Alex Tizon Quotes

Possessing a language meant possessing the world expressed in its words. Dispossessing it meant nothing less than the loss of a world and the beginning of bewilderment forever. "Language is the only homeland," said poet Czeslaw Milosz. My parents left the world that created them and now would be beginners for the rest of their lives, mumblers searching for the right word, the proper phrase that approximated what they felt inside. I wonder at the eloquence that must have lived inside them that never found a way out.

It's one of the beautiful lies of the American Dream: that you can become anything, do anything, accomplish anything, if you want it badly enough and are willing to work for it. Limits are inventions of the timid mind. You've got to believe. All things are possible through properly channeled effort: work, work, work; harder, faster, more! ...I believed it all, drank the elixir to the last drop and licked my lips for residue. I put in the time, learned to read and write and speak more capably than my friends and neighbors, followed the rules, did my homework, memorized the tics and slangs and idiosyncrasies of winners and heroes, but I could never be quite as American as they. The lie is only a lie if you fail, and I most certainly did.

When relatives asked, "How is your life in America?" my father would answer, Nandito pa rin kami. We're still here.

[...] So large was the universe of things called Oriental: roots, rugs, religions, noodles, hairstyles, hordes, healing arts, herbs and spices, fabrics, medicines, modes of war, types of astronomy, spheres of the globe, schools of philosophical thought, and salads. It applied to me, women, gum, dances, eyes, body types, chicken dishes, societies, civilizations, styles of diplomacy, codes of behaviour, fighting arts, sexual proclivities, and a particular kind of mind. Apparently, the Orient produced people with a singular way of thinking. There was no way, wrote Jack London, for a Westerner to plumb the Oriental mind - it was cut from different cloth, functioned in an alien way.

The only American soldier convicted in the [My Lai Massacre in Vietnam], Lieutenant William Calley, served three months under house arrest. What the massacre drove home to me was that Oriental life was not terribly valuable. You could extinguish hundreds of Orientals - unarmed villagers, farmers, women, toddlers, infants - and the penalty would be napping and watching television in your apartment for twelve weeks.

Having met other immigrants like myself in America, I can say that a great number of us came to our same "Oriental" identity in a similar fashion. We arrived in the United States as Japanese or Korean or Filipino, but over time we became Orientals.

Young people who would have had no natural ties in Asia found themselves bound together in America, and more so with succeeding generations. The farther out in time from the point of arrival, the more Asian they became. It mirrored what happened to Africans brought to America as slaves. "We may have all come on different ships," Martin Luther King Jr. said, "but we're in the same boat now.

I tried on various uniforms of manhood in my teens and twenties. [...] I slipped in and out of these uniforms like someone in a fitting room at Macy's trying on suits, except I'd walk around in them for a few months or years. The only suits I avoided were Asian ones. I had already concluded that being Asian did not play in one's favour as a man, not in this land of giants.

Very few things hurt my young ego more than an Asian female openly shaming me for my Asian-ness. If she could not accept me, who could? If even Asian women saw the men of their own blood as less than other men, what was the use in arguing otherwise?

Our common status made talk easier. [...] She knew the paradox of being stared at and not seen. She knew what it felt like to walk out of a movie theater feeling ashamed or erased.

A month before the Treasure Fleet's maiden voyage, at the age of thirty-four, Zheng He commissioned an epitaph inscribed on a stone pillar over his father's grave in Yunnan province. He worshiped his father, who had died in battle. The epitaph, one of only three known testimonials from the admiral, described his father's character: 'He was content as an ordinary commoner, but he was brave and decisive in his ordinary life. There was no one in this community who did not look up to him. When he encountered the unfortunate, including widows, orphans, and others with no one to rely on, he routinely offered protection and aid. He cherished the bestowal of extraordinary favours. By nature, he was fond of doing good.' This revelation of a softer version of manhood as the ideal in much of Asia provided another piece of the answer to the question of how Westerners came to perceive Asians as less masculine.

Just this year, as I was sitting in dining hall at UO, a white student at the next table complained about the "invasion" of Asians on campus. Only outsiders invade.

I recalled an economics professor in Fujian who spoke to me of China's inevitable return to the top of the world order. It was just a matter of time. "I have teapots older than your country," the professor said, sipping his tea. "And they're /very/ sturdy teapots.

Most of us inherit one shame or another. [...] I met a guy named Mike during my travels in Alaska. We've stayed in touch. He's blond and blue-eyed, and does not fit comfortably in most chairs and beds because he's six foot nine. He's often embarrassed by his height and sometimes tells people he's six foot eight. He stoops on purpose. Once, while waiting to be seated at a restaurant, he and I stood in front of a full-length mirror. His reflection wasn't all there. His head was cut off. There were so many ways to be invisible.

At that moment, it just seemed as if his face was perfect. Innocent and strong. And - why not? - exotic, too, bu exotic in the sense of being distinct from most of the other faces we saw every day. A face I would design if I could design a face for the son I was never going to have. It was an Asian face. Not unlike the one I used to see in the mirror so many decades ago, the one I was so ashamed of for its distinctive contours. The one I spent years trying to alter with clothespins and duct tape.

In December 2008 [Manny Pacquiao] defied the odds and pummeled the celebrated American boxer Oscar De Le Hoya into submission and permanent retirement. An on-air exchange by the stunned HBO announcing team: "Pacquiao is the most exciting little fighter in the world." "Little?! He looks big tonight!" "/Big/ little fighter in the world.

We could debate whether movies reflect or create the reality. It's clear to me they do both.

First was the abandonment of our native language and our unquestioned embrace of English, even though for my parents that abandonment meant cutting themselves off from a fluency they would never have again. Possessing a language meant possessing the world expressed in its words. Dispossessing it meant nothing less than the loss of a world and the beginning of bewilderment forever. “Language is the only homeland,” said poet Czeslaw Milosz. My parents left the world that created them and now would be beginners for the rest of their lives, mumblers searching for the right word, the proper phrase that approximated what they felt inside. I wonder at the eloquence that must have lived inside them that never found a way out. How much was missed on all sides.