Alan Yang’s first feature film, Tigertail, which comes out on Netflix April 10, began as a file saved as “FAMILY MOVIE” on his computer, dated August 14, 2016. But when he read the story again later, he shelved it. “I just said, ‘This isn’t it, man. This is a B. It’s because I don’t have a personal enough connection to it,” remembers Yang. So he started writing again. A lot. He wanted to tell a sprawling, multigenerational Asian-American tale, and ended up writing a 250-page script with multiple points of view that he eventually whittled down into one central character, Pin-Jui, played by Tzi Ma in the present and Hong-Chi Lee in the past. The young Pin-Jui lives and romances in Taiwan, before eventually moving to New York City. It is what Yang calls his “fever dream” of how he imagines his own father’s immigration story. “The movie is kind of my dream of my father’s dream of his past,” says Yang. “It’s emphatically not his story in some ways.”
Alan Yang’s Tigertail Is a ‘Fever Dream’ of His Father’s Immigration Story
