Jenny Zhang Quotes

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

The immigrant experience had a profound effect on me. It taught me the importance of hard work and the value of being entrepreneurial.

We'd only speak Korean at home. They wouldn't let us have sleepovers and sent us away to Korean church camp during the summers. We had weird food concoctions, too, so instead of spaghetti bolognese, we had rice bolognese with kimchi.

Once you start listening to the comics, be they Jewish, Muslim, Italian, Filipino or whatever, the material often springs from the same source - the overbearing mom, the parents who want you to marry from within your community. That's why the 'Ethnic Show' works so well.

I'm Cuban. My parents are immigrants.

I grew up in L.A. in a school that was diverse, but it was not really integrated, so I didn't ever fully fit in with the black girls or the white girls or the Latina girls.

Increasingly I feel like a Jew, an immigrant, a Russian - anything but a normal, mainstream American.

This first-generation narrative keeps happening over and over and over again, whether it was Irish or Jewish or our community, South Asians, Japanese-Americans, Mexican-Americans. We've all gone through this sort of bridge, and it will continue to happen.

All American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction.

I really got the 'Rhoda' flavor from studying my stepmother, Angela, who's Italian, not Jewish. There's really so little difference between the speech patterns and family attitudes of Jews and Italians in the New York area, anyway.

I'm very proud of the Italian heritage of my great-grandparents, who came here from Italy, and how they helped be a part of the American Dream, and that's something we want to continue to make available to everybody who wants to come here.

I am white. I am Jewish. I am an immigrant. I am a Russian American. But until recently I haven't focused so much on those parts of my identity. I've always thought of myself simply as a normal, unhyphenated American.

When you are in America, at least for me, as an immigrant, I try to be as Americanized as I could. I just want to be an actor, I don't just want to be an Asian actor necessarily.

Being an immigrant myself, but feeling very American, and also being the child of immigrants, I understand the feeling of wanting a home.

I am second-generation American, and my grandparents are from Puerto Rico.

I consider myself Russian-American because I'm American by ethnicity and by passport, but I spent all my forming years over in the former Soviet Union in a Russian school. I never went to an American school. There was a lot of culture shock when I moved back to the States when I was 17.

As a child growing up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, my connection to my Indian roots came from summer visits to New Delhi where my grandparents lived.

I think the narrative of people being caught between two cultures as immigrants is very harmful. It's exclusionary. It essentially tries to argue that some Americans are more real than others.

I'm a first-generation American. My parents are from Nigeria. I had this weird last name that looked Japanese, and then people would see me and go, 'Oh. You're not Japanese.'

I think everyone is kind of an immigrant somehow, and I wasn't raised in an American society at home. My household was a Jamaican household, so I got all my traditions, all my roots and culture intact, so I'm able to support both countries.

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.

My parents were immigrants from Pakistan. My father has passed away now, but my father and mother were very proud of Britain, and they have always respected the country and always wanted to make a contribution.

My parents were first-generation immigrants. My mum wore a sari but at school and as a teenager and in my 20s I wanted to fit in.

Being an immigrant gives you so much courage.

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