Even from the trailer alone, so many people have asked about it. I might have even had a draft at that point. Was there anything in writing that episode that made you want to explore these themes further? Copyright © 2020 HuffPost.com, Inc. "HuffPost" is a registered trademark of HuffPost.com, Inc. All rights reserved. I was like, can they be writing letters? That was the song. That just seems fake. I got to go do voiceover for a movie directed by my son. I wanted to find a song that symbolized where Pin-Jui was in his life at a time, which is a feeling of youth and passion and energy, which is kind of the energy that song, and then at the same time, a juxtaposition of Eastern and Western influences. But I didn't necessarily want that either. : Made in America level of detail. The purpose of the trip wasn't research. Because he gets to finally display some of what we've seen in his past. “Tigertail” streams on Netflix on April 10. Alan Yang is a producer and writer, known for Parks and Recreation (2009), Master of None (2015) and Forever (2018). Our editor Daniel Haworth called me as soon as he cut it in and said, "You know I don't speak Mandarin but I just feel like this is working." As far as the experience personally with my dad, I couldn't really get a read on it. He didn't mind it when I was giving him voice notes, apparently. It just always felt right. It's such an accurate depiction of the way older people communicate online, and Tzi Ma's performance is so wonderful. What was the research process like in terms of talking to your family? Were you already working on Tigertail when you and Aziz Ansari were writing that episode? Yang: That's one of my favorite parts of the movie, and that's the part that always gets me is the final montage. “It had been 25 years since ‘The Joy Luck Club’ and it was before ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ and before ‘The Farewell,’” Yang said. He wasn't making a deep-dive investigative documentary on his lineage. He gets to play that and he gets to play that sort of energy. And it is his latest attempt to push forward conversations about Asian representation in Hollywood. Tigertail can easily be described as sweeping, a visually beautiful and tonally somber piece that moves between countries and time periods even in its relatively short running time. I knew I wanted the feeling of someone a little bit omniscient and detached, but also a little bit haunting for these voiceover pieces. The final form we ended on, in my opinion, and of course, it's all subjective, I think we have the feeling of kind of an epic story and a grand scale and a scope because, obviously, it traverses generations and continents. All of that started working its way into the movie more. And I remember giving her my headset because there were limited headsets. It's a 90 some-odd minute movie with, frankly, a lot of creative license. I didn't take a recorder out and make it really scary and official. I watched it, and was like, it's perfect. Tzi was the ultimate choice for this role because he's put in the work, he has the experience, he has the chops, and he's getting to play a lead.