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A review by s_books
Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self by Alex Tizon
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.