Lulu Wang Quotes

If we come from good families where we have been supported well, there is a disillusionment we have to undergo in terms of the culture's values. We have to get beyond our cultural mythology to find out who we are.

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.

Sometimes, growing up, I tried to be very Latina; I would change my voice... experiment with my hair a lot, trying to figure out who I was in a primarily white school.

Being an immigrant gives you so much courage.

The 'Housewives' has helped me find my voice. I was always a people-pleaser, and coming into a show like this, you end up losing that.

Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it.

Even though I spent the first five years of my life in Nagasaki, going to Japan can be really difficult. Even if they know I've been brought up in the West, they still expect me to understand all the subtleties of their culture, and if I get it wrong, it matters much more than if a British person gets it wrong. I find it intimidating.

I really identified with Pocahontas' struggles as a young woman trying to identify herself in a modern, changing world and trying to stay true to her culture and heritage.

I suppose that was my first bit of acting, the acquisition of an English accent. It was really just an attempt to be understood.

I was going to be living there and I didn't want to sound like a foreigner all my life.

I really don't know how to be anyone else, and whenever I try to be anyone else, I fail miserably. Or I disappoint myself. It doesn't build my self-esteem, and it doesn't help me grow me at all.

My first novel, 'The Tiger's Daughter,' embodies the loneliness I felt but could not acknowledge, even to myself, as I negotiated the no man's land between the country of my past and the continent of my present.

This happens to a lot of kids from different backgrounds - they lose a lot of their parents' and grandparents' teachings, language and culture because they have to deal with another language and culture 24/7. By the time I was 44, I was terrible at Spanish. I was always intimidated whenever I had to speak it.

II grew up in Australia, but I'm not from there originally. Like, my dad's South American, so I know what that's like to grow up in a culture that's not your own.

I couldn't be more American if I tried. I was born in Ethiopia, but I was raised and educated as an American.

Most of the books that I've written have been focused on, sort of, the individual, and sort of, either a voice, a personal voice, or a kind of transforming event where they step forward to fight for something they value.

Living in different cultures helped me work out who I was going to be, separate from where I came from.

It has given me a global vantage point, being the daughter of immigrants from China, who had nothing when they came here. And now I am leading a company. It speaks to something deep in me, the concept that you don't have to start with anything.

Because I feel 'Thor' is the beginning of finding my roots, and I found that I have family in America, I want to take my time and put effort on my future work so that foreign people get to know me better, and I also want to enjoy that process itself!

I grew up all around the world, and when I settled in a suburb in America, I didn't have any idea what I was supposed to wear.

I look at myself, and I see a Spanish person who's trying to be understood by an English-speaking audience and is putting a lot of energy into that, instead of into expressing himself freely and feeling comfortable.

Minority is about being an individual. It's like you have to sift through the darkness to find your place and be that individual you want to be your entire life.

If I wrote a memoir, it would be like 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.'

You have to find a way - and thankfully for me, it's been music - to separate yourself from the racial identity. It's not easy, and I continue to work, God bless, and I'm really, truly appreciative of it.

I was a very quiet, shy child. I grew up in a small town, Louisville, Kentucky, and there weren't too many Hawaiian-Filipino girls, so I stuck out like a sore thumb. I didn't look like everyone else and didn't feel I belonged... But these things only build character and make you stronger. It taught me to grow into the woman I was to become.