Quotes About Culture

We instinctively knew that in order for Americans to find refugees like us acceptable, they first had to find our food digestible (not to mention affordable and pronounceable).

We were not a people who charged into war at the beck and call of bugle or trumpet. No, we fought to the tunes of love songs, for we were the Italians of Asia.

part spy thriller, part cultural and political reclamation, The Sympathizer

even if staging a culture show was really an acknowledgement of one's cultural inferiority. The truly powerful rarely needed to put on a show, since their culture was always everywhere. Americans knew their culture was ubiquitous, whether burgers or bombs.

It wouldn't do to bring infectious ideas into a country unused to them.

Don't you see that the Americans need the anti-American?

One must listen to them carefully to understand that while pain is universal, it is also utterly private. We cannot know whether our pain is like anybody else's pain until we talk about it. Once we do that, we speak and think in ways cultural and individual.

Saigon had also changed names after it changed hands, but they couldn't bring themselves to call it Ho Chi Mind City. Neither could the taxi driver who ferried them from their hotel to the house, even though he was too young to remember a time when the city was officially Saigon.

The American Dream was so simple and so optimistic that it required no psychoanalysis, no deep sea-diving. It was as shallow, boring, and sentimental as a bad television show that had somehow become a hit.

As with the Westerner, the Easterner was never so bored as he was when on his own shores.

No, we fought to the tunes of love songs, for we were the Italians of Asia.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

To be anti-American only makes you a reactionary. In our case, having defeated the Americans, we no longer defined ourselves as anti-American. We are simply one hundred percent Vietnamese.

We cannot know whether our pain is like anybody else's pain until we talk about it. Once we do that, we speak and think in ways cultural and individual. In this country, for example, someone fleeing for his life will think he should call for the police. This is a reasonable way to cope with the threat of pain. But in my country, no one calls for the police, since it is often the police who inflict the pain.

I cleared my throat of a sour taste, the gastric reflux of my confused Oriental and Occidental insides.

I, for one, am a person who believes that the world would be a better place if the word "murder" made us mumble as much as the word "masturbation.

To avoid talking, we both smoked incessantly and listened to a greatest hits tape of Johnny Hallyday, the sonic equivalent of Ricard Pastis, a taste the rest of the world could not acquire.

I was doing my best imitation of a Third World child on one of those milk cartons passed around elementary schools for American children to deposit their pennies and dimes in order to help poor Alejandro, Abdullah, or Ah Sing have a hot lunch and an immunization. And I was thankful, truly! But I was also one of those unfortunate cases who could not help but wonder whether my need for American charity was due to my having first been the recipient of American aid.

As for the Vietnamese who stayed in France, French culture had chewed on them since they were in Vietnam. By the time they came to France, they were already, like certain species of cheese, quite soft and easily digestible, qualities inherited by their ideologically pasteurized children.

Ah, the Amerasian, forever caught between worlds and never knowing where he belongs! Imagine if you did not suffer from the confusion you must constantly experience, feeling the constant tug-of-war inside you and over you, between Orient and Occident.

I lay down and imagined we slumbered like soldiers even though the only place near Chinatown where one could buy bunk beds was the children's section of gaudy furniture stores, overseen by Mexicans or people who looked like Mexicans. I could not tell anyone from the Southern Hemisphere apart but assumed they would take no offense, given that they themselves called me Chino to my face.

Even poor people in America had refrigerators, not to mention running water, flush toilets, and twenty-four-hour electricity, amenities that even some of the middle class did not have back home. Why, then, did I feel poor?

And sometimes a Pearl of the Orient could be a Paris of the Orient as well. The Parisians and the French and just about everyone meant that as a compliment, but it was a backhanded compliment, the only kind a colonizer could give to the colonized.

If I'm unreadable—if all these Asians you refer to are unreadable—perhaps we are only unreadable to those who do not know how to read. Semantics—