Big Little Man ― In Search of My Asian Self

Shame, Alex Tizon tells us, is universal—his own happened to be about race. To counteract the steady diet of American television and movies that taught Tizon to be ashamed of his face, his skin color, his height, he turned outward. (“I had to educate myself on my own worth. It was a sloppy, piecemeal education, but I had to do it because no one else was going to do it for me.”) Tizon illuminates historical figures who had and still have no place in American history books or classrooms; he delivers the unheard stories of young Asian men today; and he tracks the rise of powerful, dynamic Asian-American men like Yahoo! cofounder Jerry Yang, actor Ken Watanabe, and NBA star Jeremy Lin. As funny as it is fierce, Big Little Man interweaves memoir and social criticism in a deeply original, taboo-bending investigation of Asian-American masculinity, with “its multitude of inheritances and prospects” (Minneapolis Star Tribune).

Included in this new edition of Big Little Man is Alex Tizon’s “My Family’s Slave.” Published posthumously in the Atlantic only weeks after Tizon’s death in 2017, the piece is a provocative, haunting, and ultimately redemptive coda.