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" 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

Evil

War

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When depicting Asian people in movies, books, and television or as historical figures, it's more important to humanize them and give them all of the dimensions of humanity, and that includes sexuality. Ascribe the human the full range of human qualities. "

" 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. "

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

Alex Tizon

Man

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

Alex Tizon

Different

Time

" I didn't go into journalism thinking it would solidify my identity. I did it because I needed to make a living, and I was proficient in writing. But in becoming a journalist, I learned about other people who felt like they were on the edges of American mainstream life. "

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

Alex Tizon

Born

Decision

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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