Chinese American Quotes

#1. I had no idea what I was gonna do after I got my degree in philosophy in 1940. But what I did know was at that time, if you were a Chinese-American, even department stores wouldn't hire you. They'd come right out and say, 'We don't hire Orientals.'

Grace Lee Boggs

#2. I am an eighth Chinese, and I come from a large Chinese-American family in Los Angeles.

Lisa See

#3. The rumor is Chu Hing really wanted the 'Green Turtle' to be Chinese American, but the publisher didn't think that would sell. If you read those books, the hero almost always has his back facing the camera so you can't see his face. When he turns around, his face is obscured.

Gene Luen Yang

#4. I didn't point out that I'm part Chinese-American and so the odds that I would have been in England back in Shakespeare's time were highly unlikely. "And,

Ally Condie

#5. I've tried to be inclusive in my '2B' series. Over the course of three books, I wrote African-American characters, a paraplegic character, gay and lesbian characters, a bisexual, Jewish heroine, a multiracial hero, Korean and Chinese-American characters, and a multiracial supporting character.

Ann Aguirre

#6. If I were to limit myself to the opportunities that were presented playing only Chinese-American parts, I would be virtually without a career.

BD Wong

#7. My mother is not smiling; Chinese do not smile for photographs. Their faces command relatives in foreign lands - 'Send money' - and prosperity for ever - 'Put food in front of this picture.' My mother does not understand Chinese- American snapshots. 'What are you laughing at?' she asks. (1983: 58)

Maxine Hong Kingston

#8. The world is a big place, and there are many paths that lead to success. This applies to both political and economic concepts. For this reason, we see no need to stoically pursue the Chinese, American or French way. But we have socialism in common with China.

Nguyen Minh Triet

#9. My dad was Chinese-American and very conservative when it came to his family's futures. He said if I wanted to have a secure job, I should go into science. So I did what Dad said and went to medical school, but the writing bug never left me.

Tess Gerritsen

#10. Bruce Lee was the first star I idolized. Growing up as a Chinese American, there weren't many people like me on the big screen.

Daniel Wu

#11. I can represent my culture while helping not only the Chinese-American community, but also the community at large.

Martin Yan

#12. Being from a very traditional Chinese-American family, my parents believed the only options to have a successful life were to be a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer or a business person.

Phillip Lim

#13. My experiences growing up in both a Chinese American household and the Catholic Church define much of who I am.

Gene Luen Yang

#14. If you don't have a bed, or a dresser or a wall, or a book or a toy you are oppressed. An African American in a white world. A Jew in a Christian world. A gypsy. A Native American. A Chinese American. Let's say, you were born deprived.

Gerald Stern

#15. My father was second-generation Chinese-American, born in 1923 in California. My mother emigrated to the States from China when she was in her early twenties, in part to escape the political turmoil in China.

Tess Gerritsen

#16. A war in the Taiwan Strait would destroy China's international relations overnight. It would destroy Chinese - Japanese relations, not to mention Chinese - American relations.

William Kirby

#17. I'm Chinese-American, of course, and so it's very interesting to see China actually launch their own astronauts, becoming the third nation, following the United States and Russia, to do so.

Leroy Chiao

#18. When we rise in the morning ... at the table we drink coffee which is provided to us by a South American, or tea by a Chinese, or cocoa by a West African; before we leave for our jobs we are already beholden to more than half the world.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#19. Ron Paul's crazy talk about the Federal Reserve makes more sense these days. Right now, every - all this debt issued by the United States people assume the Chinese are buying, no they don't want any more American debt. Ron Paul has a point there.

Mark Steyn

#20. They said I looked like a foreign devil; they said I spoke like a foreign devil. I made mistakes in manners, and I didn't know delicacies that had grown up since my father left. They wouldn't have me. You can believe it or not - I'm less foreign here than I was in China.

John Steinbeck

#21. It is an honor to open in New York City and to have the opportunity to serve and share our family's version of American Chinese food and hospitality. New York City deeply influenced my passion for food and service, and it feels good to be back.

Andrew Cherng

#22. Westerners who go native with Chinese ideas are called 'eggs' - outside white, inside yellow -, and are often systematically excluded from their expat community's activities, let alone the financial support system.

Thorsten J. Pattberg

#23. There's a reason that there are oodles of young Aussies, Germans, Japanese, even Chinese backpackers traipsing around the world. They are unencumbered by debilitating student loans. No such luck for the American Theater Arts major with $120,000 in loans.

