PAJIBA
Date: May 9, 2020 
By: Roxana Hadadi

Five years ago, Master of None co-creator Alan Yang co-wrote the episode “Parents” alongside creative partner Aziz Ansari. In it, Ansari’s character, the Indian-American Dev, and his Taiwanese-American friend Brian (Kelvin Yu) discuss the sacrifices their parents made in coming to the United States, and the specific sort of silence with which they’ve both grown up. As first-gen immigrants, they’re accustomed to gaps in their parents’ biographies and to unanswered questions about their pasts. They help their parents fix glitches with their cellphones and laptops and they’re berated for not calling very often, but they’ve sort of resigned themselves to the impossibility of a closer relationship or more emotional honesty.

Well, sort of; there is still some self-effacing Millennial sarcasm here:

Dev: What? What is going on right now? We can’t have dinner with them again. I’m not trying to hang out with Peter Chang on the regs.

Brian: No, I just wanted to do one dinner. I don’t want, like, a serious relationship with my father.

I was really knocked back by this episode of Master of None for how much it synced up with my own experiences with my parents, and for that reason I was both excited—and trepidatious—about watching Tigertail. Yang’s directorial debut, which started streaming on Netflix in April, basically takes the core idea of “Parents” and expands it to a 91-minute feature film. And the impressive thing the film does, and how it expands the conversation started in “Parents” with an admission like this …    [FULL  STORY]