Nigel Ng Quotes

I've gotten used to being a foreigner.

I'm married to an American, so I guess that has changed my perspective on the subjects I can write about.

My writing has been shaped by the three countries - Sri Lanka, the Philippines and England - I have lived in.

I was born in Lebanon and emigrated to the U.S. and went back. I'd been raised in a French school in Beirut. Lebanon is a peculiar place, so bicultural it goes along with you. There is a Western influence, an Eastern influence. Most people are fluctuating between those identities.

America is remarkable, don't you think so? When I came to Washington, I was twelve years old. I spoke English with an English accent. It was assumed that it would go on in that way.

Everyone thinks England and America are the same, as we have the same language, but I felt like an alien as an English person living in America.

Over the course of my life, I have made many transitions - most of them taking me further away from my Somali roots and steadily toward the enlightened mentality of Western democracy.

I became more interested in the idea of being an immigrant and particularly of being in a country you're not familiar with. And so I began reading migrants' stories. The fact that my father is Chinese - he emigrated from Malaysia when he was about 20 - may have had some bearing on my attraction to the subject.

I was twice-born. I'm Mexican by nature and Hungarian by nurture.

I consider myself Russian-American because I'm American by ethnicity and by passport, but I spent all my forming years over in the former Soviet Union in a Russian school. I never went to an American school. There was a lot of culture shock when I moved back to the States when I was 17.

People don't know what it's like being the foreigner until they are one.

My father, when he arrived in this country found it difficult.

Everything has changed since I came to China.

I am American. If you drop me in Seoul, I don't think I'm going to thrive there.

As a European I had fit in almost seamlessly in New York for the last 25 years, but in Oklahoma I stood out like a sore thumb.

I'm interested in people who find themselves in places, either of their choosing or not, and who are forced to decide how best to live there. That feeling of both citizenship and exile, of always being an expatriate - with all the attendant problems and complications and delight.

The first 10 years of my life, I lived as 'Matangi.' When I came to England in '86, my first week of school was terrible because I would put my hand up to answer things, and no one would choose me because they couldn't say my name. My auntie came from Europe to visit us, and she was like, 'Just call yourself something else.'

My mum and dad were speaking all the time about, 'In Sudan we do this,' and 'In Egypt we do that,' so I was very aware of cultural differences. I was confused growing up; it gave me a feeling of being an outsider watching others. But I think this is good for a writer.

Only when I came to America did I think of myself as British.

My mother is American. I first went to school in America, and we came back when I was about six to rural Norfolk. In primary school, I was teased immediately and mercilessly. I probably dropped that accent within about 10 days.

It's fascinating when you're from another place, but you don't speak the language.

I was a redhead when I first came to America.

I was born in Costa Rica and we moved to America where it was a whole new world for me.

My mom's Brazilian, so she and I definitely grew up with different perspectives. I was born in America, and she's from Brazil, so we have different ways of doing things. There's a bit of culture clash there.

My identity is not based on performance; it's based on something that's pre-determined by someone else, and I don't even understand what that is because I'm an African who came to America.