Jenny Zhang Quotes

It didn't matter that I wore clothes from Sears; I was still different. I looked different. My name was different. I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different.

What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.

In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.

Africans who immigrate to America know how little racism exists there. They suspect it before emigrating from Africa, and they know it after arriving in America. Indeed, America, the Left's depiction of it notwithstanding, is the least racist country in the world.

I discovered I was an Asian American when I arrived in the U.S. I didn't identify as that before I came here. People started calling me that, and I started being treated in a specific way.

I landed in New Jersey, where I could barely speak English, and I had to figure out what a short brown kid was going to do in this big white world.

The ethnic enclave’s warm embrace becomes an economic stranglehold.

No common education has served to remove and soften the differences of origin and language.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife – this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.

When I was seven months pregnant with my son, my mother and I took a trip to El Salvador, where she's from. Frequent visits with her to see my extended family have taught me how different life can be if you are born into poverty.

My parents moved to England with that immigrant ethos of self-betterment, but I don't think they expected the kind of grief they experienced.

I know that some people, when they are growing up and they - as a person of color in a majority community - that they may feel as if they are left out, or they feel a bit strange.

If, for 2,000 years, you dress up differently, believe in a different God, celebrate different holidays, and on top of it insist on telling everyone that you're completely different than them, ultimately they'll believe you.

To try and to pretend that there's no difference between where we come from is so dumb.

I have always found it jarring to encounter people born and raised in, say, Switzerland, who are denied its citizenship and still considered Algerians or Turks.

Hispanics who get on government programs are doing only a little better than they were in the old country.

When you grow up as a minority in a majority culture, a lot of times, you're just trying to fit in.

I grew up in L.A. in a school that was diverse, but it was not really integrated, so I didn't ever fully fit in with the black girls or the white girls or the Latina girls.

I'd been taught from an early age that I was in the 'other' category on the standardized tests. You know, I had to go down the checklist - Caucasian, African-American, Latino, Asian-Pacific Islander, and then, you know, at the bottom is other. So, you know, very early on I was taught, in a way, that I was somehow this anomaly.

You're trying to grow up, and you don't want to be like your parents, and that gets mixed up with being Korean... They brought their values from Korea, and I accepted them because I didn't know anything more. But as I grow older, I feel more Korean every year; it's very strange.

By the time I was 16, I was someone to reckon with. I was so eager to repudiate any connection with any immigrant race, I would go above and beyond. I was desperate to belong to something. That was my drive as a teenager.

I will carry with me always the deep sense of what it feels like to be an outsider and how tough it was, how hard it was to adapt to this country.

Without comprehending the role of identity, many issues we all face will remain unresolved.

I've been there; I've been in the minority before. It humbles the exalted. But that's all right.

Growing up was very interesting for me. If you were Haitian, people just automatically assumed that English was a second language. So they had a special class for my brother and I, but we spoke proper English.