Quotes About Assimilation

To make my waking life American-normal, I turn on the lights before anything untoward makes an appearance. I push the deformed into my dreams, which are in Chinese, the language of impossible stories. Before we can leave our parents, they stuff our heads like the suitcases which they jam-pack with homemade underwear.

In an unfamiliar culture, it is wise to offer no innovations, no suggestions, or lessons. The epitome of sophistication is utter simplicity.

What kind of name is Paolo, anyway? I mean, this is America, for Pete's sake! YOUR NAME IS PAUL!!!

It took her longer to find out that Oscar Sierra was absorbing every scrap of information from his environment, then running it through some mental algorithm that helped him figure out how to survive in hostile, unloving territory.

She's fifth-generation Mexican American, which means she learned Spanish in class just like I did.

I read somewhere that a lot of kids of immigrants grow up quickly and are given more responsibility than other kids. Their parents tend to depend on them, mostly because the kids can speak the language better and can act as a conduit to mainstream American society. The child becomes the parent, and the parent, the child.

It didn't matter that Amelia was fluent in Mandarin and could code as well as a first-year at Peking University, she was still treated like her mother: as an interloper.

It's insane to think how fast the unthinkable becomes the normal.

Pretend long enough that you belong, and eventually even you will believe it. - Gallen

I'm partly somebody else trying to fit in and say the right things and do the right thing and be in the right place and wear what everybody else is wearing. Sometimes I think we're all trying to be shadows of each other, trying to buy the same records and everything even if we don't like them.

Lady stand on line before me, speak English so good, like genius, in America only four years, I ashamed tell twenty-two years; I tell twenty!" To class she went only once. "I don't go back," she said emphatically. "Too foolish book, Dick and Jane." She shrugged disdainfully. "Not Tolstoi!

Since the notion that we should all forsake attachment to race and/or cultural identity and be "just humans" within the framework of white supremacy has usually meant that subordinate groups must surrender their identities, beliefs, values, and assimilate by adopting the values and beliefs of privileged-class whites, rather than promoting racial harmony this thinking has created a fierce cultural protectionism.

A Frenchman! Where did you pick up that expression? Are these Burgundians and Bretons and Picards and Gascons beginning to call themselves Frenchmen, just as our fellows are beginning to call themselves Englishmen? They actually talk of France and England as their countries. Theirs, if you please! What is to become of me and you if that way of thinking comes into fashion?

When men assimilate themselves to machines and value only the consequences of their work, not the work itself, style disappears, to be replaced by something which to the mechanised man appears more natural, though in fact is only more brutal.

Another effect of compulsion in education is that it destroys originality and intellectual interest. Desire for knowledge, at any rate for a good deal of knowledge, is natural to the young, but is generally destroyed by the fact that they are given more than they desire or can assimilate.

Becoming aware of foreign customs, however, does not always have a beneficial effect. In the 17th Century, when the Manchus conquered China, it was the custom among the Chinese for the women to have small feet, and among the Manchus for the men to wear pigtails. Instead of each dropping their own foolish custom, they each adopted the foolish custom of the other, and the Chinese continued to wear pigtails until they shook off the domination of the Manchus in the revolution of 1911.

To become an American citizen, we require people to read, write and speak in English. That is to help them to assimilate in our melting pot, truly to become Americans. We mock that when the cherished right to vote does not involve English any more.

I didn't want kabobs, Afghan music, and rules that required girls to be carefully monitored. I wanted mac and cheese, country music, and independence.

Although an increasing proportion of the Hispanic population is foreign-born - about half of adults in this group - English proficiency is and should remain a requirement for citizenship.

It is the purpose of the majority of the Immigration Committee to encourage assimilation, yet this bill has already done more than anything I know of to bring about discord among our resident aliens.

I want to live in a Britain whose residents are determined to speak English.

When I first arrived in the country, I really didn't speak much of the language. I knew two words coming here, and they were 'Hello' and 'Shut up.'

My siblings and I are known as ABCs, American-born Chinese.

I'm so sick of people misunderstanding Asians in America and what we're about.