Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Big Little Man In Search of My Asian Self by Alex Tizon Alex Tizon is an American journalist and professor, and the author of "Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self. god bless the ded September 30, 2014 One of the hardest jobs a journalist will ever do is interview someone who’s just experienced a tragedy. I hated doing it but I did it anyway. In this essay, I explain why. I talk about my interviews with Richard Zapata, who’s daughter Mia poker online was raped and murdered in Seattle in the 1990s. The case went unsolved for ten years, and I interviewed Richard several times during that period. The essay is a chapter in a new book, edited by Peter Laufer, called Interviewing: The Oregon Method. Read the essay here. Big Little Man. “Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Alex Tizon offers a well-paced, engaging combo of history, memoir, and social analysis… producing a narrative that moves fluidly between subjects, settings, and gazes.” — Publisher’s Weekly. “This hybrid memoir-history, written compellingly by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and professor Alex Tizon, portrays his life in deeply felt, extensively researched, and question-filled prose.” — Booklist. “Alex Tizon’s candid journey into the shifting and multiplying definitions of manliness and the masculine ideal is revelatory and sobering.” — Library Journal. “Big Little Man bridges geographical, temporal and cultural boundaries in a seamless narrative about what it means to be not just an Asian American male, but a man in every sense of the word.” — Hyphen Magazine. A part of me felt unfastened and vaguely put off by the idea that stabbing someone in the face and cutting up his body amounted to proof of manhood. At the very least, whatever gloating I could muster felt temporary and fragile, like a house of cards on a windy beach. Maybe all gloating is that delicate. Something or someone always comes along and knocks it all down. In any event, I came away from my Mactan adventure with a sense that my floating notions of what made men men needed other anchors. And I became aware of the possibility that I had succumbed to an insidious kind of racial envy, that my secret quest was simply an attempt to assuage a feeling of inferiority that was mine alone. Maybe it was not an Asian manhood thing; maybe it was just a me thing. This had been forming for a long time. I had begun the investigation long before I realized it was an investigation. It was never very organized or even clear-hearted in its motivations. It felt as much a groping in the dark as an urge to create something new. What I did not know at the time was that I was trying to piece together a three-dimensional puzzle without a picture of what it should look like. a conversation with Alex Tizon. Where did the title, Big Little Man , come from, and to whom does it refer? The simplest answer is it refers to me. I’m the big little man in the title. The book is essentially a memoir, about my quest to assuage this racial shame that, in a sense, I inherited from my father, and which he inherited from his father. My family immigrated from the Philippines to the United States when I was four. It’s the story of my struggle as an Asian boy trying to figure how to be an Asian man. In telling my story, I end up telling pieces of the stories of many other Asian males in the West. There’s a shared experience. We all at some point encountered—and continue to encounter—the deep-rooted Western notion, perpetuated by entertainment media, that Asians are at the bottom of the food chain, the weakest, the smallest, the least masculine of men. The book is about my climb up from the bottom, and what I end up recounting is both an interior and exterior journey. Many other Asian men are on the same climb. So, in a sense, Big Little Man also refers to the changing status of the Asian male in the West. Changing status? What do you mean by that? You could say we’re on the rise. In what way? In every way: socially, professionally, demographically, geopolitically, even physically. That’s a sweeping statement. Can you speak for all Asian men? It’s a ridiculously big statement. Also a moot point, which I’ll explain later. And, no, I can’t speak for all Asian men. It’s not what I’m trying to do. In exploring the grand themes of the book, the truest story I could tell was my own. And the most I could do in the book was talk about certain themes that ran through my life, themes that, I would discover, run through the lives of many males whose lineages trace back to China, Japan, the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and so on. What Martin Luther King Jr. said about blacks in America who descend from slaves is also true of Asians who immigrate here: “We came on different ships but we’re all in the same boat now.” To the extent that Asians in the West share a particular and common set of challenges, I can say that there is such a thing as an “Asian male experience.” None of us experiences it exactly the same way, of course. I can see how this book might be relevant to Asian readers. Is that your target audience? “Target audience” sounds like a business term, and I’m the least business-minded person you’ll ever meet. I don’t think I had a target in mind. I mean, it would be gratifying if Asians and Asian Americans found something they could identify with. But I think that people of all backgrounds, of every color and nationality and persuasion, male and female – can connect with the deepest undercurrents of the book, which have to do with universal human themes: exile and belonging, shame and redemption, the need for purpose, the search for love. You devote two chapters to the experience of Asian women in the West. Why did you consider it important to address this topic? Because I have six sisters. Because I was essentially raised by two Filipino women, whom I consider my two “mothers.” Because I have two daughters, and lots of nieces whom I adore. My own experience as an Asian male in the West can’t be separated from the experience of the Asian females around me. I see the good and bad of their lives up close. They face their own struggles. And I talk very specifically about those struggles. We’re bonded by our common backstories. But I also talk candidly about how our experiential paths diverge, and how – at least in one area: love, sex and mating – the Asian male experience in the West differs radically from that of the Asian female. In a nutshell, there’s a widely accepted notion that Asian women are desirable and Asian men are not. You include a chapter on physical size. Is this a factor? Yes, I believe it is. Very short men generally have a harder time in the courtship scene, and in the working world, although you can find exceptions everywhere. People from poor and developing countries all over the world tend to be smaller and shorter than those from wealthier, developed countries. This is true of immigrants from Latin America, central and southern Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Europe. But the idea of shortness in the Western imagination seems much more associated with Asians. I was as interested in the perception of smallness – its origins in history and pop culture – as much as the reality. You say “the perception of smallness” as if it were not true. Are you implying that Asians are not on average smaller and shorter than whites and blacks? There’s truth to the perception, but it’s a partial truth. Most of the first waves of Asian immigrants to the United States came from South and Southeast Asia, and they were shorter on average than white Americans. Famine and war contributed to their shorter height. But people of north, central and west Asia were taller than their southern neighbors, and in some cases comparable in physical size to Europeans. Today, the average height – because of diet, healthcare and so on – in the most developed Asian nations is shooting up. Researchers say, for example, that in one or two generations, the average height of Japanese could equal that of Americans. The same thing is happening in South Korea and Taiwan and in the modernized areas of China. The human body is elastic. Realities are changing, and perceptions will too. There’s a chapter on penis size. Why did you feel it necessary to address this? And how did your wife feel about it? My wife thought it was extraneous and a little puerile. She didn’t think it was necessary, for example, to mention how far I could ejaculate as a 14- year-old. She’s such a dignified person, a private person. Sharing intimate details, like I do in parts of this book, is not her style, and it’s not usually mine either. The chapter, I think, corroborated for her what she and a lot of women believe – that the whole penis-size thing is much more a male concern than a female one. She’s right. In my defense, I was more interested in exploring what the penis represents in the various mythologies about race.