erin_oriordan_is_reading_again's review against another edition
5.0
This is a brilliant, warm-hearted book and I'd recommend it to anyone (but especially anyone who lives in the United States). But really, would I expect anything less from a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist? Alex Tizon takes a personalized tour of Asian-American identity, and particularly Asian-American male identity, in this insightful memoir that reads like a series of fascinating essays. It's a perspective I, as a Caucasian female, would never have been able to explore without this guidebook.
sallielu's review against another edition
1.0
It's probably a 2/5 but I honestly hated this book so much I couldn't do it. There's obviously a commendable bravery in sharing his personal and clearly emotional experience of growing up as an Asian man in America. However, the undertone throughout the entire story was one of extreme and sexist entitlement. As an Asian American woman, I found the way he talked about Asian American women to be short-sighted and despicable. As if the woes he encountered as an Asian male in this society aren't the very same that affect Asian women.
samnopal's review against another edition
4.0
Review posted on reddit
Tizon is the author of My Family's Slave which created a bit of a stir when it was published by the Atlantic. Unfortunately Tizon passed away this year and only released the one book.
Big Little Man is an exploration of Asian American masculinity. What does it mean to be a man? Are there differing definitions of manhood in American and Asian culture?
While this is a memoir primarily, Tizon's journalistic background comes through to offer up some historical perspective on various topics. He visits the site of Magellan's death at the hands of Lapu Lapu, he travels to Fujian to discover the history of Zheng He, a Chinese Mariner who sailed around the Cape of Africa 80 years prior to Colmbus' maiden voyage, and he provides insider commentary on what it means to be an Asian male growing up in America.
His theories are sometimes misguided (Asian men have it worse than Asian women because it is better to be desired for the wrong reason than ignored completely), his essays are incredibly personal including an interlude on genital size, and his Asian attachment sometimes feels a little like Japan's superior race mentality during WWII, but his struggles are what make the book interesting and great.
It's complicated and hard growing up outside of the majority both culturally and statistically. It's hard to contemplate dating outside your race, romance, etc. While Tizon doesn't really offer up any explanations, he does conclude with some optimism.
Tizon is the author of My Family's Slave which created a bit of a stir when it was published by the Atlantic. Unfortunately Tizon passed away this year and only released the one book.
Big Little Man is an exploration of Asian American masculinity. What does it mean to be a man? Are there differing definitions of manhood in American and Asian culture?
While this is a memoir primarily, Tizon's journalistic background comes through to offer up some historical perspective on various topics. He visits the site of Magellan's death at the hands of Lapu Lapu, he travels to Fujian to discover the history of Zheng He, a Chinese Mariner who sailed around the Cape of Africa 80 years prior to Colmbus' maiden voyage, and he provides insider commentary on what it means to be an Asian male growing up in America.
His theories are sometimes misguided (Asian men have it worse than Asian women because it is better to be desired for the wrong reason than ignored completely), his essays are incredibly personal including an interlude on genital size, and his Asian attachment sometimes feels a little like Japan's superior race mentality during WWII, but his struggles are what make the book interesting and great.
It's complicated and hard growing up outside of the majority both culturally and statistically. It's hard to contemplate dating outside your race, romance, etc. While Tizon doesn't really offer up any explanations, he does conclude with some optimism.
mtizon's review against another edition
5.0
Full Disclosure: I requested an advanced copy of Big Little Man from NetGalley thinking I could write an unbiased review. Silly of me, really. Alex Tizon is, after all, my big brother. His history is linked with mine. His dad, the big dreamer, is my dad too. This is not a professional review but rather my own personal reaction to this book.
I already knew some of the stories shared within the pages of Big Little Man and yet reading them here transformed them into something more than just tales I'd grown up hearing. I remember the "fire" story but I never knew how it started or that dad was, in part, responsible for its cause. Of course, that may be because I only ever heard dad's version of things. It never occurred to me that having a fireplace was such a big deal to my immigrant family or that their pursuit of the ultimate American Dream, complete with white Christmases and Presto logs in the fireplace, nearly killed them all. I recall dad's obsession with his nose but I didn't know he was trying to make it taller so he could make himself more handsome, which for him meant more Anglo and less Filipino. I never completely understood what dad meant when he told me I had a good nose because it wasn't flat. Unlike Alex, I was oblivious to the implications of this.
