Author: The Arts Are Life

August 4, 2019

Categories: movies

Today I went and saw The Farewell, a beautiful film from the film company A24, and I must say, my eyes are still worn from all the crying I did during this movie. It truly is a tearjerker, and for a good reason. The film, which is the work of director Lulu Wang, is based on a true story in which Lulu’s grandmother died without knowing she had late-stage cancer because her family kept it a secret from her. Billi, played by rapper and actress Awkwafina, is living in New York City and struggling with her career and paying her rent, so she visits her parents, who know she doesn’t have her life together. One night she notices something is going on and her parents are stressed out, and when she asks what is wrong, they tell her that her grandmother is dying of cancer. The film opens with Billi calling her grandmother and asking how she is doing. Even though her grandmother, Nai-Nai, says she is doing well, we see Nai-Nai going through an ultrasound machine to see if she has cancer, and her friend telling her in the waiting room that the cancer isn’t harmful, when in reality the doctors said the cancer is harmful and she won’t have long to live. When Billi’s parents tell her they are going to China for her cousin’s wedding, she finds out that while the wedding is still going to happen, it is also an occasion for the family to spend time with Nai-Nai before she passes away. When Billi tells her parents that they need to tell Nai-Nai about her cancer diagnosis, they say no because it is customary in Chinese culture to not tell a loved one they are dying of cancer. Billi tells her parents she wants to go to China with them not just to see her cousin get married but also spend time with Nai-Nai since she doesn’t have long to live. Her parents tell her to stay since they do not think she would be of much use going back to China with them.

But Billi doesn’t give up. She goes to China to see Nai-Nai and runs into her parents at the house. They are disappointed in her throughout their stay, but they let her stay at Nai-Nai’s with them anyway since she insists on staying. During this time, Billie and Nai-Nai develop an incredibly beautiful bond that stands the test of time even when, in reality, Nai-Nai doesn’t have much time to live (one of the best scenes is when Nai-Nai teaches Billi tai-chi.) The film deals a lot with the issue of communication and how a lack of communication and honesty impacts not just the individual but everyone around them. Everyone is impacted by the decision to not tell Nai-Nai that she is dying of cancer, and at Billi’s cousin’s wedding, after a joyous game of drinking, he breaks down because he knows that he’s not just at the wedding to celebrate getting married but also there to celebrate the short time that he has with Nai-Nai. Not being allowed to tell Nai-Nai she has cancer also negatively impacts Billi, because she wants to have an open honest relationship with her grandmother but cannot because her parents and their parents frown on getting emotional or expressing grief. One of the most powerful scenes is the dialogue between Billi and her mother in the hotel room. Billi’s mother criticizes her for being too emotional and thinks that she shouldn’t be in China with them because she would get too emotional over Nai-Nai’s deteriorating health, and reveals that her own parents frowned on her for being emotional so she doesn’t want her daughter to face the same kind of criticism. She even says that there are professional cryers at the memorial service so that people don’t have to cry when their loved ones pass, and at the graveyard where Billi’s grandfather is buried, there is a woman who cries for everyone so that they do not have to express grief themselves. This made me reflect on how different cultures face death and handle grief. Some communities treat death by celebrating the person’s life with song and dance and merry-making, while other communities commemorate the person’s life with a serious ceremony. And other cultures encourage people to express their grief through physical gut-wrenching means. My ethnic culture encourages people to grieve, but my spiritual culture encourages people to celebrate the person’s life. My spiritual culture encourages people to shed tears but to also not let grief prevent them from living their lives and celebrating the memories of the deceased person.

