27 Quotes by alex tizon

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.