Smoking Tigers demonstrates what it is like to always feel caught in the middle and never quite moving forward in life. The young Korean American at the heart of So Young Shelly Yo‘s feature debut lives a rather undecided existence. Will she get into a good college? Will her parents get back together? Will she ever find love? Arguably, nothing substantial amounts from the protagonist’s quiet but frustrating odyssey. Yet this isn’t a story about big changes, grand gestures, or even happy endings. Just the opposite, Smoking Tigers aims to find solace in hardship.
Ha-young (Ji-young Yoo) has no idea what she wants to do in life. And why should she? She’s still in high school. However, uncertainty is unacceptable to Ha-young’s mother, Rose (Abin Andrews), who wants her daughter to aim higher than a state school like UCLA. Hence Ha-young’s enrollment at a college prep course (hagwon) for young Koreans. The choice is, of course, not her own, but Ha-young has become accustomed to her mother’s guilt trips.
Smoking Tigers packs a familiar story for people with immigrant parents. The expectations can be overwhelming and detrimental for the child, but their distress is overlooked because parents always claim to know what’s best. Ha-young certainly can’t deny her mother’s biddings; Rose parades her personal sacrifices like a battle scar, thus making arguments futile. As cliché as Ha-young’s most tangible trouble is, though, So Young Shelly Yo handles it realistically. Ha-young pushes back as much as she can, yet ultimately she acquiesces due to her implicit obedience.
Although set in early 2000s SoCal, the warm and fun setting is weighed down by Ha-young’s bleak homelife. When she’s not struggling to fit in with the other students at hagwon, Ha-young bounces back and forth between her divorced parents. She is routinely the mediator as well as the messenger. Based on early interactions, it would appear that Ha-young and her little sister’s (Erin Choi) father (Jun-ho Jeong) is the easier parent to deal with; he is cheerful, whereas his ex is stone-faced. Ha-young eventually learns her father’s upbeat attitude is just a feature of his traveling salesman lifestyle. He is always hustling and trying to sell the concept of happiness, even to his own daughter.
Ha-young’s life is an uncanny reflection of the second-gen kids who struggle to fit in at school and home. For her, assimilation is always a mixed blessing; the ability to adapt and fit in makes socializing easier, but being too Americanized — answering in English rather than Korean, not prioritizing academic ambitions, standing up for herself — is frowned upon at home. Rose herself makes her daughter feel torn between the two sides of her culture, thus alienating Ha-young. So Ha-young is forever stuck in the in-betweens.
While replete with instinctive performances and realistic exchanges, Smoking Tigers is deliberately paced and, by most storytelling standards, too open-ended. Nevertheless, even when the film seems like it doesn’t accomplish anything right now, it delivers a considerable character study that will benefit a lot of viewers in the long term.
Smoking Tigers had its world premiere at Tribeca 2023.
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