TGIF Feature: 'Tigertail' saga launches today on Netflix

 Kunjue Li, left, and Hong-Chi Lee play a reluctant couple in the immigrant story 'Tigertail.'

Most Hollywood movies about immigrants coming to the United States have newcomers cming from the East, whether it be Sweden, Ireland, Italy or Africa. Tigertail is tone of the few to tell about the journey across the Pacific Ocean of immigrants coming from the West -- specifically Taiwan.

Written by Alan Yang, who is better known for his work on comedies like Parks & Recreation, The Good Place and Master of None, tells a tale loosely based on his own family. The film, which takes place over the timespan of generations, is streaming on Netflix starting today, Friday, April 10.

Yang conceived the project before the 2018 success of Crazy Rich Asians that opened the doors for more Asian-themed subjects. But like that groundbreaking movie, it has an all-Asian cast and much of the movie is spoken in Taiwanese and Mandarin.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Yang expounds on the personal nature of his movie that means so much to him:

The movie really is focused on a character [Pin-Jui] inspired by my dad who grew up in Taiwan, and grew up in pretty extreme poverty, and then worked in a factory and had to make a lot of hard choices before deciding to come to America in search for a better life. And it examines his relationship with a series of women in his life, from a girlfriend to the woman who ends up becoming his wife to his daughter, and it speaks to the regret that immigrants experience when they come to a new country. And it speaks to the difficulty all of us have at being honest and communicating and expressing our vulnerabilities, and in this specific case, his relationship with his daughter.

So it really is, in some ways, also the capsulation of my grappling with my own heritage and coming to terms with it in my personal life. Because I grew up in an area of California without a lot of other Asian people, and I never felt particularly Asian and I wanted to fit in and hang out with the other kids and do anything I could to be the same as opposed to different. But as I became a writer and director and producer and all these things, and had the opportunity to make my own shows and movies, I realized that the most powerful thing you have as a filmmaker is your point of view. And so denying that part of yourself is almost like chopping off one of your arms. It really became integral to my point of view and such a huge part of making this movie.