Justin Simien Quotes

I identified with white culture, and I wanted to fit in. I didn't identify with black culture. Like, I didn't like Tyler Perry movies, and I wasn't into hip-hop music. I liked Neil Young.

In America, I'm a foreigner because of my Korean heritage. In Asia, because I was born in America, I'm a foreigner. I'm always a foreigner.

There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn't regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn't conceive of me of a North American writer, not being white and brought up on wheat germ. My fiction got lost.

I'm comfortable, culturally I'm American, my perspectives are American, but from an aesthetic perspective do other people look at me and think that I'm American?

I'm so used to America, used to the traffic in L.A., and I don't really feel it click with the Korean culture. But obviously, I have a Korean face, and I feel like that's just - you know, I can't walk around people like I'm, like, straight-up American. It's like, I'm Korean American. My parents are from Korea.

I'm half English - and it has been highlighted by people who tell me that I'm not Asian enough.

As I got older, I realised that people saw me as other things - sometimes Korean, sometimes Japanese, sometimes just Asian. When my family moved to a more affluent white neighbourhood, I started to see myself as 'other', this amorphous category. I didn't even know what 'not other' was, but I knew I wasn't it; I wasn't what was normal.

As a teenager, my blackness was also questioned by some of the life choices I made that weren't considered to be 'black' choices. For example, joining the swim team when it is a known fact that 'black folk don't swim'; or choosing to become a vegetarian when blacks clearly love chicken.

People look at me, and they don't see what they think is a typical Aboriginal. I always thought I'd be the white person in a black play.

I'm sure I went through a stage when I resented being Indian because in every other manner, in terms of cultural reference points and vocabulary and all the rest of it, I was way ahead of everybody else - so the one thing that set me back was being Indian. And I couldn't do anything about it.

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.

I used to joke for years that I was a black man. I adopted the black culture, the black race. I married a black woman, and I had black kids. I always considered myself a 'brother.'

So many white kids, English kids - we had no culture.

When I was going to school, I just wanted to be like everybody else. I would pull at my hair to try and get it to lie straight. America was where I would consume and absorb black culture, buy Ultra Sheen and watch 'Soul Train,' but I still had that weird in-between thing.

Somebody told me once I wasn't Latin enough, and that made me laugh.

Growing up as an Asian American in this society, there were a lot of times where you feel isolated or out of place as an Asian. And growing up in White America, that's absolutely my experience. And I think that's why I got into acting because I wanted to be anybody else but Asian.

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

For me, whenever I would see a lot of 'black films,' I didn't feel represented in it. I didn't feel connected to the characters or the situations or the humor.

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.

There is an imagined thing called black culture. But culture is a construction. It is learned behavior, not innate. The black American experience is the American experience.

It was quite strange that people were saying I wasn't Asian enough. It's like, 'Oh, you're not Asian enough to play an Asian role.' So what does that mean for people who come from mixed heritage? I grew up in Asia; I'm Malaysian.

A lot of people decide, if you're mixed, you're black. And so they try to force you to choose a culture.

I've lived 16, 17 years of my life in Asia, and that's most of my life. I was born in Asia - I've lived cultures that are synonymous with Asian culture - but it's still not Asian enough for some people.

As the Chinese girl, you don't fit in with anybody. It wasn't a large Chinese-American population, so I didn't grow up having a community of Asian friends. Even when there were Asian people, we sort of existed on our own.

You could say mixed-race Eurasians have the exact same struggles as a character like Rachel Chu has had: not feeling at home in supposedly their motherland; not being white enough; not being Asian enough.