Alex Tizon

Admitting the truth would have meant exposing us all. We spent our first decade in the country learning the ways of the new land and trying to fit in. Having a slave did not fit. Having a slave gave me grave doubts about what kind of people we were, what kind of place we came from.

I first visited the Philippines when I was 29. I thought I would feel at home there, but I felt more out of place than I did in the U.S. I discovered I was more American than Filipino. It was shattering because I never felt quite at home in the U.S., either.

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.

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.

Wen wu contradicts the very American notion of John Wayne being the ideal of manhood. In the wen wu way of thinking, it's much more important to restrain rather than exert yourself through brute power.

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.

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.

You are validating someone's life by telling their story. Even if it's a sad one.

I didn't go into journalism thinking it would solidify my identity. I did it because I needed to make a living, and I was proficient in writing. But in becoming a journalist, I learned about other people who felt like they were on the edges of American mainstream life.

We all, to some degree, absorb the mythologies around us, our vision refracted by the prisms of our particular time and place.

I guess you could say I've written a lot about one thing as a journalist. But I hardly ever saw it as exclusively about race. To my mind, it was more about telling stories of people who existed outside the mainstream's field of vision. Invisible people.

American pop culture is perpetually in adolescent mode. The notions of what it takes to be a man, as depicted in pop culture, are very superficial, one-dimensional, and adolescent.