Small Man in a Big Country

Our early years in America were marked by relentless self-annihilation, though of course we did not see it that way at the time. Everything was done in the name of love, for the cause of fitting in, making friends, making the grade, landing the job, providing for the future, being good citizens of paradise—all so necessary and proper.

First was the abandonment of our native language and our unquestioned embrace of English, even though for my parents that abandonment meant cutting themselves off from a fluency they would never have again. Possessing a language meant possessing the world expressed in its words. Dispossessing it meant nothing less than the loss of a world and the beginning of bewilderment forever. “Language is the only homeland,” said poet Czeslaw Milosz. My parents left the world that created them and now would be beginners for the rest of their lives, mumblers searching for the right word, the proper phrase that approximated what they felt inside. I wonder at the eloquence that must have lived inside them that never found a way out. How much was missed on all sides.

We left behind José Rizal and picked up Mark Twain. We gave up Freddie Aguilar for Frank Sinatra and the Beatles, “Bayan Ko” for “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.”

My parents' adulation of all things white and Western and their open derision of all things brown or native or Asian was the engine of their self-annihilation. Was it purely coincidence that our first car, first house, first dog in America were white? That our culminating moment in America was a white Christmas? White was the apex of humanity, the farthest point on the evolutionary arc, and therefore the closest earthly representation of ultimate truth and beauty.

Americans did seem to me at times like a different species, one that had evolved over generations into supreme beings. Kings in overalls

I grew up hearing my parents' offhanded comments about how strong and capable the Americans were, how worthy of admiration, and conversely how weak and incapable and deserving of mockery their own countrymen were: “They can't do it on their own; they need help.” I heard it in their breathless admiration for mestizos—persons of mixed European and Asian blood—how elegant and commanding they were, and the more European the better. To be called “mestizo” was the ultimate flattery. White spouses were prizes; mestizo babies, blessings; they represented an instant elevation, an infusion of royal blood, the promise of a more gifted life.

One late evening at the White House I was playing on the floor of my parents' bedroom closet, behind a row of shirts, when the door opened. It was my father. Instead of revealing myself, I just sat there watching him in silence, cloaked by a wall of sleeves. He changed into his house clothes and stood at a small mirror appearing to massage his nose, running an index finger and thumb along the bridge, pinching and pulling it as if to make his nose narrower and longer. He stood there doing that for a short time and then left, shutting the door behind him. I thought it curious but did not think about it again until a few months later, when I saw him do it again as he absently watched television. He didn't know I was in the room.

“What are you doing, Papa?”

It startled him. “Nothing, son. Just massaging.”

“Does your nose hurt?”

He looked at me, deciding what to do next, and then he seemed to relax. “Halika dito, anak. Come here, son. You should do this,” he said to me. He showed me how to use my fingers to pinch the bridge of my nose and then tug on it in a sustained pull, holding it in place for twenty seconds at a time and then repeating. “You should do this every day. If you do, your nose will become more tangus. Sharper. Narrower. You'll look more mestizo. 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. They'll think you're smarter and mas guapo, more handsome. Talaga, anak. This is true. See my nose? The other day a woman, a puti, a white, talked to me in Spanish because she thought I was from Spain. That happens to me. I massage every day. Don't you think I look Castilian?” He turned to show his profile. “Ay anak. My son. Believe me.”

I did believe him. Just as he had believed his father when the lesson was taught to him decades earlier. These were the givens: Aquiline was better than flat. Long better than wide. Light skin better than dark. Round eyes better than chinky. Blue eyes better than brown. Thin lips better than full. Blond better than black. Tall better than short. Big better than small. The formula fated us to lose. We had landed on a continent of Big Everything.

One sunny afternoon, my father and I walked to a hardware store a few blocks from our house. As we were about to go inside, three American men in overalls and T-shirts walked out, filling the doorway and inadvertently blocking our path. They were enormous, all of them well over six feet tall, with beards and beefy arms and legs. My father and I stood looking up at this wall of denim and hair. The Americans appeared ready to scoot over. “Excuse us,” my father said, and we moved to the side.

One of the men said, “Thanks.” Another snickered as they passed.

My father leaned down and whispered in my ear, “Land of the Giants.” It was the name of a television show my family had started watching, a science-fiction series about a space crew marooned on a planet of gargantuan humans. The crew members were always being picked up by enormous hands and toyed with. The show's tagline: “Mini-people—Playthings in a World of Giant Tormentors.” My family was captivated by the show. I think we related to the mini-people who in every episode were confronted by impossibly large humanoids.

Americans did seem to me at times like a different species, one that had evolved over generations into supreme behemoths. Kings in overalls. They were living proof of a basic law of conquest: victors ate better. The first time I sat as a guest at an American dinner table, I could scarcely believe the bounty: a whole huge potato for each of us, a separate plate of vegetables, my own steak. A separate slab of meat just for me! At home, that single slab would have fed my entire family.

So I worked on becoming an American, to be in some ways more American than my American friends. But I learned, eventually, that I could never reach the ideal of the beloved.

