Tigertail and a Culturally-Confused Taiwanese

Tigertail, Netflix (2020)

A quick disclaimer first: My passport is Taiwanese, my parents are Taiwanese, I was born in Taipei, but I moved to Malaysia when I was in pre-school. I visit Taiwan at least twice a year and I speak Mandarin and can understand my family members when they complain or scold us in Taiwanese. I don’t know how qualified I am to speak about this film (can I get a hooray! for third-culture kid experiences), but here are my thoughts anyways.

I was hyped for Tigertail to come out—I had never watched anything by Alan Yang, but the very idea of a film something about Taiwan being released by Western media was exciting and revolutionary to me! And for it to be in English, Mandarin, and Taiwanese? I was excited at the prospect of hearing the familiar languages and accents on the big screen (well, the TV screen in our house). Where I live, there’s a large population of both Mandarin and Hokkien-speakers, but the accents are completely different. It’s very easy to distinguish my family and I as non-natives—another reminder that I live on an island filled with diversity but there is still not quite a me-shaped space here. I cannot speak about the immigration parts of the story because I don’t feel like I am qualified to. I know what you’re thinking, but this film was about the Asian-American immigration story! How can you not talk about that? The answer is simple: I am not Asian- American. Sure, I’ve grown up surrounded by American media and American people at my American school deep in Southeast Asia, but that doesn’t mean anything in this context. I can only speak about the parts of the movie that resonated, or failed to resonate with me. Maybe that’s an injustice to the movie, but I still feel compelled to write about it.

I loved the way the movie in the sense of its aesthetics and its soundtrack: the slightly-faded shots of the boy running through the fields. The rich colors of Pin-Jui’s youth that shone through the oldies music and the sheer freedom and the reckless actions, they all wove together to paint an image of a young man infatuated with life, with a yearning for more. The song (偷心的人）meshed beautifully with the dance scene, and the chemistry between Pin-Jui and Yuan was palpable. I didn’t understand how he could just leave Yuan without a word after having known her for so long. I don’t think that kind of relationship is something that one can just abandon without looking back. How can someone leave behind everything that they’ve known, promise themself to someone they cannot fall in love with, and jump headfirst into a world so utterly foreign? The reasoning behind that just doesn’t make sense to me, and that is only the beginning of the things I began to notice as I sat through the movie.

One of my biggest problems with Tigertail was the accents. Yes, I know there’s not a lot of Taiwanese actors and actresses working in Western media, but would it really have killed the producers to find actors that could at least replicate the Taiwanese accent? The shift between distinctly Taiwanese-style Mandarin and the Chinese accents and vocabulary that the characters sported as they aged was jarring, and it nagged at me as I finished the movie. It kind of stung to have something that I was so excited for because it was about my country, my people— morph into something else, something not quite complete. I know that the intended audience for Tigertail wasn’t native speakers, much less a culturally-confused Taiwanese third- culture kid, but I wanted it to be. Maybe my problem with this film wasn’t the linguistic strangeness of it—maybe I just pushed all my expectations for representation and cultural identity onto this Netflix release. The American teenagers got Lady Bird, the Chinese-Americans got The Farewell, my Malaysian and Singaporean friends got Crazy Rich Asians, and was it really so wrong for me to want something too? It wouldn’t have been perfect, but it would have been something.

Tigertail, at its core, is not a film about Taiwan. It is a film about the immigrant experience. I am not an immigrant. I am a third culture kid. I’m not even completely comfortable within the confines with that label because third culture kids are supposed to move around and live in four, five, six countries, and I have been in Malaysia since I learned my first phrase of English. But I call the beaches, pasars, colonial architecture of here home. So maybe there is something to be said about that and my connection to Tigertail. Maybe Pin-Jui was never quite able to call America home, and that is why he and his daughter Angela return to Huwei (虎尾) at the end of the movie in a stilted, but somehow necessary farewell to the setting where we are first introduced to the Taiwanese-speaking kid versions of him and Yuan. Another thing—I wish that he had delved a little deeper into the Taiwanese setting. Where was the food, the culture, the Taiwanese-ness of it all? It felt a little like he was just using Taiwan as a convenient backdrop for the immigrant story that he wanted to tell, and I don’t know if I’m satisfied with that. I wanted to see the parts of the home that I missed out on when my parents moved the family to Malaysia.

One thing about Tigertail I have no qualms about praising is the beginning. It was full of shots that showed the ugly parts of life in a candid light and captured the ‘on-top-of-the-world’ feeling that runs in the veins of young people in those hazy shots. My parents and grandparents have told me stories about Taiwan under the Kuomintang’s military regime, and the movie did an excellent job of making sure that dark part of Taiwanese history was brought to light. Taiwan wasn’t always the democratic island it is now, and I am infinitely thankful for the country that I call my own now. In case you don’t know what I’m referring to, Yang does this in the scene where Pin-Jui’s grandmother makes him hide in the cupboards when the soldiers come to their house. He portrays the terrible treatment of the Taiwanese people at the hands of the Kuomintang’s soldiers, because maybe his parents told him those stories too.

Alan Yang partially based Tigertail off of his father, but I can’t help but wonder if this movie was a sort of love letter to what his life might have been like. Okay, maybe not love letter, but an exploration into a parallel universe where it was him who immigrated and not his parents. Or maybe that’s just me thinking of what life might have been like for me if I had been born fifty years earlier in the southern part of the country, grew up there, fallen in love, emigrated to the West, and fallen out of love.

Maybe it’s wrong of me to project my expectations for representation for such a niche audience onto Tigertail. But I did, and there’s no going back, no erasing the taint of that from my opinion of Tigertail. Alan Yang did his best, and I respect that. I just wish that there was a little more authenticity to the Taiwanese parts of it, but then again, who am I, a Taiwanese teen who’s never really lived there, to judge?