Jimmy O. Yang Quotes

My father in the film - which we probably haven't seen in previous movies, and in British Asian movies you could probably count on one hand - he says exactly why, actually why he's frightened for his daughter. He came to this country, England, and had a bit of a crappy time.

I was a first-generation college student as well as the first in our family to be born in America - my parents were born in Cuba - and we didn't yet know that families were supposed to leave pretty much right after they unloaded your stuff from the car.

Growing up in the U.S. as an Indian wasn't easy.

My dad left when I was 3 1/2, and he left my mom and I.

I loved 'Ghana Must Go' by Taiye Selasi. It's about a first-generation African family living in America that has to return home to Nigeria when their estranged father passes away.

So my character on 'Tyrant' is a chap called Barry Al Fayeed, and he is the second son of a fictional Middle Eastern dictator. But, he has grown up since he was young in America. He's trained as a doctor. He's married a beautiful American girl, had two kids, so he's very much an American.

I remember my dad came from Ireland and Scotland, and so he carried with him the fear of poverty. So when I wanted to break loose, it kind of made him very nervous.

My father was gone when I was three years old.

I had a very angry father and was disconnected from my family.

What must it be like for a little boy to read that daddy never loved mummy?

I was born on the island of Singapore, and I grew up there until I was 11 years old, when I was forcibly removed by my dad and planted into suburban Houston. I was in shock for the first year and then began to really love it - but didn't love it quite enough to stay.

My father and his brothers never mentioned to their English wives and children that they were Jewish. Being Hungarian was exotic and foreign enough to begin with, and so long as they were not asked, they found it easier, from 1919 on, to let the matter drop.

I always feel like people misunderstand the difference between an Asian story and an Asian-American story. That's completely different, too. I have friends who grew up in Asia, and our experiences are so different. Even though we might look the same, I feel like being Asian and then being Asian-American is completely different.

I want to be viewed like a serious actress, and I'm afraid that people are just going to see me as the poor little girl whose parents were deported when she was 14.

I was barely 17 when our father decided to part ways with my mother.

I didn't want to hurt my parents' feelings about how hard certain things were in my 20s, how hard it was when my dad left my senior year before I went to college.

My parents moved to the states when I was 6, so I was raised by my grandma in the Dominican Republic and didn't see them again until I was 10.

I'm Egyptian, and my parents stupidly decided to move us down to South Carolina when I was five, which was pretty brutal.

For immigrant families, television is what connects you to American culture, but it's also what makes you feel like an outsider.

My biggest struggle was probably having to move from the Dominican to the United States to go to high school. Moving to Michigan, the weather, the language, I didn't speak English at all. That adjustment for me was difficult at the beginning.

It's tough... My real father - I have my stepdad, my mom remarried - but my real father lived in Thailand, so I barely saw him as it is. So it was really hard for me to go back there and just, I feel like I have a lot of unanswered questions.

My father and mother split and I never saw my father until I was 20, nor did I see much more of my mother.

I consider myself a brown American or a man of color before I would say Sri Lankan, to be honest. I didn't grow up there. There was a pretty brutal civil war there from 1983 until 2009. So we weren't able to go back very much. I've gone back as an adult. But I grew up in Pennsylvania.

I've had tough times before. Leaving Brazil when I was so young, saying goodbye to my family and friends to go to another culture, that was so difficult.