Big Little Man
In Search of My Asian Self
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“Alex Tizon fearlessly penetrates the core of not just what it means to be male and Asian in America, but what it means to be human anywhere.”—Cheryl Strayed, New York Times bestselling author
Shame, Alex Tizon tells us, is universal—his own happened to be about race. To counteract the steady diet of American television and movies that taught Tizon to be ashamed of his face, his skin color, his height, he turned outward. (“I had to educate myself on my own worth. It was a sloppy, piecemeal education, but I had to do it because no one else was going to do it for me.”) Tizon illuminates his youthful search for Asian men who had no place in his American history books or classrooms. And he tracks what he experienced as seismic change: the rise of powerful, dynamic Asian men like Yahoo! cofounder Jerry Yang, actor Ken Watanabe, and NBA starter Jeremy Lin. Included in this new edition of Big Little Man is Alex Tizon’s “My Family’s Slave”—2017’s best-read digital article. Published only weeks after Tizon’s death in 2017, it delivers a provocative, haunting, and ultimately redemptive coda.
“A ruthlessly honest personal story and a devastating critique of contemporary American culture.”—The Seattle Times
“Part candid memoir, part incisive cultural study, Big Little Man addresses—and explodes—the stereotypes of Asian manhood. Alex Tizon writes with acumen and courage, and the result is a book at once illuminating and, yes, liberating.”—Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl
“This personal narrative of self-education and growth will engage any reader captivated by the sources of American, and Asian-American, manhood—its multitude of inheritances and prospects.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this investigation into Asian masculinity, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Tizon offers a well-paced, engaging combo of history, memoir, and social analysis. Beginning with a pilgrimage to Cebu in the Philippines, where the conquering European explorer Magellan was killed by the Mactanese, Tizon recounts his troubled past growing up in an America that belittled and erased the complexities of his Asian manhood, and the effect it had on his psyche and his immigrant family ("My parents' adulation of all things white and Western... was the engine of their self-annihilation"). He interweaves stories of Asian men forgotten or ignored by history, such as Zheng He, a 15th-century Chinese admiral who sailed around the world without the bloodlust of the Europeans who came after, as well as examinations of American attitudes toward Asian men as seen in films such as Harold and Kumar. Passages on self-imposed isolation and attempts to hide or mock his Asianness are visceral and painful. Tizon's skill as a feature reporter serves the book well, producing a narrative that moves fluidly between subjects, settings, and gazes.