But the question I was left with was this: is it bad that the family didn’t tell Nai-Nai about her cancer diagnosis since it was a cultural tradition to not talk about illness and death? How would Nai-Nai have reacted if she knew earlier that she had a cancer diagnosis? Sometimes when people learn early on that they have an illness, they do what they can to make the most of life, while other people suffer in grief and sometimes even end their lives before their illness can end life for them. In the film Billi’s mother says that in Chinese culture, people die not from the cancer itself, but from the fear that comes when they find out they have cancer. These are all important questions that we must deal with at every stage of life. I am rather young, but this film taught me to love the ones closest to me. When I read Nick Hornby’s novel How to Be Good, the main character, Katie, talked about how her husband and his spiritual doctor tried to do good things for humanity, and yet couldn’t treasure the people closest to them, and Katie mentions that it is easier to be kind to people that we are less familiar with than people than it is for people in our immediate environment. But The Farewell showed me, through Billi’s relationship with her grandma, that we cannot take people’s time for granted and that we must treasure people while they are still alive. Billi found out a lot about her grandmother, such as her time in the military. At first she encourages Billi to get married, but then later understands that Billi wants to focus on her career. When Billi tells her she didn’t get the fellowship at the Guggenheim she applied for, she confesses that she was worried about telling her grandmother because she didn’t want her to worry about Billi, but Nai-Nai says that it is not necessarily what you do in life that matters, but how you live your life that is important. Nai-Nai wants Billi to embrace her independence because she understands that is what makes Billi happy.

I was searching for articles about the film to better understand for myself the cultural significance of illness in Chinese culture since I personally cannot relate to what Lulu Wang and her family went through, and I found this touching thoughtful piece in The Washington Post by Marian Liu about how The Farewell touched her own life. Liu says that just like Billi’s parents, her dad didn’t let Liu know her grandmother was dying of cancer. This of course impacted Liu tremendously because she never got to have a deeper relationship with her grandmother, and she never got to say goodbye because her family didn’t tell her about her grandmother’s cancer diagnosis until it was too late. Liu later had an honest conversation about this matter with her father, and he tearfully revealed that if he was dying of illness he would want her to let him know of his diagnosis instead of keeping it concealed from him for the sake of preserving family peace. Her father also told Liu that when he found out she had pancreatic cancer and only had six months to live, he told his mother that she had a sickness rather than saying she had a terminal illness, and went to great lengths to get the doctors to give her traditional medicine and other treatments. According to Liu’s article, much of Eastern culture has a holistic approach to illness, one that considers not just physical health, but also one’s emotional and mental state, and is also rooted in community, so one’s diagnosis doesn’t just affect the person with the illness, it affects everyone in the family as well. When someone feels stressed or sad after finding out they have cancer, this emotional response affects everyone in the family, and so a lot of Asian students, according to Asian American Psychological Association president Helen Hsu, do not learn about their relatives’ deaths because their parents want them to focus on their studies and not get caught up in the complex emotions surrounding the relative’s death. However, not knowing about her grandmother’s diagnosis hurt Liu and her family down the road even though it was tradition to not tell her grandmother, and Liu, in the piece, reflects on the fact that she never got to ask her grandmother for advice on marriage and having children, or even taste her recipes, or even talk about her journey as an immigrant to the U.S. When Liu saw The Farewell, she saw her life onscreen, and says in the piece that while she normally doesn’t cry during movies, she cried during this one because it is something that she and many other Asian American youths have had to struggle with in their families.

