AUDIENCES
How to be the perfect crowd at gigs, films, plays, exhibitions…
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“I didn’t grow up with a camera in my hands; I feel like a perpetual student
WHAT DOES THE WORD EXPAT MEAN? Its traditional association is with wealthy outsiders lounging around pools in exotic locations, while being waited on hand and foot by the locals. But for Lulu Wang, whose family migrated to America from China when she was six years old, it is more complicated. “When I go back to visit my family, I’m not Chinese any more. Not really. But I look Chinese. I’m also not fully an American, but I’m not an immigrant, right? They don’t even understand what that is. And so I’m like, ‘Wait up. Am I an expat here?’ You know, I studied abroad in college, and I went back, and people thought I was the tour guide, because all my friends were white.”
This was the sensibility that animated her name-making 2019 film, The Farewell, a radiant semi-autobiographical account of a granddaughter summoned back to China to await her grandmother’s death. The buzz around The Farewell,
