Quotes About Assimilation

I self-deprecate. When I first got here two years ago, I didn't realise that in America you can't go into the room and put yourself down.

As I got older, I realised that people saw me as other things - sometimes Korean, sometimes Japanese, sometimes just Asian. When my family moved to a more affluent white neighbourhood, I started to see myself as 'other', this amorphous category. I didn't even know what 'not other' was, but I knew I wasn't it; I wasn't what was normal.

I always felt that I wasn't as American as Americans and then I realised when I got back to the Philippines that I was not Filipino.

I came here from Romania when I was 12 years old. I had an accent. High school was tough a little bit for a few years. I wanted to fit in. I wanted to be liked. I wanted to be good-looking. I wanted to be popular. I spent a lot of time thinking, 'What are these people going to think of me?'

They've lived here now for more than half of their lives, and they raised a family here and now have grandchildren here... It has become their home, but at the same time, for my parents, I don't think either of them will ever consciously think, 'I am an American.'

All my friends had grandparents who had accents. I thought all grandparents were supposed to have accents. My friends were all second-generation, as I was.

To create greater convergence, we need more intergration.

When I came to this country, people told me that if I wanted to teach and work here, I would have to take speech lessons to lose my accent. But it helped me greatly, because when people turned on the radio, they knew it was me.

I understand Christmas, and I understand Easter. But Halloween is one of those things where, if you don't grow with it? The French, they tried Halloween for a few years, and I think they're dropping it.

At West Ham there were a couple of French players and they helped me get used to the team and the club.

All the best of you is in the old tongue, but when you speak your best in America you become a yokel, a dumb Norskie, and when you speak English, an idiot.

It's just a passing thing,' Vishnu had told me about his girlfriend's beliefs. 'It's like their way of assimilating into the West. It's like a social club. One more generation, it'll be over.

1979. Coming to America after a childhood spent in the Soviet Union is equivalent to stumbling off a monochromatic cliff and landing in a pool of pure Technicolor.

There, I was ridiculed for being an inauthentic American, and now I am being charged with being an inauthentic Russian. I do not yet understand that this very paradox is the true subject of so-called immigrant fiction.

Every author who straddles culture is inauthentic in a way.

HOSTESS. Oh, nonsense! She speaks English perfectly. NEPOMMUCK. Too perfectly. Can you shew me any English woman who speaks English as it should be spoken? Only foreigners who have been taught to speak it speak it well.

If you want to slip into a round hole, you must make a ball of yourself—that's where it is.

to bring a furrin child into the coonthry; an' depend on't, whether you an' me lives to see't or noo, it'll coom to soom harm. The first sitiation iver I held—it was a hold hancient habbey, wi' the biggest orchard o' apples an' pears you ever see—there was a French valet, an' he stool silk stoockins, an' shirts, an' rings, an' iverythin' he could ley his hands on, an' run awey at last wi' th' missis's jewl-box. They're all alaike, them furriners. It roons i' th' blood.

I always wonder whether I'll get treated differently with a different accent.

I was brought up bilingual, but there came a point where my mom went back to work and I got a white babysitter, so sadly I lost it. Now I can understand Spanish and put words together, but I don't speak it fluently. I'm ashamed of that.

Of course, preserving the American dream has always meant creating opportunity for the most recently arrived Americans - those who have come here from other parts of the globe to work hard and build a new, better life.

Government doesn't do much for the new Americans. The assumption is that they'll take care of themselves if they work hard enough.

I think we always move from imitation to assimilation to innovation, but I can't name you 20 people outside those we've already recognized who ever got to point three: innovation.

American society to me and my brother was thrilling because, first of all, the food made noise. We were so excited about Rice Krispies and Coca-Cola. We had only silent food in our country, and we loved listening to our lunch and breakfast.