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. Alex Tizon Read Quote
My siblings and I kept everything to ourselves, and rather than blowing up in an instant, my family broke apart slowly. Alex Tizon Read Quote
When I was 15, Dad left the family for good. I didn’t want to believe it at the time, but the fact was that he deserted us kids and abandoned Mom after 25 years of marriage. Alex Tizon Read Quote
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.’ Alex Tizon Read Quote
Admitting the truth would have meant exposing us all. We spent our first decade in the country learning the ways of the new land and trying to fit in. Having a slave did not fit. Having a slave gave me grave doubts about what kind of people we were, what kind of place we came from. Alex Tizon Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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. Alex Tizon Read Quote
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. Alex Tizon Read Quote
The idea that humanity is divided into these separate and distinct and disparate groups with clear boundaries has been disproven by science a long time ago, decades ago. Humanity really is more of a continuum, and that people belong on the same continuum and there are no clear breaks between these so-called races. Alex Tizon Read Quote
I think there has been a long-running notion in the West that Asia was a continent of people that were really conquerable. That people from Asia were weak, they were small in all ways – including physically small, geopolitically small, economically small – all of which are changing, of course. Alex Tizon Read Quote
