Land The Giant By Alex Tizon Analysis

Giants are always making everyone else feel small and it is almost never a good feeling. Alex Tizon has won a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, along with that accomplishment he was a Knight International Journalism Fellow based in Manila. Alex Tizon’s “Land of the Giant” uses repeated diction and emotional appeal in order to show that people are influenced to think that the majority of the population is what everyone should try to be like because they need to fit in. To begin, Tizon uses diction to help reinforce his argument in the best way possible. When Tizon is talking about how hard it was for him and his family in America he says that the early years “ were marked by relentless self-annihilation” (645). Tizon and his family
Tizon repeats words that have a deep meaning to him. When Tizon is explaining his family's first items in America, he talks about how all them just so happened to be white. Tizon, later, explains a situation that had happened at his house, he includes the word white when describing what happened: “One late evening at the White House I was playing on the floor of my parents’ bedroom closet…” (646). This shows that Tizon feels that he needs to emphasize on the word “white” to show that it was important to have a white house to fit in. Tizon was given several standards when living in America, which were meant to make a stereotypical American person. Tizon tells the readers about a lesson that his father was taught and he then shared with Tizon. The lesson discriminates against people that don’t look like the majority of the population, he says “Aquiline was better than flat. Long better than wide. Light skin better than dark” (647). This is meant to demote people that do not fit this description and to make them feel as though they will never be able to be equal to the people that do fit the description. Another word that Tizon repeats is “anything”. Tizon describes how the “you can become anything, do anything, accomplish anything...” (649) part of the “American Dream” is a lie. The meaning behind this is that when you are fitting the given standards in America then it is harder to do great things in the country. Hence, Tizon uses the repetition of certain words to show the readers that people think about other people differently by the way that they fit in with everyone