Alex Tizon, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter whose 2014 memoir, Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self, "documented his insecurities and alienation as a Filipino-American," died March 23, the New York Times reported. He was 57. Tizon, along with Eric Nalder and Deborah Nelson, shared a Pulitzer in investigative reporting in 1997 for Seattle Times articles "about problems facing a Department of Housing and Urban Development program to help Native Americans build homes.... The series resulted in a congressional investigation and changes in the federal program."
In Big Little Man, he addressed many of the stereotypes he had internalized as an Asian-American, having experienced them "as a set of suspicions that seemed corroborated by everyday life.... When did this shame inside me begin? Looking back now, I could say it began with love. Love of the gifted people and their imagined life; love of America, the sprawling idea of it, with its gilded tentacles reaching across the Pacific Ocean to wrap around the hearts of small brown people living small brown lives. It was a love bordering on worship, fueled by longing, felt most fervently by those like my parents who grew up with America in their dreams. The love almost killed us."
Michele Matassa Flores, managing editor of the Seattle Times, said that as a reporter, Tizon "focused on the gray.... The world was not a simple place for Alex, and he wanted to convey that to his readers."