Patrick Chan Quotes

II grew up in Australia, but I'm not from there originally. Like, my dad's South American, so I know what that's like to grow up in a culture that's not your own.

I love having different cultures around, but when the parent culture kind of dissipates, you're left thinking, 'Well, what's going on?'

Explain to me what Italian-American culture is. We've been here 100 years. Isn't Italian-American culture American culture? That's because we're so diverse, in terms of intermarriage.

I just grew up in the States, so I feel like I identify more with the American culture.

I have Asian friends - second generation - and I am the worst in terms of being in touch with my heritage.

With immigrant parents, they've had to sacrifice so much to survive, and they're trying to preserve the culture they lost, so there are just so many boundaries.

Even with my family, I feel sort of 'other.' I'm the only one of my siblings who wasn't born in Jamaica. For a long time, I didn't feel very connected to Jamaican culture, but because I was raised so heavily with that cultural influence, I realized that my inner monologue is a Jamaican woman.

Growing up, my parents were very much about the Egyptian culture. They never really wanted to assimilate in American culture.

We have taken so much from your culture, I wish you had taken something from ours...For there were some beautiful and good things within it. Perhaps now that the time has come, We are fearful that what you take will be lost.... I shall grab the instruments of the white man's success: His education, his skills, and society.

We are taking our culture and suturing it to America. Like gum on the bottom of a shoe, we are not going to disappear. Unlike other peoples who totally assimilated, we are more interested in co-assimilation.

Now, I know it's a widespread assumption in the West that as countries modernize, they also westernize. This is an illusion. It's an assumption that modernity is a product simply of competition, markets and technology. It is not. It is also shaped equally by history and culture. China is not like the West, and it will not become like the West.

Most of my life I was occupied with American television and American food. My ethnicity was my choice. It still is.

This happens to a lot of kids from different backgrounds - they lose a lot of their parents' and grandparents' teachings, language and culture because they have to deal with another language and culture 24/7. By the time I was 44, I was terrible at Spanish. I was always intimidated whenever I had to speak it.

The Indian community in Canada has integrated much better than the Indian community in United States. They've become really Canadian at the same time as keeping all their Indian characters and customs and social groups.

I didn't grow up with my Kenyan family. I grew up in a small, conservative suburb of Chicago.

Canada is a country of ingredients without a cuisine; we're a country with musicians without an indigenous instrument; Toronto's a city that doesn't even have a dish named after it.

Over the course of my life, I have made many transitions - most of them taking me further away from my Somali roots and steadily toward the enlightened mentality of Western democracy.

What will remain of our cultural identity if audiovisual Europe consists of ... sitting in front of Japanese TV sets showing American programs.

The Iraqis have a country that inherited cultures thousands of years old while the Americans have a culture only two hundred years old. Two hundred years will teach thousands of years? Oh Americans, leave Iraq for its people.

My parents came from Calcutta. They arrived in Cambridge, much like the parents in my novel. And I found myself sort of caught between the world of my parents and the world they had left behind and still clung to, and also the world that surrounded me at school and everywhere else, as soon as I set foot out the door.

American histories were the same; they had these mad ideas about how Parliament worked, or what people really meant when they said A, B, or C. All my life, I felt simultaneously deracinated and rooted in both places, and now it's my greatest strength: I'm culturally bilingual.

If we deny our culture and become nothing and everything, that weakens us.

I lived for 30 years in the U.S., but always kept my Islamic and Iranian culture and customs... even now, western lifestyle feels strange to me.

During the tour of 'Circulations,' we spent a lot of time in Canadian Chinatowns. I was fascinated by the idea that you can cross the road and enter this dream world, this vision of China.

I think everyone is kind of an immigrant somehow, and I wasn't raised in an American society at home. My household was a Jamaican household, so I got all my traditions, all my roots and culture intact, so I'm able to support both countries.