Inflamed by President Trump’s casual phrase “Chinese virus”, anti-Asian sentiment is erupting all over the world. As a British-Vietnamese person who has been spat on because of the colour of her skin, the film Tigertail is a glimmer of hope – a way of showing the truth, and connecting Asian communities at a time when panic and misinformation serve to break us apart. Alan Yang’s multi-generational love story Tigertail weaves in Yang’s cultural self-discovery and features memories of Taiwan, as experienced by the protagonist Pin-Jui. Weighted against the present tide of anti-Asian bigotry, this tender story about honesty and lost love is more relevant than ever.
“American culture has been negligent in portraying Asian-American people as fully realised human beings,” Yang told the Deadline podcast. Yang, who worked on Parks and Recreation before co-creating Master of None, recalled the trepidation he felt in the early days of his career, in a cultural landscape where east Asians were rarely represented, or stereotyped as hardworking automatons. Yang said he had felt restricted to using only white characters in his early pilots, fearing that all-Asian or Asian-American scripts would never be accepted. But this was before the film successes of Crazy Rich Asians, The Farewell and Parasite brought real Asian faces to mainstream culture.
I felt utter joy and relief at seeing my own identity conflicts explored on screen. With dialogue almost entirely in Mandarin and Taiwanese from an all-Asian cast, Tigertail illuminates the Taiwanese immigrant experience by showing it through emotions. Yang’s drama traces the journey of Taiwanese factory worker Pin-Jui from his home town to America, as well as the sometimes painful discord that separates us from those we love the most. A rallying cry against caricatures of the stoic “Asian dad”, Tigertail lays bare the complexity of Pin-Jui’s interiority: the path he takes towards his American dream, how he stumbles and learns from his mistakes and how he grows from them. The film moves between his life as a young man in the 1960s and the present day in New York. The dual time-frames reveal a mind shifting uneasily between a new, chosen culture and the vibrant one left behind. In the present-day timeline – deliberately desaturated and drained of vibrancy – an older Pin-Jui struggles to empathise with his US-born daughter Angela, who has spent her life feeling as if she couldn’t talk to her father.
That resonated deeply with me. My parents fled to Britain as Vietnamese refugees in their late teens. Because my father speaks very basic English and I speak poor Vietnamese, honest feelings cannot easily be communicated between us. The unrest within Asian families comes not from what is said out loud, but often from what is left unsaid. This cultural muteness echoes throughout Tigertail. In the film’s opening sequence, a young Pin-Jui sobs in desperation for his parents. “Crying never solves anything,” his grandmother scolds him sternly in Taiwanese. “Be strong. Never let anyone see you cry.” In many Asian traditions, including my own, the way to be strong is to conceal your emotions. But non-traditional circumstances call upon us to readjust. How can this silence persist during a global pandemic, when the elderly are being asked to isolate themselves entirely?
Piecing together my family’s story has helped me grasp the sacrifices that my family made in order to secure hope for the next generation. It’s brought me closer to my parents. I’ve learned to appreciate their perspective and our differences. Like Pin-Jui’s leap into the unknown, my family’s journey paved the way for successive generations, even if each generation is a little further from that original sacrifice, a little more removed from the country that was once home.
While Yang’s personal life informs Tigertail in many ways, the film is also about being human and knowing that we can’t face hurt on our own. It reinforces the perseverance and strength of the Asian community in embracing new lives, often at the cost of giving up another. Tigertail’s window into a Taiwanese-American family speaks volumes for those who have felt unable to express themselves, through being marginalised or because they don’t know how to.
• Georgina Quach is a freelance journalist