"Your nose is so round! And so flat! Talagang Pilipino! So Filipino!"
"What's wrong with flat?"
"Nothing is wrong with flat. Pero sharper is better. People will treat you better. They'll think you come from a better family."
I am one of the sisters mentioned in this book who married a white guy. In my defense, I once had a crush on an Asian boy who took no notice of me whatsoever. In fact, no Asian boys seemed to notice me, at least not romantically. I figured I was the wrong kind of Asian girl. Not petite enough, a little too opinionated, a little too Americanized. That's the thing about being Asian in America. You try to live in both worlds at the same time and end up feeling like you don't belong in either.
Seeing things from my brother's point of view, learning how our father's history, and that of many known and unknown Asian men, shaped him from a young boy to the man he is today, opened my eyes to a perspective I had not previously considered. I know well the culture clash of being raised Asian inside the home and having to translate that culture in a workable way outside of it. I too had to navigate my brown self through a sea of white but as so often happens with siblings, our stories, our takeaways from our history and experiences, are vastly different.
Big Little Man asks the question: What does it mean to be an Asian man? What did it mean then? What does it mean now in a landscape where the ground below us is in a state of perpetual shift? More than that, it presents universal themes that speak of how we relate to our parents, our ancestors, and the world we live in. Alex's perspective is his own and at the same time it can relate to any man's search for himself, regardless of his color.
I had no idea the emotional impact Big Little Man would have on me. Or that I would cry myself to sleep thinking of our dad in his last days looking back on his life. In my mind, I see our nephew, Kai, searching for some unknown something in the "Asian" corner of a video store. He has been taught all about the great explorers and conquerers of our collective history in school. Magellan, Darwin, Columbus. Except that history didn't include Zheng He, the great Asian explorer who, I admit, I hadn't heard of either before reading this book. In Big Little Man, Alex wonders how it might have changed things for him if the history he'd been raised on had also included our Asian ancestors' stories. Big Little Man is honest, at times painfully so. It is courageous and bold and hopeful.
I already knew some of the stories shared within the pages of Big Little Man and yet reading them here transformed them into something more than just tales I'd grown up hearing. I remember the "fire" story but I never knew how it started or that dad was, in part, responsible for its cause. Of course, that may be because I only ever heard dad's version of things. It never occurred to me that having a fireplace was such a big deal to my immigrant family or that their pursuit of the ultimate American Dream, complete with white Christmases and Presto logs in the fireplace, nearly killed them all. I recall dad's obsession with his nose but I didn't know he was trying to make it taller so he could make himself more handsome, which for him meant more Anglo and less Filipino. I never completely understood what dad meant when he told me I had a good nose because it wasn't flat. Unlike Alex, I was oblivious to the implications of this.
"Your nose is so round! And so flat! Talagang Pilipino! So Filipino!"
"What's wrong with flat?"
"Nothing is wrong with flat. Pero sharper is better. People will treat you better. They'll think you come from a better family."
I am one of the sisters mentioned in this book who married a white guy. In my defense, I once had a crush on an Asian boy who took no notice of me whatsoever. In fact, no Asian boys seemed to notice me, at least not romantically. I figured I was the wrong kind of Asian girl. Not petite enough, a little too opinionated, a little too Americanized. That's the thing about being Asian in America. You try to live in both worlds at the same time and end up feeling like you don't belong in either.
Seeing things from my brother's point of view, learning how our father's history, and that of many known and unknown Asian men, shaped him from a young boy to the man he is today, opened my eyes to a perspective I had not previously considered. I know well the culture clash of being raised Asian inside the home and having to translate that culture in a workable way outside of it. I too had to navigate my brown self through a sea of white but as so often happens with siblings, our stories, our takeaways from our history and experiences, are vastly different.
Big Little Man asks the question: What does it mean to be an Asian man? What did it mean then? What does it mean now in a landscape where the ground below us is in a state of perpetual shift? More than that, it presents universal themes that speak of how we relate to our parents, our ancestors, and the world we live in. Alex's perspective is his own and at the same time it can relate to any man's search for himself, regardless of his color.
