Filipino - Author | October 30, 1959 - March 23, 2017
Television and movies were our biggest teachers. When we came to the United States, the Vietnam War was just ratcheting up. And so the Asian faces that I saw on the news, they were the face of the enemy. Asian men, particularly, were either small, ineffective, or they were evil. And those messages were deeply, deeply embedded in me for many years.
Alex Tizon
MenWarMeEvilSmallFace
I think there has been a long-running notion in the West that Asia was a continent of people that were really conquerable. That people from Asia were weak, they were small in all ways - including physically small, geopolitically small, economically small - all of which are changing, of course.
PeopleSmallThinkWeakChanging
I first visited the Philippines when I was 29. I thought I would feel at home there, but I felt more out of place than I did in the U.S. I discovered I was more American than Filipino. It was shattering because I never felt quite at home in the U.S., either.
HomeThoughtAmericanFeelPlace
You are validating someone's life by telling their story. Even if it's a sad one.
LifeSadStorySomeoneYouEven
My grandparents bowed to the Americans and sought to learn from them. My parents sought to be them.
ParentsLearnGrandparentsThem
The stories I work on, especially for any length of time, do tend to become personal to me.
WorkTimeMePersonalBecomeLength
We all, to some degree, absorb the mythologies around us, our vision refracted by the prisms of our particular time and place.
VisionTimePlaceDegreeUsSome
Messages hidden in the thickets of a story are the ones that burrow deepest because most of us don't realize that any burrowing is going on at all.
StoryHiddenRealizeDeepestGoing
I guess you could say I've written a lot about one thing as a journalist. But I hardly ever saw it as exclusively about race. To my mind, it was more about telling stories of people who existed outside the mainstream's field of vision. Invisible people.
VisionPeopleMindYouSayRace
Shame is hard to confront. Even if you know it's baseless, it's still hard to come face-to-face with.
YouKnowShameHardFace-To-Face
In the America that I grew up in, men of Asia placed last in the hierarchy of manhood. They were invisible in the high-testosterone arenas of politics, big business, and sports. On television and in the movies, they were worse than invisible. They were embarrassing. We were embarrassing.
BusinessSportsMenPoliticsAmerica
Most of us, when imagining an All-American, wouldn't picture a man who looked like me. Not even I would.
ManMePictureUsWouldEven
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