Quotes About Assimilation

It makes me sad that our kids are growing up in a country where they are American but, in a sense, have to prove it. They can't just be who they are like everyone else. Who they are is something suspicious, something scary, something misunderstood.

The first time I set foot in Boston City Hall, I felt invisible - swallowed up by the cavernous concrete hallways, and shrunk down even more with every checkpoint and looming government counter. My immigrant family tried to stay away from spaces like these.

When I went to Germany, all I knew were German swear words.

My English was limited to vacationing and not really engaging with Americans. I knew 'shopping' and 'eating' English - I could say 'blue sweater,' 'creme brulee,' and 'Caesar salad,' - so I came here thinking I spoke English.

We have a huge immigration population in Sweden, but when I was younger, I grew up in a small town and, at one point, I was the only foreigner in my class. I really felt different, and I thought I looked different. Sometimes it was a good thing, sometimes I felt insecure.

In Sweden I am considered the Finnish-Norwegian, in Norway Finnish-Swedish, and in Finland Swedish-Norwegian. I've never really belonged anywhere.

My Finnish, it never really happened, but I'm good in Swedish.

I speak Swedish, it's my first language. Of course, growing up with Latin American parents from Argentina, I also have some other influences from other cultures. But Sweden is where I feel the most at home.

I always identified myself as non-Swedish. I was never discriminated against, because I looked Swedish and speak without an accent. But I had an outsider's perspective.

My grandfather always told me, 'You know you're American first, but you're a Greek-American, which makes you a better American.' It sounds sort of old-world and very sweet, but what he meant was that you should embrace those things that are most special and different about you.

People wanted to be friends with me for not the right reasons. They'd introduce me to somebody else as the Olympian or the swimmer. I didn't want to stand out. I wanted to blend in.

In Libya, I did well at school because I was clever. In Egyptian public school, I got the highest marks for the basest of reasons. And in the American school, I struggled. Everything - mathematics, the sciences, pottery, swimming - had to be conducted in a language I hardly knew and that was neither spoken in the streets nor at home.

My experience of Chinese culture is indirect, through echoes. When I approach the cashier at my local Chinese supermarket, they switch to English before I've even said a word. They somehow know that I'm not quite Chinese enough.

It's never easy to switch from one football to another one, from one culture, one language to a new one.

There's parts of Sydney totally indistinguishable from West London. It's exactly the same - the sense of capitulation, discouraging assimilation.

When I grew up, you needed to have straight hair. It's symbolic of needing to be like everyone else, needing to look like everyone else. And what that meant was looking like the dominant ruling class in America.

Culture can be invisible to its natives.

If anyone should be tempted to think that we are exaggerating, he has only to consider, for example, what the so-called religious convictions of many people amount to, namely a few notions learnt by heart, in a purely mechanical and schoolboy way, which they have never assimilated, to which they have never devoted serious thought, but which they store in their memory and repeat on occasion as part of a certain convention or formal attitude which is all they understand by the name of religion.

This is often the way we put together our lives, adding the striking qualities of others into our own character.

One foot remained rooted in our native soil while with our other foot we dug into American soil to anchor ourselves and weather the storm.

the Japanese observe and quietly learn from both.

British and American children are often put in a separate room, right away or after a few weeks or months.

had gone to work in Worcester's famous Washburn & Moen barbed wire factory: Swedes were preferred by employers there because, unlike the Irish, they did not tend to get either fighting drunk or unionized.

A man could get used to anything if he had to.