J. Maarten Troost

#24. Fortune cookies are an American invention, and we gave it to them. The Chinese were probably like, "Uh, we don't want it." And we were like, "It's now part of your ethnic identity.

Jim Gaffigan

#25. No matter how American I become, I'm considered part of the Chinese community by my own family.

Anchee Min

#26. You have opened a new chapter in the relations of the American and Chinese people ... I am confident that this beginning of our friendship will certainly meet with majority support of our two peoples.

Zhou Enlai

#27. 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.

Tess Gerritsen

#28. Americans believe that you can alter people by conversion, and that everybody in the world is a potential American. The Chinese also believe that their values are universal, but they do not believe that you can convert to becoming a Chinese unless you are born into it.

Henry A. Kissinger

#29. I was so tired of the parts I had to play. There seems little for me in Hollywood, because, rather than real Chinese, producers prefer Hungarians, Mexicans, American Indians for Chinese roles.

Anna May Wong

#30. Unless we rise to the challenge, instead of American youth being able to live the American dream, the Chinese will fulfill their dream of overtaking America.

Mark Kennedy

#31. In Chinese culture, it wouldn't occur to kids to question or talk back to their parents. In American culture, kids in books, TV shows and movies constantly score points with their snappy back talk. Typically, it's the parents who need to be taught a life lesson - by their children.

Amy Chua

#32. Americans are very easygoing people. If the added attention and great visibility that I have been able to generate can help open doors and expose more Chinese to American values and the American way of life, that is great.

Gary Locke

#33. The Chinese, on the other hand, were in the position of having an American military spy plane on a Chinese military base and they had their own internal problems to deal with. At first, the Chinese weren't all that belligerent. They were just stalling to get their own bureaucracy in line.

Henry A. Kissinger

#34. People think of fortune cookies as being Chinese, but in essence, they are fundamentally American.

Jennifer Lee

#35. I write on sacred stories, symbols and rituals of all cultures - European, American and Chinese - but my audiences, typically, like me to focus on India.

Devdutt Pattanaik

#36. Perhaps women were once so dangerous they had to have their feet bound.

Maxine Hong Kingston

#37. The crack in your heart allows light in. ~ GOOD FORTUNE page 238

Leslie Bratspis

#38. We're told we need this trade deal to open up vast markets to American goods, ... But the reality is that most Chinese workers cannot afford to buy the goods that even they make.

David E. Bonior

#39. I started 'American Born Chinese' as a mini-comic. I would write and draw a chapter, photocopy a hundred or so copies at the corner photocopy store, and then try to sell them on consignment through local comics shops. If I could sell maybe half a dozen, I'd be doing okay.

Gene Luen Yang

#40. When 'American Born Chinese' started getting a lot of attention, I freaked out a little bit because I realized that up until then I had just been doing comics by following my gut. I didn't really know much about plot structure or anything; I kind of just followed my gut.

Gene Luen Yang

#41. Throughout most of my life, I've tried to downplay my Chinese heritage because I wanted so much to be an American. I was the only Asian kid in my elementary school, and I longed to be like everyone else. I insisted on American food; I was embarrassed by my mother's poor English.

Tess Gerritsen

#42. Dare I ask Mao and his Communist Party?
I fear my throat will be cut into two pieces.
In the name of revolution, for thought crimes,
Such questions can turn me to ashes.

Zoe S. Roy

#43. What makes you think I ever got married? Married women work themselves to death, all their money goes to husbands who gamble it away. Why would I ever do that to myself?

Kim Van Alkemade

#44. You know, I think it's so ironic that we're calling hard work, striving for excellence, don't blame others, you know, don't give up, that we're calling these, quote, 'Chinese values,' 'cause I always thought of them as American values.

Amy Chua

#45. I hope Hong Kong and Asia wants to hire American Asian actresses as much as Hollywood has been hiring Chinese actors from Asia.

Ming-Na Wen

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

Jennifer Lee

#47. There is a definite Chinese pop sound developing, but I was shocked at how influenced it is by American music.

Paul Oakenfold

#48. If you look at national economies today, for example, the American economy, the European economy, the Indians, the Chinese, we're all tied together. If one of them sinks, the rest are going to sink with them and if one floats, the rest are lifted up. I find that very interesting.

Frans De Waal

#49. I love Jet Li, but he looks very Chinese, and his English is Chinese-accented. He wouldn't have been the right guy to play a Japanese-American.

