Quotes About Assimilation

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).

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

I came to understand that in the United States, land of the fabled American dream, it is un-American to be a refugee. The refugee embodies fear, failure, and flight. Americans of all kinds believe that it is impossible for an American to become a refugee, although it is possible for refugees to become Americans and in that way be elevated one step closer to heaven.

in America it was all or nothing when it came to race. You were either white or you weren't. Funnily enough, I had never felt inferior because of my race during my foreign student days. I was foreign by definition and therefore was treated as a guest. But now, even though I was a card-carrying American with a driver's license, Social Security card, and resident alien permit, Violet still considered me as foreign, and

We threatened the sanctity and symmetry of a white and black America whose yin and yang racial politics left no room for any other color, particularly that of pathetic little yellow-skinned people pickpocketing the American purse.

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

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.

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?

White people love you, don't they? They only like me. They think I'm a dainty little china doll with bound feet, a geisha who's ready to please. But I don't talk enough for them to love me, or at least I don't talk the right way. I can't put on the whole sukiyaki-and-sayonara show they love, the chopsticks in the hair kind of mumbo jumbo, all that Suzie Wong bullshit, like every white man who comes along is William Holden or Marlon Brando, even if he looks like Mickey Rooney.

So why are we supposed to not forget our culture? Isn't my culture right here since I was born here?

Americans of all kinds believe that it is impossible for an American to become a refugee, although it is possible for refugees to become Americans and in that way be elevated one step closer to heaven.

There was no need for the French to condemn us. So long as we spoke in their language, we condemned ourselves.

consumed by the metastasizing cancer called assimilation and susceptible to the hypochondria of exile.

The seed is put in the ground, and earth and air and water are placed around it. Does the seed become the earth; or the air, or the water? No. It becomes a plant, it develops after the law of its own growth, assimilates the air, the earth, and the water, converts them into plant substance, and grows into a plant.

I never found accents difficult, after learning languages.

We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

I just pretended I was someone else until that someone else became me.

See, American boyfriend? Eventually I am not so stupid a Croatian Catholic shiksa woman. I even learn to say 'ain't.

But now, except for a county in Alabama where the citizens voted no on a referendum, I believe the poor goy cannot elude the bagel anywhere in America.

no hay vanidad mayor que esforzarse en tragarse enteros los sistemas morales elaborados por los demás, bajo otros cielos.

I grew up very American but also fully Asian.

I feel like there's this need that the Asian-American community has to feel like people. It's something that Asians in Asia do not understand about us.

I think mine's such a mish-mash now: I get criticised for sounding like a Yank when I come home, and everybody thinks I'm Australian when I'm in America.