Plenty of people are intrigued by their family history. Growing up as the son of West Indian immigrants who moved to London in the 1950s and 60s, I was especially fascinated by anecdotes about the lives of my Guyanese relatives, which seemed a million miles away from Tottenham's Broadwater Farm estate.
Sixty percent of our immigrants are admitted merely because they have relatives here. Many of these people are not immediate relative, but are part of extended families. The nepotistic U.S. policy lets in relatives then lets in the relatives' relatives, and so on, creating an endless and ever growing chain of new immigrants.
My dad is a minister and my mum is a worker with the less fortunate and the disabled. They're Nigerian natives. Their first language is Yoruba, and their second language is English. My mum and dad moved to London when they had my eldest sister. They started a life in London as immigrants, and they built up from there. They're no actors in my family, but there are definitely animated black people in my family.
People who work in factories or in the woods or maybe a dairy farm - for years, I've been fascinated with people like that. No pretensions. They just live their lives. I found them beautiful. They were all I seemed to be interested in writing about.
When I was growing up in north-west London, our milkman's cart was pulled by a horse, and cattle still grazed on the meadows near Church Farm.
I grew up in northwest London on a council estate. My parents are Irish immigrants who came over here when they were very young and worked in menial jobs all their lives, and I'm one of many siblings.
I was born there and I moved away in 1990 when I was seven years old. After that my family moved away from there to Delhi and Mumbai. Now, only a handful of relatives live in Kashmir and we are constantly worried about them. It pains me to see that my birth-place is not a safe place to be in anymore.
London is the most multicultural, mixed race place on Earth. And I love that. I grew up in a neighborhood in London where English wasn't necessarily the first language - maybe because of that, I love to travel. Every penny I've ever saved has been spent on airline tickets to different corners of the world. I think that's partly from growing up in London. I've taken that bit with me - this ability to fit in with any culture and be fascinated and respectful with any culture all started from growing up in London.
What Joe and I love about the film industry, it's like the wild West. We're two guys who grew up a million miles away from the film business; it doesn't matter where you come from or where you go to school. All that matters is, can you find a way to practice the craft and express yourself in a way that people respond to.
An adopted son shall never take the family, name and the estate of his natural father, the funeral cake follows the family, name and the estate, the funeral offerings of him who gives ,his son in adoption cease, as far as that son is concerned.
I think it's true about people now being closer to their parents, since the '60s, really. The parents are no longer from a different planet, the 1950s ideas of American family. We could be friends with our parents. After the '60s, it wasn't like a person smoking pot was what the parents would be appalled at.
I grew up in London. My parents and I lived in West Norwood, then we moved to Norbury, and I went to the Brit School. I'm a South London girl at heart.
The youngest boy in an Indian family has a good life. Growing up in a matriarchal family where my Indian mom's culture was dominant, I experienced this first hand.
As a son of Jamaican immigrants whose father cut sugarcane as a contract farm worker for over a decade and whose mother was a cook who fed those migrant workers out in the fields, the odds have always been against me growing up in rural South Bay, Fla.
Reardan is the rich white farm town that sits in the wheat fields exactly 22 miles away from the Rez. And it's a hick town I suppose filled with farmers and rednecks and racists cops who stop every Indian that drives through. During one week when I was little dad got stopped three times for DWI- Driving While Indian.
Mum was born in 1938 in Guyana and came to Britain at the end of the 60s. She settled in Tottenham, north London, and worked for London Transport and then as a home help, a care assistant and finally a local authority officer. Bringing up five children singlehandedly with little money can't have been easy, but she did it with tremendous style.
I grew up near London Zoo, with which I was obsessed. I would lie in bed at night, thinking about the lions and tigers and wolves that were prowling only a few miles away.