Top 35 Asian-American Quotes

I always felt that just being an actor is difficult. Being an Asian-American actor doesn’t make it more difficult. I see it as an opportunity and a chance to help other Asian-American actors coming along.

I’m most concerned with committing to characters that contribute to more complex, modern and dynamic Asian-American representation on screen.

I’d like to see more Asian-American roles where the ethnicity of the character can be swapped to another. We can, of course, play the stereotypical ninja, the martial arts master, the accountant, the doctor, but we can be more than that!

I have hidden my race for 22 books. I have hidden behind my married name, which is very Caucasian, because I didn’t feel safe coming out with it. I didn’t feel that the market would really accept me. I think I felt it’s time to start bringing in an Asian-American point of view.

The feedback for ‘P.S. I Still Love You’ has been pretty amazing. To have written this story about this family with Asian-American characters and be so embraced is really incredible for me as a writer as well as a person of color.

I have minor characters who are Asian-American, and I’ve been using them throughout my career, but they’ve never taken center stage, they’ve never been really powerful, they’ve never expressed some of the experiences I had growing up in the U.S. Johnny Tam is the first one.

Growing up in America, I experienced two puberties. The first opened me up to the possibilities of adulthood. The second reinforced that for someone like me – an immigrant, a minority, an Asian-American – there were limits.

When I was growing up, I didn’t realize that the idiosyncrasies of my mother’s character had something to do with our culture. After growing up and reflecting and making more Asian-American friends, I learned that a lot this is something a lot of people grow up with.

I ended up going into the Master’s program for Asian-American studies at UCLA, in part because I was passionate about it, but also because I wanted to keep acting in the theater group that we founded.

More than anything, I’m an American kid, and my music reflects that more so than being an Asian-American. I think it’s important but also something that can detrimental to your career if celebrated too much.

Even if you look at ‘American Idol,’ or ‘X-Factor,’ or ‘The Voice’ or anything, it was always difficult to see an Asian or an Asian-American make it to a certain point.

I’m a chairman on the Board of Governors for the East-West Players, the longest-running Asian-American theater company in America.

Coming out of college into the draft, being Asian-American and being from Harvard, that’s not going to be an advantage because of stereotypes.

Being the only Asian-American in the State Legislature, I’ve had no choice but to reach across the aisle.

I never really thought of myself as an Asian-American cartoonist, any more than I thought of myself as a cartoonist who wears glasses.

My goal is, no matter what genre or story, I’ll find a personal angle. It doesn’t have to be autobiographical, or specifically Asian-American. It has to explore a burning question that I have.

Growing up as a South Asian-American, I didn’t have any female role models.

Even before BuzzFeed, Asian-American faces and voices were so prevalent online as huge YouTubers.

Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt, Al Pacino, Russell Crowe – these leading men. These are the ones I grew up with. And Hugh Jackman. I love everything that these guys are doing. It’s kind of been my mission to be an Asian-American version of that.

It’s funny – when I started acting, I didn’t know I was going to be talking about Asian-American issues so much. You know what, though? It just comes with the territory, being ethnic.

I don’t like when an Asian-American actor says, ‘I’m entering this business to change Hollywood.’ It feels like the wrong reason – I would prefer they entered the business for artistic reasons, because they need to do it.

The narrative needs to change. Asian-American actresses don’t want to be the damsels in distress anymore. We don’t want to be saved, especially by a white man.

To be honest, I’m really into folk music, and I love Big Phony. I like Priscilla Ahn, and yeah, I really support Asian-American artists.

A lot of my students are Asian-American, and it has been thrilling to watch them break through the stereotypes into something alive and surprising.

I feel like there’s this need that the Asian-American community has to feel like people. It’s something that Asians in Asia do not understand about us.

Working on ‘Fresh Off the Boat’ has been really enlightening to me because it’s made me actually think about the roles that Asians and Asian-American women have played in media. Not because I didn’t think it was important before, but because before, I was really focused on just paying my rent.

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.

I’m very humbled and honored. I’m very thankful to the Asian-American Community for all their support!

With the first novel, I was concerned I would be pigeon-holed as an Asian-American writer, and the book would be labeled for Asian-Americans only.

There were so few examples of Asian or Asian-American lead characters on American TV or even in the movies. And the ones that have existed for so long were either stereotypical or offensive in some way, or just not reflective of the lives of people in the community.

Growing up, I thought I was white. It didn’t occur to me I was Asian-American until I was studying abroad in Denmark and there was a little bit of prejudice.

I’ve gotten scholarships from the Asian-American Directors Guild of America society and things like that, and those things helped me, even if I didn’t realize how much.

I am an American, not an Asian-American. My rejection of hyphenation has been called race treachery, but it is really a demand that America deliver the promises of its dream to all its citizens equally.

I think there’s a misconception that all Asian-American experiences are the same. My experiences with my family and the way they wanted me to know my culture are not the same as others.

When I arrived at the Capitol in 2007 to take my oath as a new member of the U.S. House of Representatives, I had the privilege of filling the seat held for so long and so well by my friend Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first Asian-American woman elected to Congress. I was so grateful to her.