Even though I do not come from the same ethnic culture as Liu, or Lulu Wang or Billi, I could not stop crying during the film. This is why I love A24’s drama films so stinking much. Moonlight made me cry. A Ghost Story made me cry. Lady Bird definitely made me cry, bringing back memories of my teenage self even though I didn’t have all of the same experiences as the lead protagonist. And even though The Spectacular Now and The Lobster didn’t make me cry, they made me think long after the movie was over. A24 is good at making films that make you think and reflect on what it means to live as a human being, and illustrates how, even during the toughest struggles, individuals can find this indescribable beauty in life whatever age they are at. Combined with the incredibly beautiful combination of string quartet and voice for the score, and the deeply contemplative subject matter, as well as the trademark silences of A24 films (those moments where the characters don’t have to say anything and are free to express their pain, happiness, mixed feelings solely through their body language), I had used up my entire wad of tissues and my eyes were puffy and red, so much I think I got an eyelash in them from crying so much. I convulsed with so many tears throughout the film because I knew the grandmother was dying, and even though I understand it was cultural tradition to not have open discussions about illness and death in front of dying relatives, it was still sad to know that this young woman’s grandmother, who helped her understand her roots and her place in the world, is dying and this young woman cannot tell her because no one wants her to. Even though some reviewers dismissed it as ridiculous that the family didn’t tell the grandmother about her diagnosis (instead of opening with the cliché “based on a true story,” the film caption is “based on an actual lie), it’s not ridiculous, and as Marian Liu illustrated in her piece, is quite common in real life. Speaking from my own life, even though I am not from the same ethnic background as Lulu or Marian, I have noticed that when people find out they have illness they get depressed, and people spend money trying to cure them of their illness through all kinds of pills and treatments. Some people, famous or not, have killed themselves when they find out they have a physical illness; their depression from having the illness, not just their cancer or Parkinson’s, killed them (a lot of people say that Robin Williams’s diagnosis of Lewy body disease played a significant role in his depression and his subsequent suicide.) While I am not saying these treatments are bad, death is going to come whether we want it to or not, and while it is a hard truth to confront, it is inevitable and we need to feel okay talking about illness and death with each other so that people with the illness don’t have to wonder why everyone around them is so tense and won’t tell them what is really wrong. I used to get very stressed out when it came to illness and death with my loved ones (7/20: to be honest I still get stressed when it comes to illness and death), but as I have gotten older, I have come to understand that the only constant in life is change. We cannot bring out physical accomplishments with us when we die; even Aretha, the Queen of Soul, is buried under a heap in the ground even with her super successful career. We are all going to die at some point, so it’s not enough to say you are going to live life to the fullest, but how you and your family are going to confront the inevitability of illness. In Buddhism, we believe that there are four stages of human life: birth, aging, sickness and death, and no one, not even the most successful, most youthful looking people, can escape death. The only thing we can do is change our attitude towards illness and death and how we cope with them.

I admit I was rather apathetic at first about seeing The Farewell. I love Awkwafina in her roles in Ocean’s 8 and Crazy Rich Asians, as well as her music videos, including her video for “Green Tea” where she is rapping with comedian Margaret Cho. But this is the first film I have seen where Awkwafina acts in a lead role, let alone a powerful drama. In one interview, Lulu Wang said she was at first hesitant about casting Awkwafina in The Farewell because even though she loved her rap videos (this was before Awkwafina starred in Crazy Rich Asians, another excellent film) she didn’t think Awkwafina could play a serious role, but then Awkwafina sent in her audition tape with a couple of scenes from the script and Wang immediately then knew she would be the fit for the part of Billi. It kind of reminds me of Melissa McCarthy because many people didn’t think she could act in dramas because she has usually starred in films where she plays goofy characters who fall on stairs, curse and hit people in the groin. But after seeing her in Can You Forgive Me? She nailed that role so hard, and even now I wouldn’t mind seeing it a second time because her acting is out-of-this-world amazing and she played the writer Lee Israel so well it made me want to see more dramas with her in them (she’s going to be in a new film called The Kitchen, although I probably won’t have the stomach to see it since it is supposed to be a violent film about crime during the 1970s.) Likewise, I would love to see Awkwafina in more drama films. I love her in comedies, but in this film her acting is so powerful and moved me to tears. In short, girlfriend can act.

The Farewell. 2019. 1 hr 38 min. Rated PG for thematic material, brief language and some smoking.

May 6, 2019

I first saw the trailer for The Edge of Seventeen a while back, and thought, Eh, this is okay, but I don’t know if I’m pressed to see it. I am glad I finally watched it because it is a great movie. It is about an unpopular introverted 17-year-old named Nadine whose best friend since second grade, Krista, falls in love with Nadine’s popular older brother Darian. Nadine has been ostracized since she was young, but Krista was her best and only friend during that time, so the fact that Krista begins to prioritize time with Darian over time with Nadine is hurtful to Nadine. Nadine then shuts herself off from the world, and the only person she feels she can trust is her history teacher, Mr. Bruner, who cannot stand her excuses for not turning in homework but still lets her come into his homeroom during lunch and hang out with him since she doesn’t have friends. A guy next to her in class, Erwin, falls in love with Nadine, but Nadine shrugs him off and tries to stay friends with him because she is so busy chasing Nick, a cute guy who works at a pet store called Petland.

