In the second episode of Master of None’s first season, the acclaimed Netflix comedy created by Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang, Dev (Ansari) and his friend Brian (Kelvin Yu) spend half an hour grappling with the guilt-ridden, at times comically absurd gulf between their own lived experiences and those of their immigrant parents. A shrugging small-time actor, Dev can be petulant with his mother and father, amiable Indian-Americans who immigrated in the ’80s. Brian, on the other hand, struggles to connect with his quiet, if agreeable, father, whose stereotypically Asian-dad, monosyllabic tendencies are poked at in lighthearted, empathetic terms.
When the show premiered in 2015, this episode—titled “Parents”—was hailed as a quietly groundbreaking exploration of a specific, yet startlingly familiar dynamic between immigrants and their children. The next year, Yang and Ansari won an Emmy for writing the episode. During their acceptance speech, Yang declared—both as a lament and rallying cry—that in the history of American television and film, Asian representation largely boiled down to Long Duk Dong, the racist caricature from Sixteen Candles.
It was around that very time that Yang had been tinkering with another script—one that would expand and subvert the trope of the silent, stoic Asian father. His screenplay eventually became his remarkable, tender new Netflix film, Tigertail (streaming April 10). “It was this bloated, crazy, 200-page script that I saved on my computer as ‘Family Movie,’” Yang recently recalled over the phone from London, where he was at work on an undisclosed television show.
Yang’s directorial debut tells the story of Grover (Tzi Ma), a divorced, Taiwanese father who’s living comfortably but alone in the United States, and is incapable of opening up to his American-born adult daughter, Angela (Christine Ko). In the present, Grover appears (perhaps predictably) emotionally subdued—but the film spends most of its time exploring his past, recalling Grover’s former life in Taiwan as well as his early years in America.
The film is both remarkably simple and radically singular. It’s a tale of the Taiwanese immigrant experience—something that has hardly ever been centered in American film—and the hidden scars that are left in the process. It’s the kind of work that Yang was longing to see when he gave that Emmys speech.
“Christine Ko and I were joking about it: we were like, ‘The trailer for this movie is the only trailer I could ever think of that starts in Taiwanese, continues in Mandarin, and ends in English,’” the director said.
Unprecedented as it may be, a film like Tigertail also feels like the natural outgrowth of a nascent but growing Hollywood movement toward telling more Asian and Asian American stories. Just a few years ago, when Yang was writing his film, Parasite had not recently won best picture; mainstream cultural behemoths like Crazy Rich Asians were still far off; and intimate arthouse films more akin to Yang’s, like Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, were yet to be seen.
Back then, a film like Tigertail seemed doomed to live only on Yang’s hard drive. “It was not a sort of cash-in on the Asian trade,” the filmmaker said, laughing ruefully. “I was just like, ‘Wow, I hope I could just get some sort of financing for this.’”
Tigertail wasn’t just a culturally specific gamble—it was a passion project that spurred an unearthing of Yang’s Asian identity. The project’s initial working title, Family Movie, reflected its loosely autobiographical nature: like Grover, Yang’s own father (who narrates the beginning and end of the film) grew up in rural, central Taiwan, worked in a sugar factory—the exact same one shot in the film—and eventually immigrated to the Bronx with Yang’s mother. “I can only imagine what their life was like in the Bronx in the ’70s as probably two of the only Taiwanese American people there,” Yang said. The couple eventually moved to California, where Yang was born.