Seinabo Sey Quotes

I think that when you sequester yourself, when you put yourself into another area where you can't be part of the main traditional culture you're limiting your possibilities in the United States and I think that's one problem.

I saw an opportunity to use a restaurant to identify a lot of my issues and concerns with being an immigrant in America, and Asian in America, and a young person in America.

I've moved around so much my whole life, and I've gotten so used to being the Other in situations - the foreigner, the outsider. The first time I've ever felt like there was no separation between me and the other elements was in music.

… the Russian is a delightful person till he tucks in his shirt. As an Oriental he is charming. It is only when he insists upon being treated as the most easterly of western peoples, instead of the most westerly of easterns, that he becomes a racial anomaly extremely difficult to handle.

I'm different. I don't speak perfect American. I do have a lilt of an Indian accent. I thought, 'Maybe the world's not okay with what I bring, being Indian.'

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.

I'm excited to share my experience as an immigrant assimilating to a new country and an outsider stumbling my way into Hollywood.

Just because you came here in 1880, 1950, whenever, you became an American. You get to celebrate July 4th like every other American. You don't just get the good part. You get the bad part, too. You get all of it.

My parents left Iran in 1979 and moved to France and then moved to the U.S. My brother was born in France and I was born in New York. I think my parents left France because they felt their kids would never be accepted by French culture. Here they thought we could feel American - that we could feel safe in that way - which was important to them, given what their experiences were in Iran. They used to joke about how I could be president because I was the only one born in America.

Well, when you're an immigrant writer, or an immigrant, you're not always welcome to this country unless you're the right immigrant. If you have a Mexican accent, people look at you like, you know, where do you come from and why don't you go back to where you came from? So, even though I was born in the United States, I never felt at home in the United States. I never felt at home until I moved to the Southwest, where, you know, there's a mix of my culture with the U.S. culture, and that was why I lived in Texas for 25 years.

I am undoubtedly one of the more, if not the most, privileged undocumented immigrants in America. And for us at Define American, which is this culture campaign group that I founded with some friends, culture trumps politics.

I never did very well as an immigrant. I've lived in several countries and been a disaster everywhere.

Rather than be asked to abandon one's own heritage and to adapt to the mores of the new country, one was expected to possess a treasure of foreign skills and customs that would enrich the resources of American living.

When I got to Florida, I was a British kid, but I was also an Indian kid: a brown kid with an English accent. Talk about being an outsider. And that's become the theme of a lot of the stuff I write about.

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 grew up in a very small town in Massachusetts, and it goes without saying that there weren't many Nigerian families in that town, and a lot of people couldn't say Uzoamaka.

I'm so sick of people treating Latinos like some homogenous group that all feel the same way about everything.

I'm Asian-American, and I was the only Chinese girl growing up in a white school in San Diego. So I understood what it was like to be different, to always want to fit in and never feel like you ever could.

It is often not even wise to try to make an American of the best of aliens.

They say that immigrants don’t speak English. So? Who cares. Even the Irish learned English after a while.

Countries like France, Italy and the Netherlands may pay lip service to inclusion, but the ethos in those places is that immigrants can never really become French, Italian or Dutch, no matter what their passports say. The emphasis is on tolerance and respect, but there’s no real expectation that foreign nationals fit in.

Immigrants have to adopt our values, not the other way around.

Saying... 'Come as you are, keep living like you do, keep your culture, and we will add all that together,' doesn't work.

When I was growing up in Newcastle, there was one other Indian girl, and we got confused for each other constantly.

People don't know what it's like being the foreigner until they are one.