By @alth0u

A story of lost love featuring easily overlooked realistic Taiwanese Hokkien (Taigi) and a nuanced examination of mother-son relationships ends as an impotent exploration of how we impart our unresolved dramas upon our children and an inaccurate reflection of the Taiwanese American experience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8lp_eI78ZM

Spoilers ahead.

No trailer had a more personal effect on me than the trailer of Tigertail. When I first saw it, I played it back three more times. The period specific music, locations, and costume design struck immediately as well-researched, and some part of my ancestral memory—unscathed by epigenetics—lit up. The first scene of the trailer is the homiest earworm of dialogue—and wow did it latch on:

Lí kìo sím-mih mîa? Góa kìo Phín-Suî, lí—leh? Góa sī a-Oan.

Take a moment to rewatch the first 10 seconds of the trailer and really live in the melody of Taigi, a calm hint before the bursting entry of Tou Xin De Ren—with all the longing typical of enka.

This scene does an excellent job of capturing both the platonic Taiwanese childhood—endless summer days of running through endless fields of grain, unsure if your skin is dark because of dirt, the sun, or both—and the freewheeling and singsongy exchange of a conversation in Taigi. Pay attention to the tonal markings above (transcribed as well as I could in Pe̍h-ōe-jī). There is a clear meter and rhythm, up...down, up...down, up-down. (And I will not even try to explain the near-jazz that is the tone sandhi rules.)

This scene comes early in the film. Pin-Jui is living with his grandmother during KMT junta rule in Taiwan when he becomes friends with Yuan.

We see Pin-Jui later as a young adult; he and Yuan have a blossoming romance at this point. Pin-Jui lives and works with his mother in a factory.

Although Yang brings forth the most authentic Taigi conversations yet committed to American screens, the English subtitles strip away any color. I will unpack several that were particularly wonderful.

Lán bô hit chióng bí-kok sî-kan. We don't have that kind of American time.

This is translated just as "Why are you so slow?" as Pin-Jui's mother tut-tuts at him as he saunters over with a bucket at their shared factory job. The meaning should be obvious here— Americans are thought to have a luxury of working at their own pace—something we later see is not true of Pin-Jui's immigrant experience.

Ke-khì bó seng ba̍k-chiu! The machine wasn't born with eyes!