Miguel Syjuco Quotes

I see the American experience as being defined by the immigrant paradigm of rupture and renewal: rupture with the old world, the old ways, and renewal of the self in a bright but difficult New World.

I want people to experience what it's like being from Haiti, coming to America, being Wyclef - multicultural, multilingual.

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.

I have a variety of readers from across the diasporic community, not just from South Asia. I like to write large stories that include all of us - about common and cohesive experiences which bring together many immigrants, their culture shocks, transformations, concepts of home and self in a new land.

I haven't written about an immigrant experience because I haven't experienced that before and am focused on existential themes.

Being an immigrant gives you so much courage.

My mother is a German who was brought up in the U.K. So, there is so much cross-cultural exposure I had as a child. But Mumbai is my city.

I've never left China. My family's been there for 600 years. But my architecture is not consciously Chinese in any sense. I'm a western architect.

My parents are Italian and British. They live in Berkeley now - we all moved there four years ago.

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

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.

Well, I have a Norwegian father who emigrated to America in the 1950s, and he still speaks with varying degrees of an accent. Over my lifetime my ear has been well-tuned to that accent. Any first generation kid has that wonderful gift from their parents.

I was a redhead when I first came to America.

I'm first generation in the country - my family's Mexican.

The generation that migrated to the West in the 1970s or 1960s has now lived more in the West than India, and India has changed so much. My parents fall into that category.

When I think of my work, I'm aware that I'm American and African at all points and times. And without a doubt, my experience and understanding of America was shaped by having immigrant parents.

I'm a first generation American. My mother is Italian and Russian and a lot of other things, and my father is Uruguayan. In fact, my mother's been married twice, and both men were Uruguayan. So I grew up in a very European/Latin American-influenced home.

I'm an immigrant and I've always wanted to write something about America.

My work has been much more Caribbean and eclectic. I am interested in people, and where they come from happens to have fallen within an area of Africa.

I knew I had to write about Canada. I just could not find in literature any examples of the immigrant experience that I've had.

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'm a first-generation kid in this country. I so identify with America and its culture. I'm a citizen, I was born here. I'm American. At the same time, like most first-generation kids, I have this other identity to another country back home, which is India.

As an immigrant, I learned by watching other people.

During the tour of 'Circulations,' we spent a lot of time in Canadian Chinatowns. I was fascinated by the idea that you can cross the road and enter this dream world, this vision of China.

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.