This movie taught me a lot of valuable life lessons. Now, my high school years were nowhere as stressful as those of Nadine, but I remember being ostracized as a really young kid, and never fitting in. Like Nadine, I was an “old soul,” meaning I had a hard time relating to my peers because I loved environmental science, reading huge books, and classical music, but I never got ostracized for it. I, like Nadine, do remember closing myself off from people and feeling like I couldn’t relate to my peers. I even remember not wanting to go on an orchestra trip because last time I roomed with a group of girls on a trip the previous year, and I sensed that one of the girls didn’t like me, and thus the entire group of girls didn’t like me. Turns out that they were actually pretty cool, and when I decided to stay in the hotel room and work on my precalculus homework instead of skiing because I assumed they didn’t want me around, they were kind of sad (my orchestra teacher later called me and told me that there were some other participants on the trip who weren’t going skiing and suggested I could hang out with them. I ended up having a blast with these people.) That experience taught me to never assume people didn’t like me, especially in an age where a lot of people communicate through social media and text. I think a lot of people want more real in-person conversations nowadays because we are so overwhelmed with all these modes of communication (e.g. apps, Facebook, smartphones in general.) It reminded me of the film Boyhood, when Mason is talking to his girlfriend before he goes to college and says he wants to quit Facebook because he doesn’t want to live his life behind a screen. I remember not having any social media in high school and feeling like such a weirdo, but then also being too busy with schoolwork and orchestra to care about it much. And most kids even told me that I was smart for not being on Facebook, citing that it was a huge waste of time. I also knew that my real friends respected my choice to not use Facebook and would just call me or tell me in person if they wanted to hang out.

If anything, this film taught me the importance of self-love. If you cannot love yourself, you cannot truly love other people, and Nadine struggles with this throughout the film. When Nadine hits puberty she freaks out and gets jealous of Darian just because he seems to be zit-free (and worry-free, too.) When she goes to a party with Krista and Darian she ends up not meeting anyone while Krista floats off with people she knows and leaves Nadine hanging. Nadine goes into the restroom and beats herself up for being too awkward for her peers, and ends up calling her mom to pick her up and take her home. In one of the most pivotal scenes in the film, Nadine confronts her brother and tells him that she is afraid that she will never get rid of the things she hates about herself, and that when she looks in the mirror she hates everything about herself. However, there are a couple of people who actually support Nadine: Mr. Bruner and Erwin. Erwin, like Nadine, is awkward, but when he tries to kiss her, and Nadine says “no,” he immediately feels bad about what he did and doesn’t do it again. He, like Nadine, isn’t a super popular person, but he is the only guy who actually likes her for who she is and isn’t just interested in her for sex. And yet because Nadine cannot see how beautiful she really is, outside and inside, she thinks Erwin isn’t the right guy for her and keeps chasing Nick. Nick, however, isn’t interested in her and Nadine feels she has to go out of her way to pursue him, so she sends a sexually explicit Facebook message. He sees it and asks her out, but then when they are in the car, all he cares about is having sex with her. She expects him to just get to know her as a person first, but he isn’t interested in that. This scene taught me that it’s important to not go chasing after love just because you have this ideal vision that you and your crush are going to fall in love immediately.

