David Tang Quotes

On my parents' scale of values, the more Western something was, the more cultured it was considered.

I feel that there are a few things in the world without cultural barriers.

The East is very mysterious to Westerners. Even post-Cold War, it's still an unknown entity.

Cultural comparisons are good because they can tell you about what's similar, but also sometimes they make it easier to see obvious differences.

The Japanese are great at inventing complex systems of rules, and not so great at explaining those rules to foreign visitors.

We try to magnify the difference between Americans and the English. In real life they like the same music and dress the same. It's really much more similar than anyone thinks or how we show it.

Secularism is the experience of the Western culture and thought. Insisting on spreading it to places where the underlying intellectual background, and the political and social reasons for its appearance are lacking, is clearly a mistake, regardless of being desirable or not.

The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does the Westerner

I find that the hardest work in the world... is to persuade Easterners that growing up in the West is not intellectually crippling.

My mother came from a very affluent background, very Westernized, while my father was more Eastern. So I've had a very good blend of the East and the West. I guess this has been extremely helpful in making my career and the way I function.

We believe in a better world, an unglobalised world, enriched by the cultural differences and customs of all the people.

I was with a Russian family, and I couldn't believe that the grandparents in Russia, first of all I was shocked and delighted to find that the Russian family that I'd been told was so different from the American family, was exactly the same.

From the first, I took the Japanese seriously. In many respects, they were our equals. In others, they seemed to be our superiors.

China is a company of contradictions. Nothing is what it appears to be. We have to be extremely respectful when we go overseas.

Peace is movement towards globality and universality of civilization

The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is in the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.

The more I come to know about the outside world's perception of China, the more I feel there are all sorts of misunderstandings, and to a certain extent, people do not get the full picture from the media. A lot of foreigners have few opportunities to visit China, and a lot of Chinese people do not have the chance to go to Europe or to the West.

Either you're this, or you're that: either you're - if you're a Pakistani, you're a terrorist; if you're an American, you might be a militarist. Those kind of prisms that we see each other through are really stultifying, and they don't often show the complexity and the incredible warmth and encompassing of the world.

In a globalised world, so many of us move around so much. You lose things, but you also gain things - or hope to gain them.

China is just so different from the rest of the world.

Feliz Navidad' has interfaced the English and Spanish cultures to come together and after all, we're living in a multi-cultural world.

It's always nice to have somebody with the same accent when you're working in a foreign country.

I never felt particularly alienated as an English person in America. It doesn't feel culturally like a massive gap to me.

We in the so called 'Western civilisations' have so much to learn from other cultures, and they would stand to gain so much by learning from ours. We don't have all the answers - far from it... but nor do any other culture or religion.

The good thing about India, and the good thing about Melbourne, is that it's very, very hard on this planet of ours to find two places that are almost diametrically opposed.