John Cho Quotes

My mum thought my TV and film addiction was laziness. If you're an immigrant, you know you'll never be an accepted part of society, but you hope your children will be, and you try to make them essential to the community in a practical way - being a doctor or a lawyer. Acting was beyond their comprehension.

In 'The Big Chill,' those characters are in middle age, thinking, 'Oh, God, I've turned into my parents. I've failed.' And in 'Beside Still Waters,' we're showing the struggles of people who actually want to be like their parents and feel they can't live up to their heights.

My dad is a Ghanaian immigrant, and he wanted a son who was an engineer.

I was told many times that my writing was either too Korean - or not Korean enough.

My son will be an American, but I remain French.

My parents came from Calcutta. They arrived in Cambridge, much like the parents in my novel. And I found myself sort of caught between the world of my parents and the world they had left behind and still clung to, and also the world that surrounded me at school and everywhere else, as soon as I set foot out the door.

I overheard people saying, 'She thinks she's so great because she's Debbie Reynolds' daughter!' And I didn't like it; it made me different from other people, and I wanted to be the same.

My parents were attached to Russian culture by a thousand ineradicable ties. But they did not cut me off from American society, nor could they have. I assimilated wholeheartedly, found my parents in many ways embarrassing, and allowed my Russian to decline through neglect.

I wanted to explore Korean-American characters. And 'Columbus' did address that. The father-son dynamic felt very real to me.

I always loved performing, but my parents were very practical, middle-class Jewish people.

My parents never understood why I didn't want to be a doctor or lawyer. They're Cuban immigrants who wanted to give their children the American dream, and, to them, that was more of what 'the dream' entailed.

Chinese parents always think you can do better. But it comes from wanting you to succeed.

It doesn't bother me whether I am or I'm not compared to my dad. I do not feel any pressure at all from being his son.

I think that a lot of the stories I would see was kids who are first-generation immigrants, watching them try to rip themselves from their family and their faith and kind of erase. I hadn't really seen anything where someone's trying to reconcile the two.

I would say the hardest part in the Latino world is approval from your parents. It's such an intense thing.

My parents are proof that arranged marriages can work. It is a great part of my culture but I grew up in a completely different place, so I wouldn't want anyone to arrange a marriage for me.

I was torn between the Americanness my mom wanted for me and the Mexicanness my father wanted - they were wrestling for cultural influence over me.

I'm a different person who's not my father or my mother. I want to be treated differently from them. I am myself, Twinkle Khanna. I am proud of being the daughter of such illustrious parents, but I would not like to be compared with them time and again.

When I was younger, my mother wanted me to look like Claudia Schiffer. I was like, 'We're not even German, but all right.'

Like so many other young South Asians in America, I am the product of two cultures whose conflicting values pull at me with equal urgency. Never have I felt as torn between the two as I do about the question of marriage.

You know, both my parents aren't really from this country, and the emphasis was really on education and studying, and TV seemed like it was not the best use of my time for my parents. So ironically, of course, I rebelled completely and now it's how I make a living.

I was born in Jamaica, my whole family's Jamaican, and they always give me a hard time for being the least Jamaican member of the family. But I think it's their fault for naming me Sarah.

Growing up, I've always felt I was from two different worlds. I was born in the U.S., but my parents were born in Vietnam, and they raised my sisters and I with the parenting methods of the Vietnamese culture.

My parents were immigrants from Pakistan. My father has passed away now, but my father and mother were very proud of Britain, and they have always respected the country and always wanted to make a contribution.

For a lot of children of immigrants, what happens is your parents want you to do something very linear that they can understand. I had an aptitude in sciences and never really questioned it.