Barry Eisler

#50. I was an All-American in wrestling in high school, was National Champion in Chinese kickboxing in 1999 and have spent a lot of time around professional athletes, which includes my eight-plus years as CEO of a sports nutrition company.

Timothy Ferriss

#51. So, fortune cookies: invented by the Japanese, popularized by the Chinese, but ultimately consumed by Americans. They are more American than anything else.

Jennifer Lee

#52. I finished 'American Born Chinese' in 2005, so after that, I started actively researching the Boxer Rebellion.

Gene Luen Yang

#53. California must be all American or all Chinese. We are resolved that it shall be American, and are prepared to make it so. May we not rely upon your sympathy and assistance?

Denis Kearney

#54. If American misjudgments and actions that evolved into human tragedies - i.e., racism, sexism, and other bigotries - are guiding lights, the Chinese leadership must ultimately yield its power to the sovereignty of its people.

Patrick Mendis

#55. Gandhi has more recently recognized the need for continuance of British, American and Chinese efforts in India and has suggested that these troops might remain by agreement with some new Indian Government.

Stafford Cripps

#56. She believed being so free with her sexuality was empowering, but I wouldn't say taking home a douchebag who would laugh about the encounter with his friend later is a step forward in the feminist movement.-Lily

Teresa Lo

#57. Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Russian, combined.

Cathy McMorris Rodgers

#58. Chinese women are much more modest than American women when it comes to clothes. We tend to show less flesh.

Ziyi Zhang

#59. For 'American Born Chinese,' my first graphic novel with First Second Books, I did mostly 'memory' research. It's fiction, but I pulled heavily from my own childhood.

Gene Luen Yang

#60. I choose to be American, I choose to live in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, I choose to have Puerto Rican/Jewish neighbors, and I choose to maintain my Chinese identity.

Eddie Huang

#61. For years, American officials visiting China marvelled at how Chinese leaders could push through infrastructure projects and sweeping legislative changes without the complications of opposition and the niceties of voting.

Evan Osnos

#62. Most American and European scholars believe that the Chinese speak their languages, only that they "talk" in Chinese.

Thorsten J. Pattberg

#63. Fly you crows. My father was not a spectacle. He was the greatest man I ever knew. He was my everything.

Stacey Lee

#64. The American electorate are getting disgusted with weaklings who blow where the wind takes them while frittering away our precious lifeblood and borrowing money from our new owners, the Chinese.

Cindy Sheehan

#65. Only on a few occasions had I ever been comfortable showing my body off, and now here I was, taking a job where Asian boobs and ass ran free.

Teresa Lo

#66. A lot of times when we work overseas we tend to put the experience of someone who lives overseas, a Chinese person or a Korean person or a Bosnian person, within the prism of an American life.

John Pomfret

#67. At midnight on July 1, 1997, Hongkong, the British Crown Colony, will be restored to China. This is not only an event which will be celebrated by patriotic Chinese; any patriotic American should celebrate it as well.

Robert Trout

#68. We have to make movies where we do not think this is for the American market or this is for the Chinese market. We have to make a good movie that anyone would just want to sit down and watch because love, language, culture transcend everything.

Michelle Yeoh

#69. When they looked in the mirror, the American and Chinese women had begun to see each other's reflection. To reach the World Cup final, the Americans had become tightly connected by the ligaments of teamwork, while the Chinese had realized the necessary freedom of individual expression.

Jere Longman

#70. How very American it was to assume that these unsmiling Chinese would be pleased if one showed a preference for their native implements ... How very American it was to feel somehow guilty unless one struggled over rice noodles and lumps of meat with things that looked like enlarged knitting needles.

Tom Wolfe

#71. There's a real difference of what one believed was one's chief responsibility between American professors and Chinese professors. This was vividly revealed to me when I compared what I could learn in Chicago and what I could learn in China.

Chen-Ning Yang

#72. With a far-future setting merging Chinese and American culture, 'Firefly' also saw high-tech futurism blended with the traditional Wild West.

Jay Kristoff

#73. Ratings to me are a little like the Chinese Government. I don't fully understand what makes a rating go. I don't know what makes the American television audience respond to one person and not t another. There very seldom are great differences between many television personalities.

Tom Brokaw

#74. I think it's unfair to say that Chinese companies are squeezing out American companies. China has so many solar companies that are failing, too.

Shi Zhengrong

#75. There was an individual inside me that wasn't Chinese, that wasn't American, that wasn't Orlando. Just a kid trying to get the fuck out, tell his story, and arrange the world how it made sense to him.

