Alan Yang Thinks Tigertail “Might Hit Different” Now

Four years ago, Alan Yang stood onstage at the Emmys and made a friendly plea to Asian-American parents everywhere: “If just a couple of you get your kids cameras instead of violins,” he said, gleaming statuette in hand, “we’ll be all good.” At the time, Master of None—the series Yang co-created with Aziz Ansari—felt like an aberration, a rare showcase for Asian faces on television. Given that it’d been over two decades since The Joy Luck Club—the last major Asian-American studio release—had hit theaters, it didn’t seem crazy to think we might have to wait at least another generation for Asians to truly arrive in Hollywood.

Instead, Yang’s speech turned out to be the kickoff for a coming-out party for Asians on film: Crazy Rich Asians landed in 2018, destroying at the box office (it took home $238 million worldwide at the end of its run), followed a year later by an indie darling in The Farewell, a Netflix smash in Always Be My Maybe, and, of course, an Oscar sweep for Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite. Add Bowen Yang’s SNL casting and Marvel’s forthcoming Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings to the mix, and it suddenly feels reasonable to anoint this the Golden Age of Asian Representation.

Now, one of the men who helped usher it in is throwing his hat back into the ring. After spending the past few years shepherding a handful of critically-adored shows—writing and directing on The Good Place, co-creating Forever, and producing Little America for Apple TV+ with Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gordon—Yang is, today, debuting his first feature film, Tigertail, on Netflix. It’s a deeply personal story, told largely in Mandarin and Taiwanese, that’s not-so-loosely inspired by Yang’s own family: his parents’ youth in Taiwan and eventual emigration to the States, and his sister’s complicated relationship with their father today. Like everything Yang touches, it’s tightly written and tastefully curated, shot on dreamy 16mm and soundtracked by infectious ‘60s Taiwanese pop. But it also now carries an additional burden, arriving in a post-COVID world where attacks on Asian-Americans are rising precipitously.

With Tigertail landing on Netflix today, we called Yang at home in L.A., where he’s been holed up working on new projects, playing Pictionary over Zoom, and fantasizing about his Lakers somehow re-taking the hardwood this season.

GQ: Just a few weeks ago, I was looking forward to Tigertail’s release as a sort of celebratory capstone for what’s felt like a breakthrough moment for Asian-American filmmaking. By the time I got the screener, the context around it had changed so dramatically, and it wound up feeling like a salve for me—a saving grace in this really weird time, where it suddenly feels a little scary to be Asian in this country.

Alan Yang: Yeah, the context has changed dramatically. We could never have expected this when we announced the release date, much less while we were making it. Obviously, none of this was in the air. It’s coming at a really interesting time. I feel lucky that we’re on Netflix, a place that people can watch movies from home. We did have a theatrical release planned, and of course we lost that which was disappointing, but I’m glad that people will be able to see the movie. You add to that this anti-Asian sentiment that’s been going around, and it’s a strange, weird, ironic, perfect storm of circumstances for the movie to sadly be relevant.

Do you think the movie has added weight now? Will people interpret it differently, for better or worse?

I do think, to borrow some internet lingo, that it might hit different. I imagine that it might feel more immediate and strangely topical. When I tweeted the trailer out last week, the response was overwhelming. It felt like people wanted to see Asian faces. They wanted to see a movie about connecting with others, that dimensionalizes Asian people. I wish that the world wasn’t in the grip of this incredibly damaging global pandemic, but in a minuscule way, it does feel like the movie might give some people some comfort for an hour and a half.

How are you feeling, personally, in the face of all this rampant racism?

It’s been very mild for me, personally, but it’s affected people I know. Obviously, [Tigertail star] Tzi Ma has talked in the press about the racist attack he suffered in public. It’s really, really scary. “Disappointing” is the word I’ve been using over and over again. I guess I was naive, because I thought we had made progress. I genuinely thought we’d moved past some of this stuff. Isn’t this the stuff that our parents’ generation already had to go through? How backwards are we? What year is this? And it’s not covert, it’s overt. It’s people spitting at people. It’s people getting beat up. This is not made up—it’s happening out there. And that is just shocking. Ultimately, the biggest concern is that we solve the health crisis and figure out how to get everyone well, but it’s not great that there’s this additional layer that Asian people have to endure.