It also taught me to not compare myself to others. When Nadine and her mom are in the car and Nadine doesn’t want to go to school, her mom tells her to take a deep breath and tell herself the truth behind everyone’s facade of composure and success: everyone is just faking it until they make it, and everyone is just as miserable as Nadine is, and that they are just better at hiding it. This is so true though because even though Darian is ripped and popular, he admits to Nadine that he doesn’t care about her even though he pretended to for their entire life. He, Nadine and their mom are still trying to survive the death of Nadine and Darian’s father. I am sure that Nick, the seemingly perfect crush of Nadine, was going through a ton of stuff himself. I remember in high school and college feeling so insecure, thinking everyone has more friends than me and has an easier time with their classes than I did. However, what I failed to realize until much later is that these kids’ lives weren’t perfect either and that they were just as ready to walk across the graduation stage as I was because everyone was just about done with school by their senior year. In college, I studied hard but still compared myself to my peers. A lot of the older students had to tell me multiple times that no one had their stuff together and that everyone was just trying to make it in college, but I wouldn’t listen. These constant comparisons I made between me and my peers led me to feel depressed, and when I got depressed I shut myself away from my peers, thinking it would be pointless to even say “hi” to them because I was too busy thinking about how cool and put-together everyone seemed. After college, part of me wishes I didn’t have to go through such a self-pity party, but another part of me understands that this constant battle with my self-esteem was crucial to my personal development, because it taught me that in the end, I just need to keep killin’ it at whatever I am doing, and to not worry about what others are doing.

This movie reminds me of a book I read called The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth by Alexandra Robbins. In the book, Robbins conducts research on high school bullying and proposes a theory called “quirk theory,” which means that the things and characteristics that get kids ostracized when they are in school are the same things that help them achieve success later in life. Nadine reminds me a lot of the kids in the book because she has a hard time relating to her peers and considers herself an “old soul,” but these qualities could help her a lot later in life (although she probably wouldn’t have needed to wait long because she actually found a friend in Erwin.)

Hailee Steinfeld’s performance was incredible. The last film I saw her in was Pitch Perfect 2 (still haven’t seen her in True Grit yet) but her role was kind of on the side. Seeing her play the lead was awesome because she just brings so much depth to Nadine’s character. This film reminded me of Juno and Lady Bird because the lead characters are so quick-witted and relatable.

The Edge of Seventeen. 2016. Rated R for sexual content, language and some drinking–all involving teens.

May 3, 2019

Categories: uncategorized

A few months ago I watched Tyler Perry’s film adaptation of the choreopoem and play for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf by the late dancer and writer Ntozake Shange. I have been meaning to write a blog post after seeing the movie because it just possessed so much raw energy for me, and also Ntozake Shange passed away this past October (this is the New York Times obituary), so I wanted to dedicate this very belated post to her legacy. Disclaimer: the jumbled words on this page will never do justice to her life and her writing.

The film version is about a group of Black women living in New York who each have a different story, and they support each other through their shared struggles. The film, I must say, is a lot easier to appreciate if you read the choreopoem beforehand, and while I thought the film was incredibly moving, I read the poem after and definitely appreciate it more. The film is not an easy watch; the struggles these women endure are domestic violence, date rape, PTSD, depression, abortion and drug addiction, struggles that make them spiral deep into depression. Through it all, though, they support one another through and through, and it was enough to have me sniffling like a whiny little crybaby afterwards (I swear, I was a snotty-faced cry-baby toward the end of this film. I couldn’t stop crying after I went to bed.) This film is deeply engrained in my memory, not just because of the incredible cast, but because of their intense battles to survive in a world where their husbands, boyfriends and society treats them like they are worthless and cannot see their beauty. Historically, mental health has a stigma in American culture, particularly in communities of color, and Black women have often been portrayed as possessing this superhuman strength and not giving in to crying because people often see crying as a form of weakness. However, tears are human, and this film and play shows that the Black female experience doesn’t exist in a monolith, and to pigeonhole all Black women’s struggles would mean obscuring all the complex human emotions these Black women feel when they have to endure so much pain in their lives. And this film shows that yes, if you’ve gone through a lot of stuff, you’d better be okay with crying it out and not feeling like you have to be silent about your pain, because crying is what makes us human.

