Alex Tizon

Shame is hard to confront. Even if you know it's baseless, it's still hard to come face-to-face with.

— Alex Tizon

When I was 15, Dad left the family for good. I didn't want to believe it at the time, but the fact…

— Alex Tizon

It wasn't a conscious decision to search for my Asian self; it was an urgency born out of an emptiness I was…

— Alex Tizon

I do remember instances where girls would just fawn over me because they liked that I was different - exotic - to…

— Alex Tizon

I think there has been a long-running notion in the West that Asia was a continent of people that were really conquerable.…

— Alex Tizon

I didn't go into journalism thinking it would solidify my identity. I did it because I needed to make a living, and…

— Alex Tizon

I first visited the Philippines when I was 29. I thought I would feel at home there, but I felt more out…

— Alex Tizon

My brother Arthur was born in 1951. I came next, followed by three more siblings in rapid succession.

— Alex Tizon

The stories I work on, especially for any length of time, do tend to become personal to me.

— Alex Tizon

Most of us, when imagining an All-American, wouldn't picture a man who looked like me. Not even I would.

— Alex Tizon

We all, to some degree, absorb the mythologies around us, our vision refracted by the prisms of our particular time and place.

— Alex Tizon

The thing about stereotypes as we all know, there is often truth in them, but it's almost always a partial truth.

— Alex Tizon

My grandparents bowed to the Americans and sought to learn from them. My parents sought to be them.

— Alex Tizon

“We could debate whether movies reflect or create the reality. It's clear to me they do both.”

— alex tizon

You are validating someone's life by telling their story. Even if it's a sad one.

— Alex Tizon

I guess you could say I've written a lot about one thing as a journalist. But I hardly ever saw it as…

— Alex Tizon

One of the things I love about wen wu is its encouragement of developing the spiritual and intellectual aspects of the self…

— Alex Tizon

American pop culture is perpetually in adolescent mode. The notions of what it takes to be a man, as depicted in pop…

— Alex Tizon

When depicting Asian people in movies, books, and television or as historical figures, it's more important to humanize them and give them…

— Alex Tizon

The idea that humanity is divided into these separate and distinct and disparate groups with clear boundaries has been disproven by science…

— Alex Tizon

Admitting the truth would have meant exposing us all. We spent our first decade in the country learning the ways of the…

— Alex Tizon

In the America that I grew up in, men of Asia placed last in the hierarchy of manhood. They were invisible in…

— Alex Tizon

To our American neighbors, we were model immigrants, a poster family. They told us so. My father had a law degree, my…

— Alex Tizon

Television and movies were our biggest teachers. When we came to the United States, the Vietnam War was just ratcheting up. And…

— Alex Tizon

“First was the abandonment of our native language and our unquestioned embrace of English, even though for my parents that abandonment meant…

— Alex Tizon

My siblings and I kept everything to ourselves, and rather than blowing up in an instant, my family broke apart slowly.

— Alex Tizon

Messages hidden in the thickets of a story are the ones that burrow deepest because most of us don't realize that any…

— Alex Tizon

Wen wu contradicts the very American notion of John Wayne being the ideal of manhood. In the wen wu way of thinking,…

— Alex Tizon