On a brighter note, this has been a pretty unprecedented run for Asian representation in Western media. When you first started working on Tigertail a few years back, did you have any inkling it’d be arriving on this wave of successful Asian-led movies?

I had zero idea. I thought I was insane for writing a script that had only Asian and Asian-American characters. It was a crazy leap of faith, to be quite honest. None of those movies had come out. There hadn’t been an Asian-American studio release since The Joy Luck Club 25 years ago. So, yeah, I had no idea. But I’m incredibly happy. It’s just the beginning, but the fact that people are reading subtitles, the fact that a movie with subtitles won all of the Oscars, it’s just paving the way. We have a long way to go, but I do feel that the table has been set. It’s not insane to tell your friends to watch a movie that’s largely in Mandarin and Taiwanese. It’s becoming more mainstream, and that’s extremely exciting.

What, in your mind, were the conditions that led to this breakthrough?

How about it being incredibly overdue? We’ve been waiting for this for 80 years. I think that’s long enough, right? This is a community that, by the way, isn’t small. We’re talking about 15 to 20 million people. And when we’ve never seen ourselves portrayed on screen the way we are in real life, it’s a volcano that’s about to erupt. Those floodgates are open now, and I hope that they don’t close back up.

It’s self-perpetuating: you see Asian people on screen, you see Asian people behind the camera, and then the next generation sees that it’s possible. There are kids who want to be the next John Cho, the next Steven Yeun, the next Awkwafina, any of these actors. It’s finally happening, and it’s really exciting. That being said: it ain’t over. You hear people be, like, Oh, you must be happy! I mean, yeah, we have three or four movies now. White people have every other movie! It’s still not exactly equal. And there’s still so many kinds of movies that we haven’t been the lead of, and I think that’s the next step.

What kinds of movies would you want to see next? What do you picture as the next stage of this wave?

I’d like to see Asian-Americans in a wider variety of roles. Obviously it’s natural to make movies about our families and our heritage, because that’s an important part of our lives. I just made a movie like that, and there’ll be more movies like that, and I think that’s wonderful. But we need movies where we play different types of characters: I’d love to see an Asian Indiana Jones, or an Asian Ron Burgundy, or an Asian Furiosa. There’s just not very many of those characters—we don’t have those options. It’s always the same kind of person. We’re starting to have big directors and big movie stars who happen to be Asian, though, and that’ll help move things along.

It does feel strange that we haven’t had an Asian medical or legal drama yet.

Yeah man! You think of all these great shows and movies, and we’re not just up against what’s coming out this year. In the world of streaming and on-demand, we’re up against all things made ever. And when you look at the list of all things made ever, the list of Asian-American movies is miniscule. You’re going up against the entire library, not just 2020 releases.

From Master of None onwards, it’s felt like race has played an increasingly vital role in your work. What prompted that shift?

Well, your work reflects what you’re passionate about at the time. It’s instinctual. It’s all how you’re feeling. When you wake up in the morning, what do you care about most? For me, it’s been a confluence of personal factors, and these are the stories that have felt most important for me to tell and that I’m most excited about. People have also asked me about shifting genres and mediums, and why I’m choosing these forms. But for me, it’s like, I had an idea for this story and these characters, and what’s the best way to tell that story? In this case, it was a film, and it was a drama. It’s not like I wake up and think, I’m going to make a drama! I don’t think that way. I think of it from the story and characters first.

You wrote on Instagram recently about feeling like you’d denied your own Asian identity growing up, which was something I could unfortunately relate with.

Where did you grow up?

I’m from a small, very white town just outside of Toronto.

And there’s a huge Asian population in Toronto, but you weren’t necessarily a part of it.

Exactly.

