Pin-Jui and Angela’s scenes work in conversation with one another: After a montage of the older Pin-Jui doing his dishes alone, Angela is shown doing the same thing—both are lonely and almost paralyzed by how they’ve come to be on their own. After a flashback showing Angela’s marriage falling apart, the young Pin-Jui is depicted finding New York harsher than he thought it would be. When Pin-Jui finally opens up as the two have tea, Yang captures them sitting side by side, with artwork behind them featuring the Chinese character for the word “and.” Pin-Jui and Angela, the film makes clear, are more similar in their heartbreaks and solitude than either of them realizes.

Television shows and films about the immigrant experience often fixate on the way the older generation misunderstands or expects too much of the quicker-to-assimilate younger one. But in Tigertail, Yang shows how little the child can comprehend the parent: Angela has only ever understood her father to be reclusive and intimidating. She has no idea of his charismatic youth, of his disillusionment once stateside, or of his feeling permanently untethered as an immigrant. Angela’s concept of home will always be different from Pin-Jui’s, and that separation, Tigertail posits, isolates them both, creating an intergenerational loneliness that’s hard to mend.

I watched Tigertail for the first time at the end of February, alone inside a screening room at Netflix’s offices in Los Angeles. At the time, I’d interpreted Tigertail as a delicate portrait of an aging immigrant and dwelled on the images of Tzi Ma’s older Pin-Jui eating dinner alone in his apartment. But the second time I watched it, in the form of an online screener at the end of March, things had obviously changed: I was isolated from my family, my family from me. This time around, I saw the film differently: The scenes of Pin-Jui in seclusion felt particularly painful to watch, whereas his flashbacks felt oddly satisfying—I felt nostalgic for an era I’d never known. Pin-Jui’s younger, ebullient years spent dining and dashing, dating and dancing were freshly affecting; the scenes were so appealing, it’s no wonder Pin-Jui couldn’t help but be captivated by such memories.

It’s also why, when Tigertail fast-forwards to Pin-Jui’s muted present day, the film seems to almost collapse under the weight of his loneliness and inability to relate. His conversations with Angela can come off stilted, the pressure of their troubled relationship stopping him from responding to her pleas. And by focusing heavily on Pin-Jui’s flashbacks, the film doesn’t give Angela’s modern-day arc much room to breathe. Her husband, played by The Edge of Seventeen’s Hayden Szeto, shows up without speaking a single line of dialogue. In the flashbacks, Angela’s mother plays a significant role, but the adult Angela has just one scene with her, leaving their relationship unexplored. Angela’s narrative comes off as an afterthought compared to Pin-Jui’s potent history.