I had no idea the emotional impact Big Little Man would have on me. Or that I would cry myself to sleep thinking of our dad in his last days looking back on his life. In my mind, I see our nephew, Kai, searching for some unknown something in the "Asian" corner of a video store. He has been taught all about the great explorers and conquerers of our collective history in school. Magellan, Darwin, Columbus. Except that history didn't include Zheng He, the great Asian explorer who, I admit, I hadn't heard of either before reading this book. In Big Little Man, Alex wonders how it might have changed things for him if the history he'd been raised on had also included our Asian ancestors' stories. Big Little Man is honest, at times painfully so. It is courageous and bold and hopeful.
wellington299's review
3.0
Alex brings us along for a ride on his exploration of Asian masculinity. The book had an academic tone to it except without a lot of footnotes. He writes thoughtfully and with great depth but lacking heart, until the very end, making a hum-drum book to an average read.
Maybe I just wasn't the target audience. I was expecting a sweeping epic chapter(s) on Zheng He and/or Jeremy Lin that would ignite something in me. Instead I get more chapters on the difficulties of being an Asian male in the world of romance and business.
That would have made for a stronger book. Or focusing on his parents. That would be a book I would be interested to read.
sbaldwin16's review
3.5
This is a 3.5 star book.
This is a good, solid read, a look at the author's struggless to find examples of Asian "manliness", given the typical script about Asians in the West and all the things that help feed into and support that less-than-manly view of Asians, e.g. the Confucian Wen wu ideal of a man versus America's macho-cowboy ideal, modern-Asian-men's relative shortness of height, how the "effeminateness" of Asians can benefit Asian women but degrade Asian men, etc. Throughout the book, Tizon maintains a good balance of personal anecdotes and experiences versus science-based findings. He does, however, go the somewhat unusual route of referring to Asians as both "Yellow" and "Brown" but only touches on the specific differences of those two colors at the end, when he speaks of how some Chinese may look down on Filipinos as "Asia's niggers". There is a bit of a tendency, both in Asia as well as in America to consciously or unconsciously separate the "yellows" (i.e. East Asia: China, Korea, Japan) from the "browns" (i.e. South East Asia: the Philippines, Cambodia, Malaysia, etc.); the "yellows" make up the "model minority" myth, the "browns" not so much. It would have been nice if Tizon could have expanded on that a bit more instead of using them interchangeably but that probably would require a separate book. That might also be a bit more of a modern concept; Tizon mentions how when he was younger people would easily confuse him for Chinese or Japanese and when he corrected them and told them he's Filipino, they would simply say "same thing". Near the end of the book Tizon has a short chapter about how today's Asian American youth might have it somewhat better, now that there are a bit more Asians in America and the ability to keep in contact with the home country is greater. Any somewhat-educated American today, even if they don't know the difference between the countries and couldn't point them out on a map to save their lives, is at least aware of the fact that not all Asians are Chinese or Japanese -- they may not be able to tell the difference but they should at least be aware that there is one.
This is a good, solid read, a look at the author's struggless to find examples of Asian "manliness", given the typical script about Asians in the West and all the things that help feed into and support that less-than-manly view of Asians, e.g. the Confucian Wen wu ideal of a man versus America's macho-cowboy ideal, modern-Asian-men's relative shortness of height, how the "effeminateness" of Asians can benefit Asian women but degrade Asian men, etc. Throughout the book, Tizon maintains a good balance of personal anecdotes and experiences versus science-based findings. He does, however, go the somewhat unusual route of referring to Asians as both "Yellow" and "Brown" but only touches on the specific differences of those two colors at the end, when he speaks of how some Chinese may look down on Filipinos as "Asia's niggers". There is a bit of a tendency, both in Asia as well as in America to consciously or unconsciously separate the "yellows" (i.e. East Asia: China, Korea, Japan) from the "browns" (i.e. South East Asia: the Philippines, Cambodia, Malaysia, etc.); the "yellows" make up the "model minority" myth, the "browns" not so much. It would have been nice if Tizon could have expanded on that a bit more instead of using them interchangeably but that probably would require a separate book. That might also be a bit more of a modern concept; Tizon mentions how when he was younger people would easily confuse him for Chinese or Japanese and when he corrected them and told them he's Filipino, they would simply say "same thing". Near the end of the book Tizon has a short chapter about how today's Asian American youth might have it somewhat better, now that there are a bit more Asians in America and the ability to keep in contact with the home country is greater. Any somewhat-educated American today, even if they don't know the difference between the countries and couldn't point them out on a map to save their lives, is at least aware of the fact that not all Asians are Chinese or Japanese -- they may not be able to tell the difference but they should at least be aware that there is one.