That’s really, really similar to my situation. I grew up an hour and a half outside of L.A. People think, “Oh, L.A., there are a ton of Asian people there. There are tons of Asians at UCLA.” But I wasn’t within shouting distance of UCLA, or UC Irvine, or any of those places. Where I grew up, it was me and maybe two other Asian kids. The custodian at my school happened to be Asian, and everyone thought he was my dad. He was the only Asian adult they’d ever seen!

It took me a long time to realize that my face and the way that I look—as crazy as this sounds—it’s part of who you are. It’s part of what people think of you. You can never change that about yourself, so it’s not worth denying it. Why not learn a little bit more? Why not find out more about yourself? And in the process, you’re also learning more about your parents. These people who are so important to your life. When you’re a kid, you think of your parents as inhuman in some ways. They’re authority figures, they’re people who tell you “no,” they’re people giving you life lessons. But as you grow up, you realize they’re human beings too.

So all of those things dovetailed. I started learning more about Taiwan, which meant learning more about my dad, and learning more about myself. And that became something I felt really passionate about.

I also know from experience that immigrant parents can sometimes be reluctant to open up and talk about the past. How did you manage to bridge that gap and connect with your dad?

A few years ago, I went to Taiwan with my dad for the first time in almost 25 years. I hadn’t been back since I was 7. I had a vague idea rolling around in my brain about writing a movie about a Tawainese family, and I happened to be in China doing some work for Dreamworks. While I was on that side of the world, I called my dad and asked if he wanted to meet me in Taiwan. He’s retired, so he had the time. If you can swing it, I highly recommend that as a way to connect with your parents. It’s just more natural, it’s more organic. We’re in Taipei, and he’s speaking Taiwanese, and he’s opening up. He showed me where he went to college, and then we took the high-speed train down to where he grew up. We walked around and he showed me places he’d gone to as a boy. That was really meaningful to me, and ultimately was one of the things that inspired the movie.

Was there anything he revealed to you on that trip that really floored you?

Yeah, I remember where I was. We were on the train—this really advanced, efficient, beautiful train—and he started telling me about the political unrest in Taiwan when he was growing up. His father passed away when he was a year old, and his mom had two older sons already. Everyone in the village told his mom to give him up for adoption, because she didn’t have the resources to take care of three kids. She gave him to some relatives temporarily, until she could afford to come back for him. He wasn’t registered with those relatives for political reasons, so when the authorities came around he had to hide in a grain bin.

That story shook me so much that I made it the opening scene of the movie. It was so insane to me. I think about my childhood, and I was furious that I didn’t get a Sega Genesis. How crazy is that shift in one generation? His actions allowed my incredibly privileged upbringing to happen. You think about all of the things that he did, and the sacrifices he made. I don’t consider myself an expert on Taiwanese political history, but I liked inflecting the movie with a little bit of that. There’s a long tradition of Taiwanese films—like A City of Sadness—that explore political history alongside familial history.

How’s your relationship with your dad now, having experienced all of that?

I honestly think it’s better than it’s ever been. It’s not a coincidence that over the course of this movie we became closer, but to be quite honest, my dad and I have always had a decent relationship. It’s somewhat depicted in the movie, but I always wished that he and my sister got along better. I got a little bit of the easier end of it in my family, which is kind of a common trend in Asian families. But I was the younger kid, and they kind of pushed her. She had to go to Chinese school, and I didn’t. She got pushed to do things. She took a very reasonable route and became a lawyer, and has a good job and a family and kids, and they’re still hard on her. I never saw that as very fair, and I put a lot of that into the movie as well.

Has your family seen the movie yet?

We were going to have a screening at Netflix so that my family could see it on the big screen and we could all watch it together and talk about it afterwards. But instead, no one can see each other ever, so I’ve sent it to their Netflix accounts. My mom and sister have seen it, my dad I think is going to watch it today. But yeah, they’ve been very positive about it. I think it’s a lot to process, but I prefaced them seeing the movie by saying, “Please understand that it’s highly fictionalized. They’re characters, they’re not you guys. I love you guys, and this is a love letter to you and everything you’ve ever done for me.” I wanted to make that clear.

The person whose reaction I’d be most curious to hear about is your sister’s, in some ways.

