Toyin Odutola Quotes

I was a redhead when I first came to America.

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.

I always identified myself as non-Swedish. I was never discriminated against, because I looked Swedish and speak without an accent. But I had an outsider's perspective.

My whole life, I grew up with this double vision, this vision of America but also Latin community.

There's a big difference between race and culture. Because racially, I'm an Indian man. Culturally, not at all.

Over the course of my life, I have made many transitions - most of them taking me further away from my Somali roots and steadily toward the enlightened mentality of Western democracy.

I exist in this hyphen. I'm an Indian-American-Muslim kid, but am I more Indian, or am I more American? What part of my identity am I?

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 was twice-born. I'm Mexican by nature and Hungarian by nurture.

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

There are several different traits that make up a person's identity. For me, being Vietnamese American is the entirety of who I am.

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.

I didn't really grow up with any traditions. I grew up in a pretty liberal household in Southern California. I think that's part of my interest in thinking about heritage. I don't have a second language or cultural heritage in that way.

While I resonate deeply with my maternal cultural heritage, I identify as American.

The idea of ignoring your past, only to confront it later in life, is a familiar experience whether you come here from Hungary or French Canada or Ireland.

Bearing an eternal longing for Jewishness, I threw myself in all directions and left to work for another people. I am not one of those lucky ones raised in their own environment, whose work is normal.

Irish Americans are no more Irish than Black Americans are Africans.

I'm about as Chinese as Herbert Hoover.

I would not call my family 'traditional Chinese.' We were more what I would term the Colonial Chinese.

I come from an immigrant family, but I know no other nationality apart from British.

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 think of myself as being Jewish and Irish, despite the fact that I'm English.

I was born in Lebanon and emigrated to the U.S. and went back. I'd been raised in a French school in Beirut. Lebanon is a peculiar place, so bicultural it goes along with you. There is a Western influence, an Eastern influence. Most people are fluctuating between those identities.

When I got to Florida, I was a British kid, but I was also an Indian kid: a brown kid with an English accent. Talk about being an outsider. And that's become the theme of a lot of the stuff I write about.

Yeah, I think that's sort of the American way. And it's also the Polish way, it turns out.