Mourning the lost self in Mei Ng's Eating Chinese Food Naked and Lulu Wang's The Farewell

The Chinese American female protagonists in Eating Chinese Food Naked (1998), written by Mei Ng, and the film The Farewell (2019), directed by Lulu Wang, are caught up in a crisis of cultural "in-betweenness". The sense of exclusion these characters feel in their cross-cultural encounters contributes to the painfulness of not being able to establish a sufficient sense of the self. In Eating Chinese Food Naked, food is used as an everyday ordinary topic to portray the protagonist's melancholic depressive state and her ambivalence to a sense of self. In The Farewell, family dinners reveal the complexity of generational and cultural conflicts. The second-generation Chinese American granddaughter is distraught over her Chinese grandmother's lack of awareness of her own terminal lung cancer diagnosis, while all the family members regard their decision of not telling the truth as a cultural norm. In dealing with various conflicts between Chinese and American values, both protagonists become entangled in the cultural roles imposed on them. During the process, they look inside themselves and struggle to search for their own individual voices, while being conscious of the impossibility of assimilating into any culture.