Cheney Zhang ‘29

WUJUR (2026) | Cite this work

Abstract

This article examines how The Farewell (2019), directed by Lulu Wang, constructs and circulates gendered emotional labor within a transnational Chinese family. While the film is frequently discussed through binaries such as collectivism versus individualism or truth versus filial piety, this study shifts the focus to a less examined question: who performs the emotional labor required to sustain the family’s decision to conceal a terminal diagnosis, and how is that labor culturally interpreted? I argue that the film frames emotional labor as feminized, unpaid, and structurally necessary work that sustains intergenerational and transnational cohesion. Through silence, restrained gesture, mise-en-scène, and narrative concealment, women daughter, mother, aunts, and grandmother—are positioned as emotional regulators who absorb and redistribute affective labor across cultural and generational divides.

To explore both representation and interpretation, this study adopts a dual-method approach. First, drawing on feminist film theory and the work of Stuart Hall, Sara Ahmed, Arlie Hochschild, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, it conducts a close textual analysis of the film’s cinematic strategies. Second, it employs grounded theory coding to compare audience reception on Douban (China) and Metacritic (United States), examining how viewers interpret the film’s central “deception” through distinct moral frameworks. The findings reveal that emotional labor functions as a culturally mediated “currency” of belonging: Chinese audiences tend to frame concealment as relational care, while many American reviewers interpret it through lenses of individual autonomy and psychological transparency. By integrating film analysis with reception study, this article demonstrates that gendered emotional labor is not only cinematically encoded but also differently valued. across cultural contexts.

Main

This article is viewable by PDF download.

References

References for this work are viewable by PDF download.

Supplemental material

There is no supplemental material provided by the author(s) for this work.

About this article

Citation (APA)

Zhang, C. (2026). Emma Wang: Silence Across Screens: A Dual-Method Analysis of Gendered Emotional Labor in The Farewell. WUJUR, 2(2), 52-66.

A DOI link will soon be supplied for this article and added to the above citation.

Author Information

Cheney, Zhang. Washington University in St. Louis.
Corresponding Author. Send correspondence to chenyu.z1@wustl.edu.

Additional Information and Declarations

There is no additional information or declarations provided by the author(s).

Peer Review

WUJUR thanks the anonymous Peer Reviewers who contributed to the review of this work.

Rights and Permissions

Individual articles © 2026 by their respective authors. Illustrations and images remain the property of their respective authors or rights holders and are reproduced here with permission or under fair use.

The author(s) may grant certain license permissions to the public.

Copyright © 2026. Washington University Journal of Undergraduate Research. All rights reserved for compilation, design, and editorial content.