In her 2010 book The Promise of Happiness, the scholar Sara Ahmed describes the “happiness duty” as an expectation levied on immigrants by the liberal ideas of multiculturalism. In return for full acceptance, Western democratic societies demand that immigrants enthusiastically acquiesce to a new nation’s cultural values. (For a recent example, look no further than the Trumpian right’s outrage over Representative Ilhan Omar’s temerity to criticize her adopted home.) Under no circumstance can these immigrants retain secondary attachments that may lessen appreciation for their new country. In this way, happiness, Ahmed writes, functions as “a technology of citizenship.”

Mainstream Asian American cinema, when it has had the chance, has often told happy stories. In classics like The Joy Luck Club and in more contemporary fare like Crazy Rich Asians, America compares favorably to the disorderly Old World of Asia, while the immigrant trajectory remains gilded with the promise of generational progress. Crazy Rich Asians—which crammed an entire continent into the backdrop of a classically Western marriage plot—doesn’t present Asian countries as bearing viable alternative ways of life. The romantic comedy Always Be My Maybe and the ABC show Fresh Off the Boat also wholeheartedly cast their lot with America, handling the Asian American experience of racism by swiftly trouncing it in one-off demonstrations. Inherently assimilationist, these stories rest on the conclusion that Asian characters are just as “American”—sometimes more “American”—than their tormentors.

An atmosphere of unhappiness—a mix of longing and defeat—is what sets Lulu Wang’s The Farewell apart from its peers. The film follows Bili (Awkwafina), an unemployed twentysomething who has lived in New York since her mother and father (Diana Lin and Tzi Ma) emigrated from China when she was six. If her parents are proud and naturalized Americans, Bili is an ambivalent heir, with memories of a childhood spent happily elsewhere. Bili learns that her grandmother (Zhao Shuzhen), or Nai Nai, is dying of stage-four lung cancer. But the family has decided not to tell Nai Nai of her diagnosis, and Bili is asked to forgo a trip back to China, where the family has orchestrated a fake wedding for Bili’s cousin as an excuse to say goodbye.

Bili goes anyway, arriving at her grandmother’s apartment unannounced and just in time for dinner. Nai Nai is ecstatic that her far-flung relatives have gathered in one place; everyone else is duly miserable. The film prepares its viewers to expect conflict between Americanized Bili, who thinks the diagnosis should be public knowledge, and her family, who see their subterfuge as a filial duty. Yet as with the family’s wedding, this tension is a well-executed decoy. While most mainstream portrayals of Asia tend to dramatize its essential differences from the West with as much anxiety as condescension, The Farewell allows for no easy lines between American liberalism and Asian communitarianism. Bili is too confused, and too sad, to play proxy in some civilizational face-off.

The central conflict in the film is thus not ideological or cultural but emotional. In The Farewell, China is a place of dark geometry; angular cranes and housing blocs tower into the frame, more brutal than brutalist. Whereas Crazy Rich Asians gussied up Asian modernity in luxury fabrics and candied colors, The Farewell calls to mind the portentous aesthetic of Jia Zhangke, a Chinese filmmaker renowned for chronicling the changes that convulsed his country after Deng Xiaoping opened its economy. Jia’s films ask what happens to those living on the margins of free-market upheaval; The Farewell asks if we can understand those margins as international. Bili, truly an immigrant of our globalized time, can’t make rent in New York, and discovers on her return to China that her childhood residence, like so many others in China’s rapacious housing development drive, was razed. In Wang’s world, home is as elusive as happiness. “Everything was different,” she tells her mother. “Everything was gone.”