TIGERTAIL: FILM REVIEW
Tigertail opens with a shot of an Asian boy (Queenie Yu-Hsin Fang) carrying a tin pail, sprinting down a narrow dirt path surrounded by stretches of long grass. The camera runs behind him, showing us his point of view, as wisps of green tower above him. While Tigertail takes place in Taiwan, my dad also spent the first few years of his life on a farm in the middle of nowhere China, where his foster family became his first family. It was uncanny how much the whole film mirrored many of the stories he would tell me about his upbringing.
When I was young, every time we stumbled upon a river or a broad patch of land, my dad would never fail to mention how much the open space reminded him of his childhood. I grew up hearing these stories, so I always took them for granted, never really internalizing the image that my dad, who is now a neurologist in Chicago, grew up on a dirt-poor farm. However, watching my dad’s experience mirrored on screen cemented his experiences for me, bridging the disconnect between a past generation’s experience and my own.
Directed by Alan Yang, Tigertail follows the story of Pin-Jui (Tzi Ma), a Taiwainese immigrant who is loosely based on Yang’s father. The film cuts back and forth between Pin-Jui’s present, as the father of a distant and hardworking American daughter Angela (Christine Ko), and Pin-Jui’s past, as a boy growing up in Taiwan (Hong-Chi Lee), who spends his days laboring in dangerous factories with his mom to get by. As the film progresses, stories of Jui’s sacrifices and memories help bridge the gap between his present and past. His mother’s recent passing is the ultimate turnstile connecting these two worlds.
As an American-born child of two Chinese immigrant parents, this film resonated with me not because I saw myself in Angela, but mostly because it allowed me to unpack the transition between seeing my mom and dad as people, as opposed to parents. Don’t get me wrong, I have already undergone this mental shift over the past few years,. However, it’s still difficult to really imagine, I think for anyone, the life your parents had before you were born, especially if you grew up in different countries. My mom was once a young girl whose only labels were daughter and sister, and my dad, a boy whose only labels were son and brother. As simple as that sounds, this image didn’t really click in the way I wanted it to until I watched Tigertail.
Not only is Tigertail an immigrant story, but it also aims to show the way trauma carries into adulthood and relationships, as Pin-Jui struggles to console and deal with his daughter’s breakup with her boyfriend. When he was young, Pin-Jui himself used to have a girlfriend named Yuan (Joan Chen) who he loved very much and would have married. The two met when Pin-Jui lived on the farm as a boy, but unlike Pin-Jui, who grew up in a one-bedroom house with his mom, Yuan came from a wealthy family. However, at a certain point, Pin-Jui had to make the tough decision between remaining poor and in love and taking the leap to find better opportunities for him and his mom in America. It’s heartbreaking, but not a spoiler to say that he ends up choosing the latter. It takes Pin-Jui a while to realize that in order for his daughter to open up to him, he has to, too.
The element that holds Tigertail together is its strong pulse. Although sometimes the dialogue, especially between Pin-Jui and his daughter, is a bit cold and dry, the heart of the film lies in deeply rooted personal experience and humanizing a generation’s worth of stories. If Yang showed a chronological string of events of his father’s journey from growing up in Taiwan to moving to America, the film would be very different, and arguably, much weaker. The smooth intercuts between Pin-Jui’s past and his present paint a much fuller picture of his sacrifices, many of which he is still paying for. Looking back and wondering “what if” does nobody any good, but even Pin-Jui sometimes cannot help himself.
As Yang’s debut film, Tigertail reveals that the writer/actor/director is no doubt a masterful and empathetic storyteller. Yang did not grow up in Taiwan, and I know that bringing his father’s story to life was no easy feat. I’m extremely grateful that Yang took on this task that many of us first-generation Americans cannot even imagine executing, and in some ways, are scared to. Tigertail is meant for every generation, as it paints a picture of an individual’s honor and sacrifice, which, like many other leaps of faith, yields fruits that often cannot be seen for decades to come.