Fawad Khan Quotes

My family's journey is something I am very proud of - in front of me, behind me and every part.

I'm not Chinese, but both of my parents were born in Iran; my brother and I were the first ones born here. First in our family to go to college, that whole thing.

I'm the grandson of immigrants who came across rivers and oceans to get here, some without documentation.

My father is Hungarian and moved to Britain during the uprising, and my Spanish mum comes from Galicia; they moved here at the end of the Fifties.

I part of this great nation because my grandfather was born here, in Cincinnati, Ohio. He took a horse, back in 1895, and ride it all the way down to Guanajuato, looking for his American dream. No penny in his pocket, only dreams in his head. And he was an immigrant coming from the States into Mexico. And he found his American dream in Mexico.

I came to America, and I made good. It's an old story, but it hasn't been told in a long time. Usually, it's, 'I'm an immigrant, I came here and got persecuted.' My story is I came here, I worked hard, and it worked out all right. So it's still available.

My father was an immigrant from Russia and my mother was first generation.

My father started with nothing and is a self-made man. No matter what I do with my life, I can never match his accomplishments.

My parents emigrated from Poland in 1924 with my brother, who was a few months old. They were from a simple family of Polish Jews. They were looking, I suppose, for a better economic life and were escaping from an anti-Semitic environment.

My grandfather worked in a shoe factory - he was an Italian immigrant. My father was the first to go to college in the family.

My grandparents used to tell me stories about their trip to Ellis Island from Russia and life on the Lower East Side of New York.

I'm a daughter of the middle class with a strong sense of social mobility and individualism, like the waves of immigrants, like my Spanish grandparents, who made Argentina.

My father was a Jewish immigrant who settled in Argentina and was left to his own devices at the age of 15. My mother was a teacher, herself the daughter of a poor immigrant family.

My mother was a full-time mom, and Dad started his own business. He was a mini-American dream story. Came from Russia at age 4, started his own pen business in Brooklyn. The company isn't around now, but he created his own healthy little world, leaving a decent legacy. My dad taught at Cooper Union but was never fully graduated himself.

Almost any American can connect on some level to a family background of having come across some ocean. They say, 'My great-grandparents came from wherever... this is why we have this last name, why we do this thing at Christmas.' All the details get watered down but don't quite disappear.

My great grandfather emigrated from Italy, and my grandfather worked in a steel mill and was able to raise kids and have a family and go on vacation.

As little boys, my brother and I used to spend hours with my grandmother, asking her about the details of how she came to America. She could only give us a smattering of details, but they all found their way into our collective imagination, eventually becoming a part of our own cultural identity and connection to the past.

My parents were migrants and I experienced first hand the challenges they had to overcome. If they hadn't decided to seek a better life elsewhere, I could never have aspired to become the person I am now.

While my mother is from Jammu, my father was originally from Afghanistan, as my grandfather was the governor of five provinces there, including Herat.

Mum was born in 1938 in Guyana and came to Britain at the end of the 60s. She settled in Tottenham, north London, and worked for London Transport and then as a home help, a care assistant and finally a local authority officer. Bringing up five children singlehandedly with little money can't have been easy, but she did it with tremendous style.

The business of being told to earn a dollar, that no one is going to give you anything - that was kind of my mantra throughout my childhood, and now it's in my adult life. I find that people really tend to relate to the immigrant father, whether he be Italian, Greek, Spanish or whatever.

My grandfather was an undocumented immigrant. My great-grandmother, my bisabuela, carried him over the border in her arms.

I was the first of my siblings born here in the United States.

Before the music and before the fame, I loved Apl for Allan Pineda, for being a brother that he is and for the inspiration - for him to actually come to the States from the Philippines and make something of his life. That's inspirational.

My passion is from my mom. She was passionate about leaving Germany and coming to America and making a life for her and her family. My father - discipline, a chain of command, it works this way.