Alex Tizon Quotes

Alex Tizon was a Filipino-American journalist and author. He wrote extensively on topics such as immigration, race, and social justice. Tizon's works included memoirs, investigative journalism, and personal essays that shed light on the experiences of marginalized communities. His writings often explored complex issues with compassion and nuance, provoking thoughtful discussions and raising awareness of social inequalities. Tizon's contributions to journalism and literature continue to resonate, as his works inspire readers to reflect on the world around them and advocate for a more inclusive society.

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

American pop culture is perpetually in adolescent mode. The notions of what it takes to be a man, as depicted in pop culture, are very superficial, one-dimensional, and adolescent.

I do remember instances where girls would just fawn over me because they liked that I was different - exotic - to them. And they didn't use the word 'Asian' at the time. All of the aspects that make me Asian, they liked.

To our American neighbors, we were model immigrants, a poster family. They told us so. My father had a law degree, my mother was on her way to becoming a doctor, and my siblings and I got good grades and always said 'please' and 'thank you.'

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

Wen wu contradicts the very American notion of John Wayne being the ideal of manhood. In the wen wu way of thinking, it's much more important to restrain rather than exert yourself through brute power.

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.

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.

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

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

One of the things I love about wen wu is its encouragement of developing the spiritual and intellectual aspects of the self that are actually more important than the development of the body and the capacity to commit violence - which is how much of Western pop culture defines a man.

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.