Eddie Huang

#76. Chinese economic development has cost many American workers their jobs. That's the price of progress.

P. J. O'Rourke

#77. Americans are much more American than they are Northerners, Southerners, Westerners, or Easterners ... California Chinese, Boston Irish, Wisconsin German, yes, Alabama Negroes, have more in common than they have apart ... The American identity is an exact and provable thing.

John Steinbeck

#78. In China's big cities, American products - say, for instance, Proctor and Gamble shampoos or many other goods - are widely coveted by a lot of Chinese consumers.

Rebecca MacKinnon

#79. Everywhere in Africa, you see Indian, Chinese, Brazilian businesses. Other than Coca Cola and the oil companies, it is very rare to see American businesses.

Mo Ibrahim

#80. Some prescient American collectors, including Vicki and Kent Logan and Mera and Donald Rubell, began collecting Chinese art before 2000 with a genuine passion, but as the auction prices exploded everyone was beating a path to the galleries and artist studios in China. It became the 'China thing.'

Arne Glimcher

#81. The Chinese dream is an American dream embedded in a Confucian cocoon.

Patrick Mendis

#82. Look at the truth from how it stands, not where it comes from. The truth is still the truth no matter whether it is spoken by an Indian, an American, a Chinese, an European, an African or an Australian!

Israelmore Ayivor

#83. China cannot pull in the best and brightest from all over the world. It's an ethnically defined nation, the opposite of an immigrant nation. You don't see a lot of American engineers trying to be Chinese citizens.

Amy Chua

#84. A woman growing up under American ideas of liberty in government and religion, having never blushed behind a Turkish mask, nor pressed her feet in Chinese shoes, cannot brook any disabilities based on sex alone, without a deep feeling of antagonism with the power that creates it.

Susan B. Anthony

#85. Every empire suffers from hubris, arrogance and condescension, and therefore a moral blindness. That's true of the American empire, it was true of the British Empireearlier, and it will certainly be true of the Chinese Empire in the future.

Cornel West

#86. Chinese mercantilism is not free trade, but it is far better than American militarism.

Ilana Mercer

#87. Wasn't it thrilling when the U.S. Women's team took home the gold in gymnastics? A group of American teenagers getting a higher score than Chinese kids? That never happens.

Jay Leno

#88. When it comes to the Yellow Races overruning the world, you may laugh ... [The Chinese] have neither the foresight or endurance to overrun any white country in any way except by intermarriage. One American marine could stand off a great many yellowmen without much effort.

L. Ron Hubbard

#89. My father, a refugee from Eastern Europe, was preparing a fraudulent marriage to an American citizen as a route to this country when he was sponsored, making fraud unnecessary. My wife's grandfather bought papers from another Chinese villager to be able to come to the United States.

Nicholas Kristof

#90. There is reinforcement in such familiar back-formations as Chinee from Chinese, Portugee from Portuguese.

H.L. Mencken

#91. What are you? German? American? English? Greek? Japanese? Turkish? French? Indian? Chinese? These are not real, these are virtual! You are human! This is what is real!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#92. More and more Chinese intend to embrace freedom of speech and human rights as their birthright, not some imported American privilege.

Michael Anti

#93. Chinese buildings are like American buildings, with big footprints. People don't care about daylight or fresh air.

Helmut Jahn

#94. I'm as proud to be Chinese as I am American.

Ming-Na Wen

#95. I'm so proud of my Chinese ancestry, but I was born and raised in America, and I really believe in American values, our American system, our freedom, our liberties.

Gary Locke

#96. You know, this is a very strange phenomenon. I keep reading that in American newspapers, and I keep reading extensive speculations. I meet with the Chinese leaders periodically, and while I don't say they've endorsed the missile shield, it has not been in the forefront of their discussions.

Henry A. Kissinger

#97. Teach For China recruits top American and Chinese college graduates, like 26-year-old Yang Xiao, to teach in the country's most disadvantaged schools.

Wendy Kopp

#98. As the architecture of a country always follows the earliest structures, American architecture should be a refinement of the log-house. The Egyptian is so of the cavern and the mound; the Chinese, of the tent; the Gothic, of overarching trees; the Greek, of a cabin.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#99. The Self of everyone, the Atma of everyone, the transcendental field of reality of everyone, is the same in everyone. Whether the body calls itself an American, German, Indian or Chinese, it doesn't matter.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

#100. If you want to judge the performance of the Egyptian people by the standards of German or Chinese or American culture, then there is no room for judgment.

Mohammed Morsi