Yeah, she’s still processing it. We were just talking about it. She was like, “It’s a gorgeous movie, and I’m so glad you made it. It’s just a lot to process.” She wants to watch it again, and I told her to give it a little bit of time. I told her I didn’t mean to expose her personal business, of course, but I hope she appreciates that it’s my wish for what could happen between her and my dad.

What do you feel like you’ve gained, ultimately, from connecting with your heritage?

It’s an incredible feeling, man. I recommend it. Whether you realize it or not, it takes some mental energy to pretend you’re something you’re not. And I’m not saying every Asian person needs to talk about being Asian and do Asian stuff all the time. For me, it’s just about not being embarrassed, not hiding. It’s something to celebrate. That’s the most powerful thing you have as somebody making films or TV shows: your perspective, your point of view, how you see the world.

Being Asian definitely shaped how I grew up, how I move through the world, and how people see me. It’s not everything—it doesn’t make up the entirety of who I am. We’re much more than what we look like on the surface. But it’s part of it, and I think it’s healthy. Many people have written about it more eloquently than I’m speaking about it now, but it’s about looking in the mirror and accepting who you are and being proud of it. That’s a universal experience for everyone in America who isn’t, like, a super handsome jacked white guy. [Laughs.] And, by the way, if you’re a super handsome jacked white guy, I’m sure you have struggles of your own that we never hear about.

Yeah, I don’t really feel that bad for them, though.

Yeah, seems like a pretty good life. [Laughs.] But yeah, that’s where it becomes a pretty universal struggle. And by no means should I be the spokesperson for knowing about what it means to be Asian, because I’m just scratching the surface. But am I using Duolingo to learn a little bit of Mandarin? Yeah. Can I text my mom and dad, like, “Hello, how are you?” Yeah, I do that now! So that’s kind of fun.

Wait, so you aren’t fluent? What was it like directing a film that was primarily in Mandarin and Taiwanese, then?

Oh, my Mandarin is terrible. And my Taiwanese is even worse. But it’s funny, because you realize you know more than you think. On set, a few of our actors were more comfortable in Mandarin than English, so I’d give notes through translators. But they didn’t realize that I could understand a little bit, because a couple of months in the translators got a little too comfortable and started to freelance a little. They’d be like, “Yeah, pretend it’s like the first time you guys met each other, and it’s surprising.” I was like, “No, no, no, you can’t do that! You can’t just give him additional notes!” [Laughs.] They were shocked, because they thought I was just this American guy who couldn’t speak any Chinese. And I was like, “No, I’m onto you.”

But with very simple language, I could understand it. And my Mandarin got better, because I lived in Taiwan for months and months making the movie. My grandma lives in Taiwan and came to set. She spoke to me in Taiwanese, and I could understand a little bit of that, which felt really good. It felt like there was a little bit of personal growth. I’ve been speaking Mandarin to my niece and nephew, because they know a little. I’m not good, I’m very bad, but it’s baby steps. And I think it makes my parents happy when I try.

Do you think the movie might have a similar effect of bringing other immigrant families closer together at a time like this?

That would be amazing. I do hope people see it, and that they take away from it that it’s never too late to connect to the people you care about, and it’s never too late to share how you feel. I know that that’s a very basic message, but it’s very specifically ingrained into Asian-American communities to be a little bit more reserved, and to be a little bit less open about your feelings. Again, I feel lucky that it’s coming out on a streaming service that’s in millions of homes, and that people are watching Netflix…

And people are watching a lot of Tiger-related stuff on Netflix.

Yeah, I was about to say! I welcome the Tigertail-Tiger King confusion! I’ve been telling people it’s a direct sequel, and that Joe Exotic shows up at minute 83. I know it’s a different tone, but you’ll see how it ties in. You’ll start out with a beautifully filmed Asian-American family story, but you’ll see a tiger appear eventually.

I can’t wait for someone on Twitter to edit the two together.

Yes, please make the memes, people! If you make the memes and send them to me, I will absolutely retweet them.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Originally Appeared on GQ