How Lulu Wang’s film brought me back to my grandparents’ dining table in China
The first thing I notice when I walk into my grandparents’ home in Wenzhou, China, is the dining table. Large and round, it sits in the nebulously defined dining space equidistant from the front door, the kitchen, and the rest of the living room. Even outside of mealtimes, it’s often laden with food: room-temperature leftovers from an earlier spread, bowls of fruit, buns and breads that are picked at, mindlessly, throughout the day.
From the time Bili lands in Changchun, the countdown to the wedding banquet can be measured in meals. Her reunion with Nai Nai takes place over dinner, as Bili surprises everyone gathered at the dining table. In the following days, there are more scenes of cooking and eating at home, as well as dinner with the entire extended family at a restaurant. And, of course, the wedding banquet itself: an extravagant affair overflowing with hulking crabs and an obscene amount of booze.
The most recognizable form that love takes is in the practice of pushing food on one another, that frenetic ritual of urging this person to try that dish, picking out the best cuts of meat to place on someone else’s plate, holding a tasty morsel up to somebody’s mouth until they open wide and accept the bite. Such a meal is a game of eroding boundaries; protests of “no, I don’t want that, I’m full” often bear little meaning to persistent family members and their proffered chopsticks.
All bodies — fat, thin, tall, short, tan, fair — are subject to the same kind of snap judgments in China, my mother tried to reassure me, and yet I had still never felt so hyper aware of my own physicality as I did during those summers in China. If I ate too little, my relatives would express hurt before chalking up my reticence to what they assumed was a choosy American palate and distaste for their home-cooked efforts.
to the point of fetishization. The complicated nature of food rituals is a central throughline of Wang’s film, not only in its subtle nods at body policing — at home in New York, Jian rejects Bili’s request for five wontons as too few, and a dozen as too many; 10 is the number she settles on for her 30-year-old daughter — but also as a manifestation of the family’s elaborate lie, in which they must mourn the inevitable loss of their matriarch without her knowing it.
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