The moment I started paying particular attention to the Netflix series Master of None was early on in its first season, in just the second episode. It was still pretty rough, but over the course of the episode (titled “Parents”) Dev and Brian go from being annoyed at their dads for asking for help to fix their iPads and sending them articles to read, to realizing that their parents led these whole other lives before immigrating to the U.S. that they, as privileged second generation kids, knew nothing about. In his directorial debut Tigertail, Alan Yang, previously a writer on Parks and Recreation and co-creator of Master of None, takes the central conceit of “Parents” and turns it into a fully fledged, inter-generational, Asian American immigrant story, one that we haven’t seen in such scope and depth since The Joy Luck Club almost three decades ago.
The film tells the story of Pin-Jui (played by everyone’s favorite big screen Asian dad Tzi Ma) as he struggles to connect with his adult daughter Angela. In watching his story unfold, from a child running in the fields of Taiwan, as a brash, ambitious, romantic teenager working at a factory with his single mother, to a struggling young convenience store clerk in New York City, the audience understands how his upbringing and experiences shape his life story, but ironically, his daughter does not. All she knows is the distant and demanding father who values security over chasing dreams and brings her to tears at piano recitals. In addition to the changes in environment, Pin-Jui’s life is defined by his relationships with four women: his mother, his childhood sweetheart Yuan, his wife Zhenzhen, and his daughter Angela.
Yang is known for his screenwriting, but from the very beginning of Tigertail, it’s clear that he is a student of film history and is fully engaged with the visual medium – the movie is filled with an array of homages to the greats. The Kuomintang soldiers’ inspection of the grandmother’s house calls to mind the iconic opening scene of Inglorious Basterds, and the frontal shots looking straight into the camera is pure Barry Jenkins. Yang also pays tribute to his Taiwanese New Wave predecessors with the themes of countryside vs city life and the understated long takes and somberness reminiscent of Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao Hsien, and the disruption of Confucian family ideals and east-west parent-child clashes in Ang Lee’s early work. Yang also steals a lot of the iconic visuals of Wong Kar Wai: the saturated reds, the neon lights, the piercing gazes, the long pullbacks and delicate shot compositions, and the stylish period piece temperament (all the past scenes are strikingly shot on 16mm).
It works – there’s a great sense of chemistry and playfulness between the young Pin-Jui and Yuan, of living in the excitement and romance of youth, surrounded by the lush Taiwanese countryside and the dreamy, blues-filled village bars. The world, the future, is full of untapped possibilities. The lively young man who sings Otis Redding, dances to Mandarin pop, and dines and dashes at upscale restaurants, who dreams of a successful and happy life in America, is a far cry from the the silent and sad old man that Angela has known all her life. Children tend to have trouble understanding that their parents had a different life before they were born, and that disconnect is even more difficult when the parent is an immigrant, having grown up in a completely alien and unrelatable world.
There are so many little touches of authenticity, the best illustration of which is the use of language. The very first shot of the movie is white text that reads: “Mandarin subtitles in white, Taiwanese subtitles in brackets.” It’s a bold move to ask viewers who don’t speak either language to distinguish between the two dialects, but there is meaning embedded in this distinction. Almost every second generation child can relate to how the Pin-Jui responds to his mother in Mandarin, even though she would speak to him in Taiwanese, or how Angela would speak English to her father even as he speaks Mandarin. The reality is that a lack of fluency or comfort often creates yet an additional barrier in conversing across generations. That’s what makes the last scene so poignant, when this dynamic subtly changes.
Outside of his four central female relationships, there is also Pin-Jui’s grandmother, who teaches him as a young child that crying doesn’t solve anything. “Be strong – never let anyone see you cry”, she scolds him. Pin-Jui takes this to first mean that he should put on a fearless bravado, but after his arduous experience of trying to find his feet in America, and cowed by the loss of Yuan, this turns to stoicism, never allowing himself to shed a tear until the very end. You wonder, along with Pin-Jui: would that have changed had he immigrated with Yuan instead of Zhenzhen? Or was that just the fleeting, bright flame of youth that would have inevitably been tamped down by age and experience and disappointment?
As spirited and exciting as Yuan was, Zhenzhen is equally fascinating. Her backstory is a little muddy, but when she and Pin-Jui first get to New York, she turns out to be a fully fleshed out character. She is her own person, with her own struggles and wants and desires, and a great counterpoint to Pin-Jui. Kunjue Li plays Zhenzhen with a sincere shyness and conveys her loneliness and isolation in a foreign country in such a real and effective way.
Ironically, in fleshing out the typically one-note strict Asian parent stereotype, Yang leaves the character of Angela woefully underwritten and somewhat miscast, and her dialogue comes off as wooden and stilted and inauthentic. Angela is played by Christine Ko, who seems to struggle to emote as a daughter who has spent a lifetime wanting more from her father. As a result, Pin-Jui’s relationship with Angela is interesting in concept but lacking in execution, and the story ends up dragging whenever it reverts to the current day timeline. It’s a little odd because you’d think Yang, as a millennial second generation Asian American, would most identify with Angela. Things pick up later with a wonderful cameo from Joan Chen, leading to Pin-Jui and Angela taking the first steps to try to shift their relationship and open up to each other.
Even more than lost love, Tigertail is about a young man’s promise and big dreams, and how those get shelved away and locked in a drawer as life gets in the way. It’s about making, and learning to live with, the heartbreaking choice in the face of necessity, the sacrifice for family that ends up reverberating 40 years later. But the inter-generational nature of the story provides us with some perspective – even as you wonder what could have been, life moves on. You don’t stop living, and neither do the other people in your life. Yang is still finding his voice as a director, but he’s talented and shrewd enough to capitalize on this sense of nostalgia and wistfulness while reminding us that the relationships we do have and the paths we’ve chosen are the ones that matter.
Crazy Rich Asians, which came out in the summer of 2018, was not a movie made for me. It was entertaining enough, but there were some real problems for a movie purporting to be a breakthrough in Asian American representation. But even then, I hoped that it was the start of something that would lead to more authentic, accessible Asian American stories being told in mainstream media outside the rom-com genre. The Farewell and now Tigertail represent an encouraging trend. There is not just one Great American Novel, and there can not and should not be one single movie that definitively represents all of Asian American experience, any more than there is one for the Black or Latinx experience in America. It’s impossible and unfair for one film to shoulder that burden. If Tigertail isn’t for you, though, there’s hope that one is coming soon.
