'Tigertail' director Alan Yang calls President Trump's anti-Chinese rhetoric 'a purposeful rallying cry to his base'
Alan Yang was born and raised in California, but he keenly remembers the first time he was made to feel like a foreigner in his own country. “We would always go up to Yosemite or the other national parks in our area,” the writer and director of the new Netflix film, Tigertail, tells Yahoo Entertainment. “My sister and I got separate from our parents, and we were looking at Vernal Falls. This middle-aged white lady came up to us... and said really slowly, ‘I bet they don’t have anything like this where you come from!’ My sister was like, ‘We come from California!’” (Watch our video interview above.)
Reflecting on that encounter years later, Yang characterizes it as a case study in the challenge faced by all children born in the U.S. to immigrant parents. His own father and mother left Taiwan for New York City in the 1970s before settling in California, a journey that provides the basis for the semi-autobiographical Tigertail, which stars Tzi Ma and Kunjue Li as characters inspired by his parents. (Details of his parents’ lives have also found their way into some of his other work, most notably the Emmy-winning Netflix series, Master of None, which he co-created with Aziz Ansari.) Yang recalls that he and his sister enjoyed a childhood that he describes as “pretty all-American.” But when that fellow Yosemite tourist approached them, they suddenly became outsiders. “It’s that perpetual foreigner stereotype. We consider ourselves local, but we’ll never look like locals — we’ll always look like people who come from somewhere else.”
Yang says that lesson has recently been driven home again with the rise in anti-Asian xenophobia that has accompanied the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. And those flames have been fanned by President Donald Trump, who has often referred to COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus.” Asked how it feels to hear the president engage in such talk, Yang replies with a rueful laugh, “It ain’t great! I didn’t love that photo of him crossing out the word ‘Corona’ and writing in ‘Chinese.’ I think that was a purposeful rallying cry to his base to purposefully scapegoat another nation for this disease.”
While he allows that China’s response to the coronavirus outbreak within its own borders was far from ideal, Yang believes that Trump’s choices of words are an overtly political talking point. “It was definitely purposeful. Everyone in the world had agreed it was called COVID-19 and/or the coronavirus, and he still randomly called it the Chinese virus. I think that definitely contributed to the everyday acts of anti-Asian racism we saw.” Yang reveals that his Tigertail leading man, Ma — who was born in Hong Kong, but lives and works in Los Angeles — was the recent victim of anti-Asian bigotry. “He was told to go back into quarantine by a stranger while he was in the parking lot of a supermarket in Pasadena. So this is real.”
In Tigertail, the younger version of Ma’s character works in a Bronx bodega when he first arrives in New York from Taiwan. And as Yang notes, those kinds of immigrant laborers are the very people currently putting their lives on the line by continuing to work in the middle of a pandemic, and in the face of xenophobic attacks inspired by the rhetoric from the White House and other figures in the conservative media. “Think about all of those workers who we have been told they don’t deserve a $15 minimum wage, and meanwhile they’re the only people going to work and risking their lives. Many of those people are immigrants, because no one else wants to do those jobs.”
At the same time, Yang is quick to point out that his film isn’t intended to be a direct rebuke to Trump. Instead, he’s telling a version of his parents’ story in part to emphasize the commonalities all Americans share, no matter what they look like. “I don’t want people to think the movie is preachy or sort of political. The people happen to have Asian faces, but other than that it’s a very universal story about lost love, the passion of youth, regret, honesty and telling the people you love that you care about them. And I don’t know what’s more universal than that.”
Tigertail is currently streaming on Netflix.
— Video produced by Gisselle Bances
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