Ruby Wax Quotes

In many immigrant families, the parents are just talking and talking about the home country until the children are like, 'Oh, don't tell us any more.'

There are a lot of things that immigrants, especially Chinese-Americans, want to share with their children, but there are a lot of things they don't want to share.

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.

My mum is Croatian, and obviously she's female and she's very emotional, very hot-blooded, very touchy-feely, whereas I think my dad's quite British.

My mother was Canadian, so you never knew what she was thinking.

I can encourage my daughter to love her body, but what really matters are the observations she makes about my relationship with my own body.

My mom won't let anyone treat me like a little princess.

I loved 'Ghana Must Go' by Taiye Selasi. It's about a first-generation African family living in America that has to return home to Nigeria when their estranged father passes away.

It's a complicated thing, knowing how much pain my father caused in my life and the lives of others whom I love, yet still holding love for him in my heart. No matter what he did, he was my father. He helped create the person I am.

My big advantage was to have my father accept me as first-generation.

They had asked for me because they wanted a younger girl, but Mum asked if she could bring Kylie along because she didn't want there to be any jealously.

When I was a kid, I resented my grandparents not speaking the perfect English I wanted to speak.

I always love the soapy conflicts between somebody's family of origin and their new family - 'Do I have Thanksgiving at my husband's parents' house, or at my parents' house?'

I know when I was little, having my Thai mom, even I was weird about fish sauce and fish heads and clams. I kind of sided with my dad because he was a big American guy. So, we were very meat and potatoes, but I really wish I had grown up appreciating my mom's taste a bit more.

My favorite movie is 'Imitation of Life.' It's just a true love story, and it really touched me.

Once you start listening to the comics, be they Jewish, Muslim, Italian, Filipino or whatever, the material often springs from the same source - the overbearing mom, the parents who want you to marry from within your community. That's why the 'Ethnic Show' works so well.

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

One of the biggest things immigrant kids oftentimes feel is this big disparity between our parents and us. And our parents are staunch pragmatists, and I consider myself to be an optimist.

I obeyed my parents' rules inside our Chinese household while I pursued my dreams in the American world outside.

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 dad's side of the family were calm folk from England, but the other side just loved to party. Somewhere between those two factions is me.

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.

My parents are super westernized. My mom listens to western music, my dad was like a pub landlord so he properly embraced English life. But the truth is they both came from tiny villages in Sri Lanka.

When my father came out on stage wearing a big cowboy hat and a shirt lettered 'Bar Mitzvah Ranch' to sing 'Home on the Range' in Yiddish, it was his way of saying, 'I want to be an American.'

I made 'The Farewell' for me, for my family, and for other immigrant children, or children of immigrants, who feel caught in-between two worlds.