The size of American bodies came to represent American capacities in everything we desired: they were smarter, stronger, richer; they lived in comfort and had the surplus to be generous. They knew the way to beauty and bounty because they were already there, filling the entryway with their meaty limbs and boulder heads and big, toothy grins like searchlights, imploring us with their booming voices to come on in. Have a seat at the table! Americans spoke a few decibels louder than we were used to.

We were small in everything. We were poor. I mean pockets-out immigrant poor. We were undernourished and scrawny, our genetics revealing not-so-distant struggles with famine and disease and war. We were inarticulate, our most deeply felt thoughts expressed in halting, heavily accented English, which might have sounded like grunts to Americans, given how frequently we heard “Excuse me?” or “Come again?” or “What?” The quizzical look on their faces as they tried to decipher the alien sounds.

My father, who was a funny, dynamic conversationalist in his own language, a man about Manila, would never be quite so funny or dynamic or quick-witted or agile or confident again. He would always be a small man in America. My mother was small, too, but it was acceptable, even desirable, for women to be small. American men found my mother attractive. She never lacked attention or employment. My father was the one most demoted in the great new land. He was supposed to be the man of the family, and he did not know which levers to pull or push, and he didn't have the luxury of a lifetime, like his children, to learn them.

I'm convinced it was because of a gnawing awareness of his limitations in the land of the giants that he was a dangerous man to belittle. Gentle and gregarious in the company of friends, he was a different person in the larger world of strangers: wary, opaque, tightly coiled. My father stood all of five feet six inches and 150 pounds, every ounce of which could turn maniacal in an instant. He took offense easily and let his fists fly quickly. He was not deterred by mass. He recognized it, yes, but became blind with fury when it trespassed on him or his family. I once watched him scold a man twice his size, an auto mechanic he thought was taking advantage of him, and threaten to leap over the counter to teach him a lesson. “You kick a man in the balls and he's not so big anymore,” he once told me. Actually, he told me more than once.

My mother corroborated the stories of my father challenging other men over perceived slights, losing as many fights as he won and getting downright clobbered on a few occasions, once landing in the hospital for a week. My mother was present at some of those fights; she was the cause of at least one, in which an unfortunate young man ogled her and ended up laid out on the sidewalk.

I got another glimpse of his inner maniac once at a park in New Jersey when I was about twelve. A big red-haired kid on a bike spit on me and rode away laughing and making faces. My father followed him all the way back to where his family was picnicking and confronted the three men in the group, all Americans, one of whom was presumably the kid's father. They all appeared startled. I heard only part of the conversation that followed. “We could take care of it right now, right here,” my father told the men in a low, threatening voice, his fists clenched into hard knots. He stood leaning forward, unblinking. The men averted their gaze and kept silent. On the walk back to our spot, my father said, “Tell me if that boy comes near you again.” I was speechless. His mettle astonished me. But it was something more than bravery on display that day. His fury was outsized, reckless, as if something larger was at stake, and of course now I know there was.

Unlike my father, I worked hard to get along with strangers. We moved so much in those early years that I got used to strangers as companions as we passed from place to place. I learned American English, trained out whatever accent I had inherited, picked up colloquial mannerisms. I kept a confident front, not in a loudmouthed way but in a reserved, alert manner, and I got more surefooted in my interactions as I got better at English. If I had to guess, I'd say my classmates would have described me as a little shy but smart and likable. I brooded in private. How could someone be ashamed and capable at the same time? I was fated to have a secret life.

So I worked on becoming an American, to be in some ways more American than my American friends. But I learned, eventually, that I could never reach the ideal of the beloved. And when the realization came, it seemed to land all at once, blunt force trauma, and I felt embarrassed to have been a believer.

It's one of the beautiful lies of the American Dream: that you can become anything, do anything, accomplish anything, if you want it badly enough and are willing to work for it. Limits are inventions of the timid mind. You've got to believe. All things are possible through properly channeled effort: work, work, work; harder, faster, more! Unleash your potential! Nothing is beyond your reach! Just do it! I believed it all, drank the elixir to the last drop and licked my lips for residue. I put in the time, learned to read and write and speak more capably than my friends and neighbors, followed the rules, did my homework, memorized the tics and slangs and idiosyncrasies of winners and heroes, but I could never be quite as American as they. The lie is a lie only if you fail, and I most certainly did.

When I ask myself now when this shame inside me began, I see that I inherited the beginnings of it from my father, and he from his father, going back in my imagination as far as the arrival of the Spanish ships almost five hundred years ago. An ancient inherited shame. It accompanied us across the ocean. We carried it into a country that told us: not reaching the summit was no one's fault but your own.

Excerpt from Big Little Man by Alex Tizon. Copyright © 2014 by Alex Tizon. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Note: In Big Little Man, Alex Tizon referred to Eudicia Tomas Pulido, who appears in the family photo above, as his aunt. Shortly after his death, in 2017, The Atlantic published a story by Tizon, "My Family's Slave," revealing Pulido was in fact not a relative but had been enslaved by his family for fifty-six years.

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