Quotes About Culture

A grown person in Tahiti has an eating hour allotted to him twice a day, at 10 A.M. and 5 P.M.

This is it. The root of it all. The real history of yellow people in America. Two hundred years of being perpetual foreigners.

cut us off from our families, our history. So we made it our own place - Chinatown. A place for preservation and self-preservation; give them what they feel what's right, is safe; make it fit the idea of what is out there..Chinatown and indeed being chinese is and always has been, from the very beginning a construction,a performance of features, gestures, culture and exoticism, invention/reinvention of stylization.

because the idea was you came here, your parents and their parents and their parents, and you always seem to have just arrived and yet never seem to have actually arrived. You're here, supposedly, in a new land full of opportunity, but somehow have gotten trapped in a pretend version of the old country.

But the experience of Asians in America isn't just a scaled-back or dialed-down version of the Black experience. Instead of co-opting someone else's experience or consciousness, he must define his own.

Is it true that you have an internalized sense of inferiority? What? That because on the one hand you, for obvious reasons, have not been and can never be fully assimilated into mainstream,

After two centuries here, why are we still not Americans? Why do we keep falling out of the story?

The son who got As in every subject, including English, now making a living as Generic Asian Man.

They don't know what they want. They want cool Asian shit.

Maybe it's the dream of the open highway. The romantic myth of the West. A reminder that these funny little Orientals have actually been Americans longer than you have.

There's just something about Asians that makes reality a little too real, overcomplicates the clarity, the duality, the clean elegance of BLACK and WHITE, the proven template and so the decision is made not in some overarching conspiracy to exclude Asians but because it's just easier to keep it how we have it.

The emperor's job was to present these plastic trays of steaming delicacies to a family of blond people somewhere in the middle of America, and then to bow to them, while off-screen, in the shadows, a gong sounded (and further off-screen, in the mists of history, you could hear the collective weeping of a civilization going back five thousand years).

It's not clear if he can dunk (no one's ever seen him try) but he can definitely grab the rim and that alone is pretty impressive given that he's five eleven and three-quarters. —Which, for the record, is the perfect height for an Asian dude. Tall enough for women to notice (even in heels! even White women!), tall enough to not get ignored by the bartender, but not so tall to get called Yao Ming and considered some kind of Mongolian freak.

To be yellow in America...a special guest star, forever the guest. Fade to black.

The great shame of your life that you can't speak his language, not really, not fluently.

LOVE STORY FOR A GENERIC ASIAN MAN???

He says something you don't quite follow. You hear it, you catch most of the individual words, and yet somehow--you don't understand. This gap, always there. Somehow unbridgeable, whether it's across a wide Pacific gulf of language and culture, or just a simple sentence, father to son, always distance. The texture of everyday actions, simple movements and gestures, is harder than it looks. The great shame of your life that you can't speak his language, not really, not fluently.

if you travel with an open mind and a good heart, and remain respectful of the country you're in, then you should be fine.

On clubbers: They were all photographing themselves. In fact, that's all they seemed to be doing. Standing around in expensive clothes, snapping away with phones and cameras. One pose after another, as though they needed to prove their own existence, right there, in the moment. Crucially, this seemed to be the reason they were there in the first place. There was very little dancing. Just pouting and flashbulbs.

Celebrity' is increasingly the only role the media can process,

I don't think the real America is in New York or on the Pacific Coast; personally, I like the Middle West much better, places like North and South Dakota, Minneapolis and Saint Paul. There, I think, are the true Americans

Tea? Good God, no. It's mud. How the British ever built an empire drinking the filthy stuff is beyond me. And if we carry on drinking it, I've no doubt that the empire won't last much longer. No, a civilized person drinks coffee.

his native Russian, 'Do svidanja.' 'Do svidanja.

The only difference between Detroit and the Third World in terms of corruption is Detroit don't have no goats in the streets.