Quotes About Heritage

When you teach your son, you teach your son's son.

There was a very famous musician in our family. He was a great violinist, an internationally known teacher. He was Leopold Auer.

Both of my mom's parents were music teachers, so I was hearing the fundamentals of playing the piano, what notes are, and all those things very early on.

in Bengal it was so easy to know who was who; more often than not, just to hear someone's name would reveal their religion, their caste, their village.

ON THE BANKS of every great river you'll find a monument to excess." Kanai recalled the list of examples Nirmal had provided to prove this: the opera house of Manaus, the temple of Karnak, the ten thousand pagodas of Pagan. In the years since, he had visited many of those places, and it made him laugh to think his uncle had insisted that Canning too had a place on that list: "The mighty Matla's monument is Port Canning.

From the older ox the younger learns to plough.

in appearance and background

She whirls around and around in her red English stockings and white moccasins, her cloak of wampum and feathers flying out around her like the wings of a great hawk.

People there only dream that it is China, because if you are Chinese you can never let go of China in your mind.

It's my fault she is this way. I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these two things do not mix?

This is how a daughter honors her mother. It is shou so deep it is in your bones. The pain of the flesh is nothing. The pain you must forget. Beacuse sometimes that is the only way to remember what is in your bones. You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother before her. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh.

For a long time now the woman had wanted to give her daughter the single swan feather and tell her, 'This feather may look worthless, but it comes from afar and carries with it all my good intentions.' And she waited, year after year, for the day she could tell her daughter this in perfect American English.

Precious Auntie, what is our name? I always meant to claim it as my own. Come help me remember. I'm not a little girl anymore. I'm not afraid of ghosts. Are you still mad at me? Don't you recognize me? I am LuLing, your daughter.

Joy Luck was an idea my mother remembered from the days of her first marriage in Kweilin, before the Japanese came. That's why I think of Joy Luck as her Kweilin story.

In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English.

I threw my head back and smiled proudly to myself. And then I draped the large embroidered red scarf over my face and covered these thoughts up. But underneath the scarf I still knew who I was. I made a promise to myself: I would always remember my parents' wishes, but I would never forget myself.

I think about our two faces. I think about my intentions. Which one is American? Which one is Chinese? Which one is better? If you show one, you must always sacrifice the other.

Together we look like our mother. Her same eyes, her same mouth, open in surprise to see, at last, her long-cherished wish.

Anyone can have original style," he countered. "And yet no one truly does. We're influenced by those who came before us, beginning with the painters thousands of years ago who imitated nature.

Fate once made you American. Fate took it away.

She says she is Irish—Nell O'Connor, but she was born in Latvia and talks like a Greek.

We 'preserve' folk songs, at the same time that our way of life destroys the singer…we are proud of our museums, where we display the damning evidence of a way of life that we have made impossible.

The Vanderbilt story somehow manages to be both unique and also, deeply, universally American.

Hard to imagine that the man who made the Gilded Age according to his whims and who died on the cusp of the twentieth century had a great-grandfather born the same year as the Salem witch trials, but such are the long spans of generations.