents, I can imagine the wonder of it — to see your children have children, and the baby you thought lost to time is back in your arms again, reborn in the next generation.

She told me in Mandarin, “When I die, I’d like to use this picture at my funeral.” I shook my head. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye.