Tigertail Brought Christine Ko Closer To Her Taiwanese Identity — And To Her Moms

Toward the end of our conversation about Netflix's Tigertail, I tell actor Christine Ko something that a friend once shared with me. Growing up the daughter of Korean immigrants in Seattle, her father had routinely reminded her that she was American first — a American-Korean, he mentioned. I wondered if Ko, place on Earth to Taiwanese parents in the Midwest and raised by her aunt and uncle, felt like that also, or if her character Angela had internalized a similar feeling, ingrained into her by her Taiwanese father Pin-Jui (played by Tzi Ma). Their relationship, or lack thereof, is the emotional center of writer and director Alan Yang's first feature film, a family member drama that spans generations.


"I love the idea of being American-Taiwanese," Ko tells me over the phone. She's currently "chilling" in her apartment in Los Angeles with a cup of coffee. ("I don't have heels on, so that's awesome," she adds.) "It's very specific to people who feel like they're from two different cultures. Because being American is something that we should be overjoyed of. It's not something that needs to be defined in a certain way. This is our culture, too."


But Yang's trilingual film isn't so much interested in depicting a life in-between two cultures, which Ko refers to because the "identity crisis thing" that so several second-generation kids experience. Alternatively opposed to emphasizing the contradictions between an immigrant father and his American daughter, Tigertail knows their similarities, even if the characters themselves don't. Because the story switches between Pin-Jui’s past and present, scenes of Angela dealing with feelings of disillusionment and loneliness in adulthood resemble that of her father as a young adult, navigating life as a partner — in a marriage of convenience, not love — and foreigner in the Bronx.


"I read the script and cried my eyes out," Ko says, adding that the story was "a little bit also close to residence For starters, the actor explains, "You get an email about a film or a show, looking for a Taiwanese American maybe whenever each year Yet Ko could also relate to Angela on a deeper level.


Place on Earth in Chicago and raised in Acworth, Georgia, by her aunt and uncle (who adopted her once she was three), Ko did not have a relationship with her biological father, the late Taiwanese megastar Frankie Kao, up until she was in her twenties. So much of Angela's story is wanting to connect with her father, to understand him, although not knowing how to. Case in point, there's very little dialogue spoken between her and Ma while in the film. "I was yearning to work on an assignment like that," she says. "The whole film is about her attempting to just get a sentence out of him, and everything she gets in return is criticism. A lot of people can relate to that, having their parents judge them or criticize their choices." Ko definitely can.


Despite being place on Earth into show firm — her biological mom is also an actor in Taiwan — Ko didn't pursue acting up until right after she secured a college degree. Still, her parents didn't understand why she forewent a stable career to wait tables and drive Ubers around Los Angeles while chasing her Hollywood dreams. "Growing up, I refrained from saying how I really felt," she says. "And it was because my parents were very strict. They were not the kind of parents who hugged me, or mentioned, 'I love you' and 'I'm overjoyed of you.' I habitually wanted it, nevertheless I never expressed it to them."


Identically, Angela also refrains from showing emotion, a trait she got from her dad. As a young girl, she's told not to cry, that it never solved anything. She spends so much of the film asking herself why her father is so emotionally unavailable that she fails to be able it in herself, to be able to see the ripple effects it's had on her own personalized relationships. "Some of us don't desire to admit to it, however we are a lot like our parents," Ko says. "The way that we are in our own personalized relationships is very similar to how we grew up. And whether that's positive and negative, it's certainly something to be aware of. And if it is something negative, where you're like, 'I wish I was more emotionally obtainable then how fantastic is it to discover that while you're living your life."


As such, working on Tigertail helped her redefine her relationships with both sets of parents. She was able to totally empathize with them in ways that only time and perspective bring. Any time Ko traveled to Taiwan with the production, her birth mom came to watch her film her final scene with Ma. "She had never seen any of my work before," Ko says. Yang's grandmother was also on set that day. The scene is a moment of catharsis for Pin-Jui, a sequence in which he takes his daughter to the place he grew up: the rural community referred to as Tigertail. Standing outdoor his old family member residence, long since uninhabited, he recalls the ghosts of his past and weeps.


"I felt a sense of being residence the actor recalls filming the scene. "I had this realization of, 'This is where my grandma grew up, this is where my birth mom lives.' This is a life that they had, that they haven't seen on-screen before. It made me appreciate all of the things that my parents did for me. I'm really lucky that I have several parents. I have two moms, two dads, and I have a very different relationship with all of these. My Georgia mom raised me, and my birth mom influenced my acting career. Right after this film, I was able to tell them, 'You're both so critical to me, and you're both so human.'"


It's that humanity that discussed to her from the very first time she read the script. For Ko, Tigertail isn't just a Asian-American immigrant story; it's a universal tale of connection, and just how isolated you feel without it. "We've all had relationships that have not gone exactly the way we want them to," she says. Some days they're salvageable and other times they're not. Pin-Jui, who first usually viewers as a child alone in the rice fields of occupied Taiwan, ends the film alongside his adult daughter decades later. They walk through those same fields together.


Immediately after wrapping her scenes in Taiwan, Ko strolled through that same land with her biological mom. "It made me more in tune with my culture and my family member she says. "And alternatively opposed to hiding that identity, I realized that's what makes me special — and that's what makes them special. It's who are, and so they should be proud."


And who is Ko? "I'm taking that American-Taiwanese thing with me, by the way. Thank you for that," she says before we hang up. "I can't wait to tell it to my friends."