Elif Batuman Quotes

The anger that Uncle Junior has comes from my background. My father was the son of an Italian immigrant, and I've seen the fire of the Italian temperament. It can be explosive sometimes in ways that are both funny and tragic.

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.

My parents didn't really understand too much about sport. At that time, we were in a Polish community in the inner city of Chicago, and I was the youngest of a bunch of cousins. Polish families are real big, with cousins and aunts and uncles.

My family, my background... it just parallels really nicely with a lot of social and cultural movements.

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

But now all of a sudden some idiots in Taiwan start to say that they are not Chinese. Their grand parents were Chinese. But for some reason, they feel they are not Chinese.

The parent characters that I portray are Indian because I grew up in an Indian household. Having said that, I feel like people of all cultures would relate to those parents.

I'm first generation in the country - my family's Mexican.

For the Arabs in Israel there is always a tension between nationality and identity.

I'm the only one in my family with an American accent.

I have been aware since my youth that I am a Hebrew through my mother, and that is something that has played a subtle but important role in my development.

My dad's whole family is in Madras and I was born in America so we didn't have that big Indian community. I don't really have anything interesting to say about it. When I talk about it people are like, 'meh, let's talk about something else.'

Somebody told me once I wasn't Latin enough, and that made me laugh.

I have to expend an awful lot of energy actively undoing the impact of my name. Understandably, people assume that I have at least some connection to Iran. The truth is that I don't. I have very little knowledge about the culture, the language, the history. I've never been to Iran. I've never even been inside a mosque.

I guess everything having to do with your background has some influence on how you tell stories but it's hard to parse how growing up in a Jewish community in Minnesota really affected it.

My grandparents - my mom's parents - they're Jewish. But nobody ever pushed religion onto us. It wasn't something I ever grew up with.

My brother and I were brought up sort of thinking that we were English. I remember hearing the poet Roy Campbell on the radio and being quite shocked that he had a South African accent. I didn't know there were any South African poets.

I'm a first-born child of a Chinese immigrant family, I grew up on the East Coast. And I have to admit, I did not grow up around technology.

Growing up, my mom always knew that I was more on the Black side than the Spanish side, just because I didn't speak Spanish.

I was so hungry to learn my history, to really know who I was.

My parents were first-generation immigrants. My mum wore a sari but at school and as a teenager and in my 20s I wanted to fit in.

For my mother, everything stands in relation to her Welshness; the fact she married an Englishman seems to be something of an issue. She's kind of anti-English... anti-imperialist.

I've lived 16, 17 years of my life in Asia, and that's most of my life. I was born in Asia - I've lived cultures that are synonymous with Asian culture - but it's still not Asian enough for some people.

Definitely the Korean culture is very strong to me, and I grew up in Hawaii where Asian-Americans are the dominant culture, but I never thought of myself as the minority.

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.