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. When it’s time to eat, the dishes multiply — there are always far too many — and the chairs arranged in a neat circle around the table. The most I’ve seen it sit is 12 people: aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and my family, freshly arrived from America, elbows and chopsticks jostling against each other in the endless tussle to ply everyone else with as much food and drink as possible.

The same kind of dining table, achingly familiar, is a focal point in The Farewell, director and writer Lulu Wang’s deeply personal comedy-drama that is, in the words of the movie promotion, “based on an actual lie.” The film, based on a story Wang once told on This American Life, stars rapper and actor Awkwafina as Bili, a Chinese-American woman who returns to Changchun, China, for a sham wedding that’s really an excuse for the entire family to say goodbye to her grandmother, whose terminal lung cancer diagnosis has been hidden from her by her family.

From the time Bili lands in Changchun, the countdown to the wedding banquet can be measured in meals. Her reunion with Nai Nai (奶奶, the Mandarin term for “paternal grandmother”) 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.

So much of the narrative unfolds over meals that, as Wang told GQ, during development she was given notes about how repetitive the food scenes were. But why, Wang pointed out, would she have the characters do anything else? For Chinese families like Bili’s — and mine — food is the crux around which we’re oriented, the organizing principle guiding everyday life and interactions. When we greet each other, it’s with a “吃饭了吗？Have you eaten?” Food is an expression of love that in The Farewell is embodied by Bili’s great-aunt affectionately preparing fried stuffed pies (馅饼) for a niece she hasn’t seen in years. Or Bili’s parents saving all their rationed eggs for baby Bili to eat all those decades ago. It looks like the household’s women bustling around the kitchen all day, making the food that will feed their family.

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. Sometimes the encouragement feels more like hounding. As a teenager, I dreaded mealtimes in China because of this custom, paralyzed by my own pickiness and the dissonance of being prodded to eat more by the same relatives who were casually assessing whether or not I looked heavier since they had last seen me. Bili faces a similar assessment by Nai Nai as she’s ushered to the dining table.

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. If I ate too much, I would be condemning my appearance to more scrutiny, another year of comments like, “You’ve gained weight!” and “Do you exercise?” The easiest solution, I found, was often to decline to eat anything at all, to remove myself from the song and dance of pushing dishes back and forth — and the consequences of whichever choice I made — by simply making myself unavailable. I had no desire to participate in the tradition that made me resent them, and myself.

In China, food became a burden for me, rather than a source of joy and family bonding. The Farewell shares that tension, a welcome rarity among Asian American media that can sometimes glorify traditional cooking and the pleasures of eating 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.

People who are grieving, as Wang points out in her GQ interview, lose their appetite. And yet, to sustain their ruse, the family must keep behaving — and eating — as if nothing is wrong. During that first dinner in Changchun, Bili sits listlessly without eating, unable to fake her emotions as well as she had promised. Nai Nai, in true Chinese grandmother form, holds a fried bing up to Bili’s face and orders her to take a big bite. Bili does so with a furrowed brow and a forced smile, while around her, her father, uncle, and cousin blink back tears and chew furiously in response to Nai Nai’s sentimental words: “It’s been too long since we’ve all been together like this. I’ve been looking forward to this day for a long time.” It’s clear how painful even the act of chewing is for the family members who bear the twin burdens of knowledge and sorrow — Nai Nai’s oblivious partner Mr. Li, by contrast, is always depicted eating without any qualms — but out of love for Nai Nai, they must swallow their grief alongside their food.

Eating becomes a form of denial, one that can only hold for so long. By the time the climactic wedding banquet is underway, the mask begins to unravel. Bili’s uncle Haibin, the father of the groom, delivers a toast that quickly becomes a tearful, thinly veiled elegy for Nai Nai. The groom Hao Hao, meanwhile, is pushed to pound drink after drink until he, too, collapses into a sobbing mess. Bili, surveying the roomful of guests gorging themselves on booze and platters of seafood, asks her father Haiyan if all the guests know about her grandmother. Nai Nai, seated next to her, lifts a prawn with her chopsticks to Bili’s mouth and urges her to eat. We don’t see Bili take it.

There was no singular breaking point for me, no defining moment in which I told my relatives to leave me alone, or instantaneously repaired my fraught relationship with food, my family, and China. On one particularly hungry summer day in Hangzhou, exhausted from the oppressive humidity that collected in perspiration on everyone’s faces, I started crying in the middle of an elaborate restaurant meal with my relatives and their friends. The tears didn’t subside, and instead crescendoed into the kind of hiccuping sobs that rack your entire body.

I spent the rest of that stay in China — and the next visit, too — swallowing the urge to cry at almost every meal. My relatives were concerned, but treated the outbursts the same way Bili’s family treats Haibin’s and Hao Hao’s: with overwhelming bewilderment, some tenderness, and, following the Chinese tendency to bury grievances, an unspoken agreement not to bring up the episodes to save us all from further embarrassment. The customary pushing of food — and my accompanying anxiety — never abated completely, but, year by year, it became slightly more bearable, with everyone striving to meet each other somewhere in the middle.

There’s no right or wrong in The Farewell’s story of love, grief, and lies. There are only the gray spaces between ideas commonly positioned as diametrically opposed: collectivism versus individualism, stoicism versus emotion, good lies versus bad truths. In actuality, none of these are mutually exclusive. The truth can be both freeing and a shackle. Food can be a manifestation of love as much as a source of anxiety. Living as a Chinese American — as a human, really — means navigating those hazy in-between spaces. Drawing out those complexities from sweeping assumptions is where The Farewell really shines. Reality, the film tells us, is always much more complicated.