The movie was excellent, and it made me wish I had read the play before seeing it in order to better appreciate the legacy Shange left behind, especially because it gave background information about Shange’s inspiration for her choreopoem. During the 1970s, Shange collaborated with various other women in California who were musicians, publishers, writers and academics. Shange said that her exposure to female writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and taking courses in the Women’s Studies program at Sonoma State College provided her inspiration for her writings about women. She then moved back to San Francisco to study dance, and discovered that dance was an outlet for her to freely express herself as a Black woman.

Knowing a woman’s mind & spirit had been allowed me, with dance I discovered my body more intimately than I had imagined possible. With the acceptance of the ethnicity of my thighs & backside, came a clearer understanding of my voice as a woman & as a poet. The freedom to move in space, to demand of my own sweat a perfection that could continually be approached, though never known, waz poem to me, my body & mind ellipsing, probably for the first time in my life…I moved what waz my unconscious knowledge of being in a colored woman’s body to my known everydayness.

Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, p. xi

Shange joined a troop of Black female dancers called The Spirit of Dance and also worked in the public schools as an adjunct professor in the Ethnic Studies program, and after several performances with the troupe, she left the company to begin production of for colored girls. She began the play as a series of seven poems. The seven Black women who would each tell their stories in these poems did not have names because Shange wanted the viewer to focus on the narratives rather than the names of the characters (the colors of their dresses represent their characters.) Shange and her choreography partner Paula Moss staged the play in various spaces in the San Francisco area: the Women’s Studies’ departments, bars, cafes, and poetry centers. Many people came to see their play in its early performances, but when Moss and Shange moved to New York to take for colored girls to the stage there, only their friends and family came for the showings. One of these friends was Oz Scott, who helped Shange and Moss stage the production for a New York audience, and as time went on, Shange also recruited more poets and dancers who were interested in the production. In December of 1975, when they put for colored girls on at a bar called DeMonte’s, Shange had let Scott take over the directing of the play, and when she did this, she let her creation grow on its own, and said that “as opposed to viewing the pieces as poems, I came to understand these twenty-odd poems as a single statement, a choreopoem.” (Shange xiv) She also learned the importance of putting those poems on a stage instead of just writing it in a book (“those institutions I had shunned as a poet–producers, theaters, actresses, & sets now were essential to us,” Shange xiv.)

Honestly, reading this entire foreword to the play has not just helped me appreciate Shange’s for colored girls, but also the performing arts as a whole. Dance is such an important avenue for our bodies to express themselves, and works well with other mediums of performing art, such as music and theatre. For Black women, dance is especially powerful because it allows for that freedom of expression that American society didn’t always allow for Black women. Misty Copeland, for instance, made history as a Black ballerina in predominantly-white spaces, but she had to struggle hard to access these spaces since she grew up without racial or class privilege that her fellow ballerinas benefited from. Even when she struggled with body image issues, she learned to accept her curves and not try to fit mainstream stereotypes of ballerinas. The Alvin Ailey Dance Theater is another prominent example: a few years ago, I was doing a paper on dance for a philosophy course, and I used this performance that the theater put on for Ailey’s work “Revelations.” The performance is not only incredibly lovely, but it also conveys the importance of dance for Black artists like Shange. The dancers in “Revelations” own the entire space onstage, so they have the freedom to move however much they want. The video goes back to African-American music traditions, namely gospel and blues, using traditional songs such as “Wade in the Water.” Seriously, even though I have watched this video more than once, it still moves me to see these beautiful artists carve out this space for their own, where they can celebrate the beauty of being African-American.

If you haven’t seen for colored girls yet, I recommend it, but I also recommend you read the choreopoem first if you can score a copy of it. (you can find it on Amazon here) I was better able to contextualize the movie when I read the play afterwards. And here is the trailer for for colored girls. I still get chills every time I watch it. Rest in Peace, Ntozake Shange and may your powerful legacy live on in the lives of young women and young Black women everywhere.

for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf: a choreopoem by Ntozake Shange. 64 pp.

For Colored Girls. 2010. Rated R for some disturbing violence including a rape, sexual content and language.