Miguel Zenon Quotes

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.

As a child, I grew up the son of German immigrant parents, so I grew up being teased and called 'Fritz' at school. When I married my wife and went to live in Vienna, I was teased for being a Brit.

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.

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.'

We are Martians who have come to earth to change everything—and we are afraid we will not be so well received. So we try to keep it a secret, try to appear as Americans…But that we could not do because of our accent. So we settled in a country nobody ever has heard about and now we are claiming to be Hungarians.

We used to have a view that to really be a good Australian, to love Australia, you almost had to cut your links with the country of origin. But I don’t think that was right and it never was right.

American histories were the same; they had these mad ideas about how Parliament worked, or what people really meant when they said A, B, or C. All my life, I felt simultaneously deracinated and rooted in both places, and now it's my greatest strength: I'm culturally bilingual.

When I was 12 years old, living in Cairo, my parents enrolled me in the American school. Most of the Americans there appeared oddly stifled, determined to remain, if not physically then sentimentally, back in the United States.

Puerto Rican culture is very different from Mexican culture. Part of the Mexican psychology is the idea of being an immigrant or being illegal or being confused with that. That doesn't happen with Puerto Ricans, because you're a commonwealth.

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

I have Asian friends - second generation - and I am the worst in terms of being in touch with my heritage.

With immigrant parents, they've had to sacrifice so much to survive, and they're trying to preserve the culture they lost, so there are just so many boundaries.

There were a lot of kids from Puerto Rico at my high school in Florida; people always assumed I was Puerto Rican. Even now in California, I get talked to on the street in Spanish constantly!

At the beginning of my career as a writer, I felt I knew nothing of Chinese culture. I was writing about emotional confusion with my mother related to our different beliefs. Hers was based in family history, which I didn't know anything about. I always felt hesitant in talking about Chinese culture and American culture.

Rather than be asked to abandon one's own heritage and to adapt to the mores of the new country, one was expected to possess a treasure of foreign skills and customs that would enrich the resources of American living.

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

I have always felt more at home in a culture that has nothing to do with the one I was born and brought up in.

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

Even though I'm very Westernized as an individual and very Canadian, I guess I've lost some of my Chinese culture.

To be the child of immigrants from Eastern Europe is in itself a special kind of experience; and an important one to an author. He has heard two languages through childhood, the one spoken with ease at home, and the other spoken with ease in the streets and at school, but spoken poorly at home.

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.

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

I was the most Australian child ever in the world, even though my home was in Africa.

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.

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.