Alex Tizon

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist's memoir, in the spirit of Richard Rodriquez'sHunger for Memory and Nathan McCall's Makes Me Wanna Holler—an intimate look at the mythology, experience, and psyche of the Asian American male

In Search of My Asian Self

Big Little Man

Sam Howe Verhovek

“Somewhere in the tangle of the subject’s burden and the subject’s desire is your story.”—Alex Tizon Every human being has an epic story. The late Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Alex Tizon told the epic stories of marginalized people—from lonely immigrants struggling to forge a new American identity to a high school custodian who penned a New Yorker short story. Edited by Tizon’s friend and former colleague Sam Howe Verhovek, Invisible People collects the best of Tizon’s rich, empathetic accounts—including “My Family’s Slave,” the Atlantic magazine cover story about the woman who raised him and his siblings under conditions that amounted to indentured servitude. Mining his Filipino American background, Tizon tells the stories of immigrants from Cambodia and Laos. He gives a fascinating account of the Beltway sniper and insightful profiles of Surfers for Jesus and a man who tracks UFOs. His articles—many originally published in the Seattle Times and the Los Angeles Times—are brimming with enlightening details about people who existed outside the mainstream’s field of vision. In their introductions to Tizon’s pieces, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet, Atlantic magazine editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, Pulitzer Prize winners Kim Murphy and Jacqui Banaszynski, and others salute Tizon’s respect for his subjects and the beauty and brilliance of his writing. Invisible People is a loving tribute to a journalist whose search for his own identity prompted him to chronicle the lives of others.

Stories of Lives at the Margins

Invisible People

“Alex Tizon fearlessly penetrates the core of not just what it means to be male and Asian in America, but what it means to be human anywhere.”—Cheryl Strayed, New York Times bestselling author 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 his youthful search for Asian men who had no place in his American history books or classrooms. And he tracks what he experienced as seismic change: the rise of powerful, dynamic Asian men like Yahoo! cofounder Jerry Yang, actor Ken Watanabe, and NBA starter Jeremy Lin. Included in this new edition of Big Little Man is Alex Tizon’s “My Family’s Slave”—2017’s best-read digital article. Published only weeks after Tizon’s death in 2017, it delivers a provocative, haunting, and ultimately redemptive coda. “A ruthlessly honest personal story and a devastating critique of contemporary American culture.”—The Seattle Times “Part candid memoir, part incisive cultural study, Big Little Man addresses—and explodes—the stereotypes of Asian manhood. Alex Tizon writes with acumen and courage, and the result is a book at once illuminating and, yes, liberating.”—Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl “This personal narrative of self-education and growth will engage any reader captivated by the sources of American, and Asian-American, manhood—its multitude of inheritances and prospects.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

Alex Tizon

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