Lulu Wang's The Farewell (2019) opens with the text ‘Based on an Actual Lie’, inviting us to read the film through conflicting registers of referential accuracy and deceptive fabulation. Adapted from an episode of the podcast This American Life, Wang's film has explicit ties to her lived experience, retracing her family's decision to withhold a terminal cancer diagnosis from Wang's elderly grandmother (Zhao Shu-Zhen). While Wang's fictionalised surrogate, Billi (Awkwafina) lives in New York near her parents, her paternal grandmother – whom she calls Nai Nai, the Mandarin name for grandmother – resides in Changchun, China. Nai Nai's only other son has also emigrated, to Japan, leaving her in the care of a younger sister (played by Wang's real life great-aunt Hong Lu). Given this family's complex geographic dispersal, Nai Nai's sons decide to anticipate her nephew's wedding to his Japanese wife in their native hometown. The wedding festivities merely serve as a ruse for Nai Nai's family to gather around her for what might be the last time. In their outward, and at times wavering, display of false mirth, the family's faces give phenomenological substance to the smokeand- mirrors of their hoax in a way that resonates with the actuality of cinema's own lies – its capacity to invest diegetic fiction with the concrete physicality of the profilmic world. I want to suggest, therefore, that the face in The Farewell serves as a locus that links cinema's imbrication of the virtual and the real to how Asian-American subjects have been coded as unintelligible or unassimilable to the US national body. In so doing, I aim to locate how the film's aesthetic grammar interrogates and re-evaluates the imagistic dimensions of racialised being as it has been elaborated and challenged across independent Asian-American film.

The Farewell 's central narrative tension arises from Billi's protests that her grandmother should be informed of her terminal condition. However, the rest of her relatives, and even her grandmother's doctor, argue that withholding a terminal diagnosis protects her from the ultimately unnecessary fear of an impending but immutable outcome, much as Nai Nai did for her own husband.