Maya Lin Quotes

I only saw one English-speaking person all the way across Siberia.

Family is funny, and so it was not an unnatural thing for me, growing up, not to know anything about my dad or about the Vance side of our family.

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.'

The principal contributor to loneliness in this country is television. What happens is that the family 'gets together' alone.

The Internet has become a bunch of interlinked but linguistically distinct and culturally specific spaces. There's some interface between them, but there's a lot less than there was years back when we were sort of pretending that this was one great global space.

But I am not allowed to speak to foreigners and I am not allowed to leave the country. So I'm not so happy.

Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we've put it in an impossible situation.

My parents had an arranged marriage, as did so many other people when I was growing up. My father came and had a life in the United States one way and my mother had a different one, and I was very aware of those things. I continue to wonder about it, and I will continue to write about it.

My family kept its history to itself. On the plus side, I didn't have to hear nightmarish stories about the Holocaust, the pogroms, terrible illnesses, painful deaths. My elderly parents never even spoke about their ailments.

Since my brother died in 1982, my parents and I had formed a shaky tripod of a family; now that I'd lost my father too, it was too easy for me to glimpse a future point where I alone was the keeper of not just my own childhood memories, but of my family lore.

I didn't grow up with my Kenyan family. I grew up in a small, conservative suburb of Chicago.

It's funny because I remember when I came to the U.S. with 'Swimming Pool,' the movie did well, and it was great box office for a French movie, but I remember I was a bit upset because all people talked to me about was the nudity.

I'm very close to my mother, but not a single other person in my family.

My father is 100% Japanese and came to the United States when he was only 18 years old. My grandmother still resides in Japan, which has allowed me to travel to the roots of my ancestors with my father.

My mom is a translator for the school district in Delaware. She'd hear these different stories from working with families there. Those stories stuck with me.

It's hard to learn about your parents' courtship.

I'm not entirely sure why I write about family, but I do know that it hasn't stopped interesting me. You meet and leave other people at different stages of your evolution, whereas family is made up of people who are constant links in your life, who know you over the course of time and have your complete curriculum vitae in their heads.

No adult in my family would ever tell me anything about who my father was. I knew from an older cousin - only four years older than I am - everything, or what little I could discover about him.

Everybody at home speaks mandarin except me.

Being an only child, I didn't have any other family but my mom and dad really, since the rest of my family lived quite far away from London.

I've never read one book about my father.

I chose a pseudonym, Chris Marker, pronounceable in most languages, because I was very intent on traveling.

I used to work as a tour guide for Americans. I'm convinced that even after four weeks on the road they had no idea where they had been. They were in a bubble.

I was one of the only people of color at my grade school and also my high school. It's weird recollecting on my childhood, I think, because my brothers are all white. We all share the same father but different mothers. I guess I kind of associated white, but I was occasionally reminded in a really negative way that I wasn't.

We need to preserve our cultural peculiarities; however, going to the extreme would lead to cultural isolation