Kelvin Yu Quotes

When I was 17, I came to the U.S. to study Middle Eastern history and politics at Columbia University.

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.

I grew up in a close-knit community where I was expected to excel, and it was a different experience when I got to the university. There were very few students of color, and those numbers were extremely low in the school of engineering.

In the fall of 1978, I left the religious, conservative, biracial, slow-paced culture of South Carolina for the secular, liberal, multi-ethnic, intense culture of Princeton University. Like most immigrants, I was looking for a better life in a place I only half understood.

I'm a first-generation American, so I had friends from several cultures while growing up, including Indian and Iranian friends.

Because I was aspirational, I did my work, I was respectful to my teachers, I experienced a lot of bullying from the black kids. My friends were largely white or Asian.

I saw an opportunity to use a restaurant to identify a lot of my issues and concerns with being an immigrant in America, and Asian in America, and a young person in America.

The only time I used to feel like an outsider was when I first went to India.

It is an agreeable and yet a painful sense of novelty to stand for the first time in the midst of a people whose language and manners are different from one's own.

I had a hard time when I came back to Sweden and started school, because I looked different. And we moved to a really small town on the west coast of Sweden, and there were no brown people around. It didn't really get any better until I started music school at about 10 years old.

My parents wanted their daughters to reach their full potential. I joke that they said, 'We left our homeland so you could pursue your dreams - as long as you're a lawyer, a doctor, or an engineer.'

I made it to London aged six, an event I recorded in my diary with coloured markers to convey my sense of occasion. And in 1983, after graduating from college, I returned to spend two years at Cambridge University.

I was 13 when my parents moved to Israel, and I was put in a Scottish mission school. Ninety-nine percent of the children were Israeli... Suddenly, I found myself speaking the wrong language, dressed in the wrong clothes, picked up by the wrong mode of transportation - an embassy car instead of a bus.

This story is based on a gentleman who indeed did... used to come to my parents' house in 1971 from Bangladesh. He was at the University of Rhode Island. And I was four, four years old, at the time, and so I actually don't have any memories of this gentleman.

When I came to America in 1978, I was a huge sports fan - the problem was, my sport was cricket. Shockingly enough, no one wanted to talk cricket with me!

Everybody in Spain is sick of me. But in America, there's curiosity about the new kid on the block who doesn't speak English very well. The attention makes me feel vulnerable, which is something I hadn't felt in a while. But I like it.

As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past.

I understand what it's like to come with your family, and to uproot yourself and come to another culture. You need a lot of support. People say, 'She's got her daughter; she's got her husband.' Yeah, but she hasn't got anyone else.

My family is Chilean, and I was born there. By the time I was four, we were living in San Antonio, Texas, and I just remember picking a blue bonnet and getting yelled at by some guy with a sheriff hat and a badge. I was traumatized. He told me it was the state flower, and I wasn't supposed to be messin' with it.

Staying in China provided me with the opportunity to adjust to life outside of North Korea and to gain a sense of perspective, most importantly, by learning that so much of what I had been taught about my country was a lie.

I am the child of Indian immigrants, both of whom have Ph.D.s and are college professors, and I'm an actor in Hollywood.

I'm Egyptian, and my parents stupidly decided to move us down to South Carolina when I was five, which was pretty brutal.

LeBron had never interacted with white people before St. Vincent.

My dad looked like Errol Flynn, and I think my mom thought she was moving into a hacienda, but they lived on a dirt street in Tijuana, a house jammed with relatives, nobody speaking English. She didn't know a word of Spanish. She grew up well and was appalled and humiliated, terrified of anyone ethnic.

My biggest struggle was probably having to move from the Dominican to the United States to go to high school. Moving to Michigan, the weather, the language, I didn't speak English at all. That adjustment for me was difficult at the beginning.