Arlie Russell Hochschild Quotes

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.'

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

The first years of my life in the U.S. were very difficult.

I was six when we came to this country. When I was 14 or so, I still had a lot of trouble with it.

The only time I used to feel like an outsider was when I first went to India.

I was born in Hong Kong and immigrated to the United States with my family when I was 4. I spent most of my childhood in Chicago. My elementary school had no program in English as a second language, so I was placed in a class for students with speech impediments.

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.

I once wrote that the first week in Jerusalem was the hardest week of my life. I was different, other; my clothes were different, as was my language. All of the classes were in Hebrew - science, bible, literature. I sat there not understanding one word. When I tried to speak, everyone would laugh at me.

I refused to learn English for two years when we moved to London, hoping to send my family back home. It was tough, but at the same time, it has given me a sense of displacement that actually really suits the life that I'm living now.

I've gotten used to being a foreigner.

When I first came to this country I was this new kid from the Caribbean. England was a rude awakening for me.

My dad looked like Errol Flynn, and I think my mom thought she was moving into a hacienda, but they lived on a dirt street in Tijuana, a house jammed with relatives, nobody speaking English. She didn't know a word of Spanish. She grew up well and was appalled and humiliated, terrified of anyone ethnic.

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.

To pretend you don't feel a certain strangeness after living in England for 40 years is a fallacy.

It has been stressful to be a French resident in America.

In 1975, I left the burning city of Beirut for the quiet insanity of England. To say that short, frail and wispy 15-year-old me didn't fit in would be such an understatement as to be a joke.

Of course, everyone knows my story of being born in Russia and moving to the United States at 7. For a few years people would say, 'Well, she's living in the United States, but she's Russian.'

I understand what it's like to come with your family, and to uproot yourself and come to another culture. You need a lot of support. People say, 'She's got her daughter; she's got her husband.' Yeah, but she hasn't got anyone else.

I was 15 when my family moved to Jidda from Britain in 1982. Living in Saudi Arabia was such a shock to my system that I like to say I was traumatized into feminism.

I thought everything would be different in America. It wasn't.

I was born near Bucharest, but my parents came to France a year later. We moved back to Romania when I was thirteen, and my world was shattered. I hated Bucharest, its society, and its mores - its anti-Semitism for example.

When I first moved from Shanghai when I was five, I just thought of myself as Chinese.

When my mom, Mercedes, and her younger sister, Juanita, first came from Puerto Rico, they were the youngest in the family. They had to jump into a new community and really learn English, assimilate, and adapt - and I saw that. I grew up in that community.

I wanted to do comedy because I left Malaysia and went to America. I got bitten by the Western, idealist, opinionated, democracy bug.

I was just stunned when I came to America. I didn't know anything about rock music or football, and I felt very out of it... America was like a foreign country to me at first.