When we first meet 16-year-old Hayoung (Ji-Young Yoo), she’s wandering around the neatly-appointed furnishings of a clearly upper-class home. She finds the bathroom, sits in the bathtub, stretches out. But as much as she seems at ease with making herself at home here, this house isn’t hers. As we glean from the next scene, in which she’s lounging in a high-ceilinged living room just on the periphery of the action, she’s merely accompanying her father (Jun-ho Jeong) on a job. He’s a carpet salesman, and he’s there to make a pitch to the home’s owner, going out of his way to compliment her, her home, and her color selection to close the sale. In reality, Hayoung is squeezed with her family in a tiny apartment. Her mother (Abin Andrews) teaches piano, but that venture isn’t paying the bills. Hayoung shares a bed with her younger sister Ara (Erin Choi). Her Appa, meanwhile, hasn’t lived with them in a while.
Hayoung is a Los Angeles-born Korean American, but her family deeply feels the pressures to fit in, to be successful. But while a lot of American media likes to stick Asian characters firmly into stereotypical model minority roles, Smoking Tigers dissects exactly what that means, and the shame and isolation that accompanies it, without involving any white perspectives. It’s the feature film debut of writer and director So Young Shelly Yo, who won the AT&T Presents: Untold Stories award at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival. The competition, intended to grant funding to filmmakers from underrepresented groups to help them tell their stories, awarded Yo’s pitch a million dollars and a Tribeca premiere. Big picture, Smoking Tigers touches on a lot of themes and story beats familiar to both coming-of-age and immigrant tales. But it is so rooted in the specificity of Korean culture, and so assured in its perspective on the pressures of family, friendships, education, and economic status on a Korean American teenage girl, that it’s remarkable that such a confident movie stemmed from a first time filmmaker.
It’s clear after the aforementioned opening sequence that Hayoung and her family have been having some trouble (Appa drops her off at the apartment, telling her that if she tells Ara what a good time she had maybe next time she’ll accompany them too), but the real conflict kicks into gear when Hayoung and her mother meet with a school counselor. That Hayoung’s grades are good—possibly even better than the average American teenager—aren’t in question. But when the counselor asks Hayoung what her college plans are, and Hayoung answers with “UCLA,” the counselor tells her to aim higher. When Hayoung then counters with “Stanford,” the counselor responds in the affirmative—then tells her that she’ll need to improve her grades a lot. She recommends that her mother send her to an academy geared toward Korean Americans and improving their test scores—which her mother, who counts so much Hayoung’s success, does, despite the $3000 price tag that they clearly can’t afford.
But while Hayoung makes some friends at this new school—Rose (Erin Yoo), a classmate she lends a pencil to and later helps cheat on her tests, and Joon (Phinehas Yoon), a boy she develops a crush on—their upper-class status begins to uncork all of her bottled-up shame. These relationships with her peers aren’t as thoroughly-developed as other aspects of the movie, and yet the intention of their placement in the film is clear. When Rose asks Hayoung where she lives, she lies, giving her the address of a large, renovated home that is currently on the market. Hayoung even breaks into the home at night, wandering in and out of rooms the way she did in the home in the opening scene, imagining what her and her family’s life might be like there, her parents happy and no longer separated. Along with the recurring bathtub motif, Yo plays a lot with reflections throughout the movie—in one scene, for instance, she shoots Hayoung and Ara’s reflections in a swimming pool as they have a conversation—and in doing so effectively illustrates Hayoung’s desires without words, the ways she is always searching for something or someone to be reflected back at her. One afternoon, Hayuong and Ara accompany their mother to a piano lesson, waiting in the backyard until she is finished. As they begin to leave, Hayoung watches the family of four sit down to dinner through the window, her reflection and theirs almost seeming to merge. That used to be her family, and that’s something she still wants, as she is, at the outset at least, more forgiving of her absent father than her mother and Ara.
Yo makes the most of the limited spaces her film centers around in other ways as well. When Hayoung attends a party at Joon’s house, she’s mesmerized by the pinpricks of light created by a projector to set the scene, granting this glimpse into how the other half lives an almost magical quality. This is contrasted with the space her father is living and working out of, a dingy warehouse piled high with rolled-up carpets.
Eventually, the conflicts between family expectations and personal desire come to a head, although in Smoking Tigers those conflicts—while they mean everything to Hayoung, who is stuck trying to please everyone and ultimately only alienating herself further—are pretty low-stakes. But Yo proves herself a master at showing not telling; for instance, we never explicitly learn the full story of why Appa no longer lives at home, and why he’s seemingly always so busy he can’t even pick up Hayoung from school on time, but we can glean from the series of images Yo presents what may be going on. And she imbues the film with so many touches unique to Korean culture; for instance, Hayoung frequently goes to a Korean bathhouse with her mother, and the mirror scenes set there at the start and conclusion of the film demonstrate a turning point in their relationship with each other. Furthermore, the performances throughout feel natural and grounded in reality, especially the ones between parents and children. Yo’s script sketches out her characters so that even those with minuscule screen-time have complex motivations. Parents are more than blindly driving for their children’s success, and for the children, the pressures of attaining and retaining the American dream manifest themselves in more ways than just getting great grades. Smoking Tigers is a warm and thoughtful film that was absolutely deserving of being picked up by Tribeca, and is absolutely deserving of your time.
Smoking Tigers had its world premiere at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival on June 9. Runtime: 85 minutes.
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